Publicis fires back at WPP over Cindy Rose’s ‘CEO handshake’ comments

Publicis Groupe has written an open letter to WPP chief executive Cindy Rose, hitting back at her suggestion that rivals are winning big accounts without proper scrutiny. The letter, shared with Adweek on 5 November and signed off by “your friends at Publicis”, says that claiming the group wins on a CEO handshake is “an insult to clients’ intelligence”, as Adweek reported.

What Cindy Rose said

Rose made her comments on 29 October, the day WPP reported a 2.1% fall in third-quarter revenue less pass-through costs. Asked by Adweek about Publicis chief executive Arthur Sadoun’s view that more clients now choose agencies without a pitch, she said it was misguided to think the trend was about a CEO handshake. She added that the industry does itself no favours by encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence, a point Adweek says she also made to investors on WPP’s results call. She did not name Publicis.

She did not need to. Publicis took PepsiCo’s global media business from Omnicom in September without a pitch, and Adweek reports it won LVMH’s Asia-Pacific account from WPP the same way. The PepsiCo win led Publicis to give up Coca-Cola’s North American media and pull out of the global review, which WPP went on to keep while Omnicom took North America.

What the letter says

Publicis argues that big clients spend months testing an agency’s data, technology and teams before handing over an account, and that skipping a traditional pitch is not the same as skipping due diligence. It also reminds Rose that she used to work at one of the companies that chose Publicis this year, a reference to Microsoft, which named Publicis its media agency in April.

Then the letter gets personal. It mocks the idea that WPP’s teams were too tired to compete for Coca-Cola’s biggest market, after WPP chose not to pitch for the North American account, as Digiday reported. And it says Publicis “didn’t expect a basket of muffins or a thank-you note for clearing the path to your global renewal”. WPP had not responded to Adweek at the time of writing.

Why it matters

Holding companies rarely trade blows this openly, and the letter reads like it was written by a company that knows it is winning. Publicis grew 5% in the third quarter while WPP is still shrinking, and its pitchless wins are the proof it offers that clients will buy data and technology without a beauty parade.

Rose has a point, though. Pitches are slow and expensive, but they are also how procurement teams check that a supplier can do what it claims, and a private test is hard for anyone outside the room to judge. The bigger question is whether other marketers follow PepsiCo. If more global accounts move without a pitch, the advantage shifts to whichever of the holding companies has the deepest data and technology stack, which is exactly the bet Publicis made when it closed its $2.2bn LiveRamp deal this week.