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 Honestly, you wait years for one agency head to sell up to a major multinational group, and then two come along at once. Er, sort of.
This week the head honchos of Ogilvy & Mather and its local subsidiary/partner Memac Ogilvy sat side by side, and confirmed that, yes indeed, WPP-owned Ogilvy was looking to buy up the 60% of Memac it doesn’t already own.
“Yes, we are [looking to increase our stake],” said Ogilvy CEO Miles Young at a round-table event this week.
“We’re at a fairly advanced stage of discussion, and it is our intention to try to consummate our joint venture and increase our equity stake,” he added.
Eddie Moutran, owner of the remaining 60% of Memac, was extremely clear: “Let’s put it this way: Ogilvy wants to buy, I want to sell.
“If it wasn’t for the global economy, the deal would have been done by now,” added Moutran.
This comes shortly after Campaign revealed – or at least, suggested – that BBDO has bought out more of the local Impact BBDO group.
Should Ogilvy and Memac come to terms, majority-locally-owned agencies will be looking somewhat thin on the ground (among the majors, anyway). Insert your own end-of-era/inevitable movement/overstated importance arguments here, if you want.
Beyond the brief, and alarmingly straight-forward, discussion of ownership, the discussion was fairly predictable.
Young, who was stopping off in Dubai on his way back from the Far East, suggested that the Middle East suffered from “acronym deficiency” in terms of not being part of the Bric (Brazil, Russia, India, China) grouping, and compared this region to China some 15 years ago.
Interestingly, he also suggested that the way forward, for Ogilvy at least, may be in data analytics, observing that where his agency had strong consulting and analytics teams, it performed better.
Why? Because “agencies have lost the ability to measure effectiveness” and needed to move beyond just measuring stuff, and towards working out why marketing did or did not work.
It’s one of those “well, duh” statements that is, nevertheless, very true – but of course it’s rather easier just to produce a dozen spreadsheets with lots of numbers on than to work out what they actually mean.
For his part, Moutran had a predictable swipe at last year’s antics of Fortune Promoseven Doha, ahead of next month’s Lynx awards. Forgive? Forget? Don’t know what you mean...
He also had a go at non-paying clients, and appeared to suggest that support from governments would be very welcome as part of an effort to make debtors pay up. There could be one small flaw, there, that we can see, but still...
On the subject of bad debts, we can’t help but laugh at some of the reader comments
on Arabianbusiness.com’s version
of this story, which reinforce our view that letting all and sundry comment on things is Not Necessarily A Good Thing.
“They deserve not to be paid, they made enough money with highly inflated price with no advise to the client, but spend spend spend...millions for billboard,magazines with no audit, pure vanity and show off...we can't even see the city anymore with all their visual pollution,” wrote MeMoiAna.
He/she/it added: “Please Edmon Montran,we know you don't care about Muslim values, you just lobby against Islamic values, do us a favor, and take your advertising industry somewhere else (actually i can t think of many civilized country that would allow Fair and Lively ads without being sued for encouraging racism and inferiority complex among darker skinned people)..Anyway, the best advertising is no advertising.”
Oh, charming. What a complete and satisfactory argument this reader presents – and no prejudice at all! [NB: PLEASE NOTE EXTREME SARCASM IN THIS LAST SENTENCE. THANK YOU]
And under the heading “WHINERS”, one NOSYMPATHY commented: “The CEO needs to quit whining and write it all off as a bad debt. This is the price of doing business in the Middle East. When times were good nobody was whining, so why now?”
Sigh.
Sigh.
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