PUBLICIS/OMNICOM: "A Merger of Equals". RIGHT!!

My experience with agency mergers proves to me that the union of advertising agencies is like two heavenly bodies hurling themselves directly at each other until they collide.

As if the advertising business isn’t crazy enough, to try and fuse two disparate bodies together, foreign bodies in this case,  appears insane despite all the claimed benefits of doing so. Culture clashes alone cause style and procedural problems, not to mention egomania conflicts, along with the client kind.

Admittedly on a much smaller scale, I lived through seven agency mergers, every one of which resulted in a failure.  In the new book The Insanity of Advertising, www.theinsanityofadvertising.com, there is a chapter devoted entirely to this subject.  It’s titled “Cultricide”.

Agencies continue to desperately want to get bigger to “compete” and mergers are the quickest route to larger revenues.

Albert Einstein said: “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”.

The insanity of advertising.