Why Publicis had to write to WPP

If you have ever made a pack, a poster, a thirty-second film or even a shelf wobbler for a supermarket aisle, you know the check. The script goes in, the legal team’s pen comes out. “Best”? Prove it. “Clinically”? Show me the trial. “Every”? Against what universe, over what period, measured by whom. The word you loved comes out, the line gets weaker, and it runs that way, because the alternative is a claim you cannot stand behind and a competitor, or an advertising standards body, who will make you take it down.

That discipline is one of the things this industry can be unreservedly proud of. We do not put things into the world that are not true, or that cannot be proven. We hold our clients to that standard, and we charge them for it.

On Thursday, Publicis Groupe wrote an open letter to Cindy Rose, chief executive of WPP, about her answer on WPP’s results call a week earlier: that clients appointing an agency without a pitch were bypassing “proper due diligence”, and that the appointments in question were a “pitch-less, CEO handshake thing”. I had already disagreed with her on the substance. Publicis went further, and signed it “your friends”.

Since then the industry has sorted itself into two camps. One is enjoying it: the return of a bit of Maurice-and-Martin, proper competition back among the holding companies. The other camp finds it beneath Publicis: the muffins, the troops, the reference to Rose’s old employer. I am closer to the first camp than the second. But both camps are answering the wrong question.

The question is not whether Publicis should have written the letter. The question is why it was necessary. And the answer is simple. Someone had to speak for the clients, and someone had to check the homework, and no one else did. If nobody checks the homework, we have no business being surprised when a rival does. We should be grateful.

Let me be precise, because precision is the point. The figures in a trading update are the most policed words a company publishes. Listing rules, auditors, regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, personal liability for the people who sign. Nobody changed a number to suit a story, and I am not suggesting they did.

But the numbers are a few lines. Around them sit the words: the answers in the Q&A, the wins and the retentions, the league-table position, the platform launched that morning. Those words are read by investors, by clients choosing a partner, by a hundred thousand people deciding where to work, and they carry less of that burden. The financials get an auditor. The narrative gets a press release and a long small boilerplate text about ‘forward looking statements’. A chief executive can say what she likes about how a rival wins business, and about the clients who chose it, and the sentence is relayed, headlined, and never once asked for its substantiation.

Why is it any different from the pack? We would not let a client say “clinically proven” on the strength of its own trial. We let ourselves say the equivalent every quarter.

Strip out the jokes and the letter’s first and loudest point is not about WPP at all. It is about the people who chose Publicis.

“Claiming we win on a ‘CEO handshake’ is an insult to clients’ intelligence.” Microsoft, PepsiCo and LVMH did not hand over their “data, media, and tech keys over a friendly espresso”. It took “months of hard testing by marketers, engineers, data architects, and procurement teams.” And the line aimed at Rose’s own history, which the coverage read as a dig and which I read as the heart of it: having worked at one of those companies, “you know its leaders really well, and your comments sell them remarkably short.”

Think about what the handshake theory implies about those clients. That the people running media, data and technology for some of the most scrutinised companies on earth moved billions of dollars on a chat between two chief executives. That procurement did not look. That the board did not ask. These are serious business people making serious decisions, with their names on them. PepsiCo ran a capabilities review of a partner it had already been paying for years. Microsoft and LVMH are not run by people who hand over the keys over coffee.

None of them was ever going to answer an aside on a rival’s earnings call; serious companies do not. Their agency did it for them. That is not a spat. That is what a partner is for.

The second thing the letter did was check a claim. “A victory lap is fun even when you’re the only one who ran.” Coca-Cola invited two groups to compete for its rest-of-world media: WPP and Publicis. Publicis withdrew in September when it signed PepsiCo. That is the whole check. Publicis does not post a letter to Instagram without every line having been through its own version of the room with the pen. The tone is playful. The claims are not, and they stand.

This is not about one answer on one call. It is every public claim this industry makes about itself. In January I wrote about a platform launch whose own chief technology officer described it to Campaign as “almost agentic” while the press release said “agentic” and “autonomous”: the extra 5% that moves the announcement beyond the truth. You cannot launch something you wish were true in the hope that a client who does not know better chooses you on the strength of it. On a pack we call that a misleading claim and we take it down. In a capabilities deck we call it positioning.

In every grown-up market somebody is paid to ask. Here, the people who asked were the sell side: the Bank of America analyst who put the Coca-Cola question and the pitchless question together as one question to Cindy Rose, because they are one question. Analysts are paid by investors to find the gap between the release and the business.

The trade press carried the handshake line to every market in the world within a day. They didn’t test the line, and I am not expecting an industry press that now lives on awards and events rather than subscriptions to take it on. Beyond them, a few of us writing on our own time.

So in this case, when neither was heard, the competitor had to. That is not a breakdown of civility. It is the oldest accountability mechanism this industry has. Competitor complaints are how claims get tested: Reckitt took Procter & Gamble to the regulator over Ariel and won; Coke and Pepsi have policed each other’s packs for fifty years and nobody called it unbecoming. Publicis did to a rival’s claims exactly what our clients do to each other’s.

And the industry’s general response was to review the tone, not the content. Which both underlines the problem and tells you there will need to be more of this.

I am not asking for a regulator. I am asking for a habit: the question we put to every pack, put to every claim this industry makes about itself and about the clients who choose us. If the answer is good, say it louder. If it is not, the word comes out and the line runs weaker, the way it does for every brand we have ever served.

It is the same argument as the pitch. A trade with no standard of its own leaves the buyer to set the exam. Until this industry has a standard for what it says it sells, the exam will be set by whoever has a motive to set it. This week that was a rival. Be glad someone sat it.

Our industry deserves accuracy. It deserves clarity. It deserves accountability. And our clients deserve to be described as what they are: serious people making serious decisions.

We will not let a client print a word it cannot prove. We print our own every quarter, and only a rival reads them with a pen.

So, to those who write the releases and those who read them: which claim about a win, a retention, a rival, a platform or a client’s judgement from this earnings season would you send to clearance first?

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has sat on all three sides of the industry’s table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. If this was useful, subscribe here — Brandflow lands by email every Monday and Thursday.