CANNES – Media agencies must now compete with management consulting shops in the race to help marketers reorganize their businesses, says Luke Taylor, CEO of DigitasLBi during an interview with Beet.TV. DigitasLBi is a unit of Publicis Groupe and was formed earlier this year when Publicis merged Digitas with its Amsterdam digital agency LBi to help grow Publicis’ footprint in digital media.
“Most of our CMOs want help rearchitecting and reorganizing their marketing functions to deal with always on conversations, the regulatory requirements of publishing real-time, the relationships with the IT department… All these shifts are demanding a complete rebuild of the marketing function and that now puts us head to head with the Accentures of the world, so there’s a fun turf war playing out there,” he explains in this video interview.
In addition to those business design services, the recently merged DigitasLBi is now 7000-employees strong and also counts insights, creative technology and distribution among its key purviews. “We have 400 data scientists who look forensically at how to overlay data on the big data social graph with customer information to have a highly targeted experience,” Taylor says of the insight group.
When it comes to creative technology group, the goal is to link the brand strategists with information architects and technologists as well as the social and PR side of the business to “drive story and conversation,” he says.
