By Gini Dietrich

On Sunday, when I read the announcement of Omnicom and Publicis merging, I said to a friend, “This will be interesting. Having worked for Omnicom, I know how hard it is to work with the sister agencies. The partners are incentivized to get the most profit out of their P&L. They’re not incentivized to work with the sister agencies. Not to mention the list of conflicts, the antitrust issues, and perhaps even skirting the line of a monopoly.”

The merger makes the company much larger than WPP, the current market leader. Their combined U.S. revenue, alone, is $11.4 billion, which is twice as much as that of WPP.

Not only that, all you have to do is look at the list of clients for the two organizations and you’ll see conflicts galore.

Omnicon has the Pepsi account, while Publicis has Coke. Omnicom has AT&T and Publicis has Verizon.

The holding company (with each company holding 50 percent) will be based in the Netherlands and I cannot imagine they will share software and accounting and administrative needs, which will allow them to tell clients they have firewalls and other things set up so the conflicts are non-existent.

Heck, I’ve seen two competitive companies work within the same PR firm without issue from the clients so I don’t see the conflicts being a huge deal. At least not on the Publicis Omnicom side. (more…)