Digiday opined on The Coca-Cola Company’s global
media, data, and technology review staging a Publicis Groupe versus WPP faceoff.
In Digiday’s
perspective, it will boil down to Coke choosing a White holding company or
single White operating company for their respective positions regarding data.
If the
decision is focused instead on performance and trust, Publicis Groupe has the
advantage, based on its self-promotional hype.
As for global flaming dumpster WPP, well…
Besides,
there’s plenty of data to prove awarding the business will be determined by
which contender best appeases the client with exaggerated promises, lavish
presents, and underhanded proposals.
‘One of our
core areas’: Ahead of global agency review, Coca-Cola’s CFO focuses on data
matching
By Seb Joseph
One of
Coca-Cola’s core focuses these days is data — specifically how it matches its
own data against what its partners hold.
John Murphy,
the advertiser’s president and CFO, made the point at the DBAccess Global
Consumer Conference on Thursday.
He added:
“Today, one of our core areas, how do we take the, let’s say, first-party data
that we own — it’s proprietary, it’s ours — and how do we marry that with the
customer data that these proprietors who are bottlers, given the amount of
engagement they have with millions of customers every day. Or how do we work
with some of our partners, whether it’s in the U.S. with Publicis or WPP in
other parts of the world, to bring that together and then to create a sort of a
new intelligence.”
While it’s
hardly a fresh observation, it is a timely one. Coca-Cola is about to kick off
a global agency review covering media, data and technology, triggering a tussle
between Publicis Groupe and WPP, as Ad Age first reported. It will exclude
North America, where the advertiser already works with Publicis as well as
Japen and Korea where it works with Dentsu, the company said in an emailed
statement. Moreover, it will not include global creative and PR disciplines,
which will remain with WPP.
The review,
which is being managed by Mediasense, will begin in July, with the decision
expected to be announced in the fall. When it lands, it will settle (at least
for now) which of the two prevailing holdco views on data a major advertiser
buys into. Publicis has spent years building a proprietary data stack across
Epsilon, Lotame, LiveRamp and its CoreAI operating system, and will no
doubt pitch itself as a tech company that also does media. WPP, on the other
hand, will do the opposite. Rather than owning the data, it acquired InfoSum to
connect data sources across the ecosystem without centralizing them, a
privacy-safe collaboration model it has since folded into GroupM and WPP
Open.
Put another
way, one holdco bets on owning the database, the other on owning the connective
tissue. The Coca-Cola review therefore is about as direct a test of those two
philosophies as it gets, and one of the more consequential. A Publicis win
would be a timely endorsement of its data stack bet, arriving just as it moves
to close the LiveRamp acquisition. A WPP win would be a crucial jolt for a
holdco that has been searching for consistent momentum after sluggish growth
and too many false dawns.
“The Coca-Cola
Company is evolving its digital-first marketing operating system for future
growth,” reads its statement on the matter. “This includes a shift in mindset
from traditional media planning to the emerging ways we need to reach consumers
through technology, including agentic tools.”
Whatever it
signals about the holdco model, the review could just as easily expose the trap
both companies risk walking into. They’ll lead with AI and data because
that’s what clients want to hear. But turning combined first-party data into
something that actually drives decisions is ultimately a people problem as much
as a technology one. The hard question is whether either agency will have the
senior talent capable of interpreting what the tools produce.
“To unlock real
value from AI, you’ve got to use your own data as a base,” said Robert Webster,
founder of AI marketing consultancy TAU. “The real battleground is how you show
Coca-Cola how your data, your approach and the AI it plugs into actually matters.
Publicis has won a lot of business in Europe, but has been — in my opinion —
less AI-focused than perception might suggest. WPP, meanwhile, has very much
focused on larger clients, with EssenceMediacom particularly strong on CPG,
which again is relevant here. On Europe and the U.K. I’d give WPP a slight
edge, on Asia definitely Publicis. But crucially, what a client really wants is
to make sure they own their data and their method to execute against it — and
neither of them properly delivers that yet. On data ownership, LiveRamp gets
Publicis closer.”
That’s the real
issue for the largest companies. A Bain & Company survey of 951 companies
found the top reason AI programs underperform is that companies still can’t
reliably reach their own data after a decade and hundreds of billions spent on
modernisation. MIT found the same wall from a different angle: 95% of corporate
GenAI pilots stalled, mostly on tools that integrate badly. Through that lens
the Coca-Cola review becomes a test of which holdco can actually solve a
plumbing problem most enterprises haven’t cracked.
“For advertisers there are valid reasons to want
an agency plugged deep into their data to do AI work, but they also need to
keep architectural sovereignty and the freedom to switch,” said Tim
Norris-Wiles, head of go-to-market at data startup Neuralift AI. “Those goals
are at odds. It gets harder still for any brand running a single global
architecture but with different agencies across markets, where every
integration is also a dependency they have to maintain and be able to unwind.
The holdcos that win long-term therefore won’t be the ones that lock clients in
hard, they’ll be the ones that can deliver value while leaving the client’s
architecture portable.”
