PUBLICIS to acquire PhoneValley<< NOKIA's main announcement | Main | 1st European deal for MEDIO >> Thomas Husson | September 07, 2007, 03:43 AM PUBLICIS, one of the largest advertising/communication agencies worldwide just announced the acquisition of PhoneValley, a mobile marketing specialist. After having announced the acquisition of online agencies such DIGITAS and to a lesser extent Business Interactif, Publicis is clearly trying to focus on digital. However, the company already had bought a small mobile marketing specialist last year: WATISIT. This reminds me of the ScreenTonic acquisition by Microsoft. Both of them claimed to be Pan-European players but at the end of the day most of their business was in France even if both companies have opened offices abroad. Both companies succesfully raised their profiles through good contacts with the press. The turnover is still small: PhoneValley announced 6.7M euros for its 2006 revenues. But that's not the point here since this acquisition is strategic. That's a long term play and the earlier ad agency understand the market and have the internal know-how to deal with the complexity of mobile marketing, the better. Actually, one of the key feedbacks from our recent executive survey is that lots of education needs to be made among agencies and marketers so that mobile is naturally recommended as a medium in the marketing mix. We're not there yet but deals such as Nextedia / Lagardere, Jumptap / WPP, 3rd Screen Media / AOL, Actionality / Yahoo, 12 Snap / Neomedia, FollowCom / SBW, Hot SMS and Flytxt / Buongiorno...will help. So, who's next ? |
 Subscribe for free JupiterResearch email updates:
|