Is Publicis Groupe a dead brand? The Wild Wild East Goes West IX

As my parting note from Paris, please read the following post from Seth Godin here, and then my non-encounter with Publicis Groupe afterward. Seth Godin is a best selling author on marketing and regularly conducts seminars with Fortune 500 marketing staffs.

Brands that matter

In this era, there are two questions every marketer answers:

Do I want people to interact with me and my brand in unexpected ways (as opposed to just quietly consume it)? When they interact, do I overwhelm people with delight worth remarking about?

If you think about dead brands like Tide or United Airlines, the answer to both questions is clearly 'no'. On the other hand, vibrant growing brands manage to answer both questions with a resounding 'yes.' It's not an accident and it's not easy, but if you do it right, it may be worth it.

On our trip through Paris I had it clearly marked on my itinerary that I wanted to stop by Publicis and talk with one of their International directors about the concept of Infinite Wisdom and how we might work together in Asia and other markets. For those who may not be aware, Infinite Wisdom is our combination of a marketing partner with a traditional management consulting firm providing market research, in-depth brand analysis, brand design and marketing solutions to clients and agencies alike. It's a concept that neither traditional agencies nor management consulting firms have been able to bridge and I thought that certainly someone there would be interested in exploring at least the idea. It's a client-centric idea that pairs analysis and marketing execution together in a way that makes executions the direct result of the marketing plan.

In any case, we could be producing rubber stamps that you use to make cost effective Post-It note business cards and if nobody has ever done that before it seems that someone at the world's third largest communications holding company might be interested in that idea - if you could find them.

So off I went, on a personal visit to the groupe to see if I could find an international director, regional director or discipline specific director to speak with.

Cut to the offices of Publicis Groupe on Avenue des Champs Elysées in Paris, just a stone's throw away from the Arc de Triomphe . They're a fairly faded retail glitzy affair complete with a coffee shop and multiplex movie theatre that at street level, if you didn't know it, could pass as a rather non-enticing mall effort, anywhere in middle America. A museum like display of the founder, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, tones things down a bit once in the lobby and one of the desk attendents finishes a cigarrette outside to come in and care for my request, which in English, befuddles the attractive female receptionist behind the actual counter. A baffling display of company owned logos including Leo Burnett, Saatchi and seemingly all their subsidiaries try's in vain to explain what the company actually does but it's plain to see that the founder's black and white photographic relationships with everyone from Charles De Gaulle, to Harry S. Truman carries the weight around there not to mention the more than toney address that more than undermines the cheesy facade that was certainly not designed by Frank Gehry, let alone the country's design L'enfant Terrible, Philippe Starck.

"Tell me again he says", as I try to explain the nature of my business and that I certainly do not have an appointment but am simply looking for the right person with which to have an appointment with. He then tells me in no uncertain terms that they are not able to give out the names of anyone who might be working in the building and then relays to me a telephone number that I should call on a yellow sticky note. I ask with whom should I speak and he says he doesn't know but just to call it. Later, I learn it is the general number listed in the phone book. Thank you.

The next morning I call the number and, unless I made a mistake in thinking they were an "international" firm was reasonably baffled by the succession of non-english speakers I was forwarded to in response to my request. And if you're wondering why I just didn't send an email, so am I. The parent company website succeeds in being a company brochure but seems to let interactivity and any shred of real information fall by the wayside. They even show the most cursory form of professional disrecpect to anyone interested in the firm by listing "webmaster" as the primary email contact for the firm. Embarrasing for a communications company? You tell me.

After the parade of operators who most certainly had decided that the best English speaker could do the best job, they settled on a Mr. Robert Fridovich, Director of Marketing Communication. With all due respect to Mr. Fridovich, because I really did feel he was a nice man, he seemed perplexed with the idea that anyone would call the company looking for anything. I asked for his email and said that I would send a detailed note of my request as well as my full background and contacts - and I did not forget to mention my previous association with Leo Burnett.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a bit of a detail geek and certainly a good salesman so I did feel confident that the note I sent would give him the information he needed to make a recommendation. But it didn't. So I sent yet another detailed note with some possible working scenarios in which his company and mine might benefit. And then, a two day wait.

In the end he came up with nothing.

The reason I was given was that there were no cross agency brand responsibilities assigned to any one person and that I might do better searching the individual agency websites for contacts - so basically, back to square one. In essence, despite a trip to Paris, and indeed a trip to the home office, I had failed in coming up with anyone I didn't already know in the organization.

Thinking of Jana O'Brien's (our Nintendo research head at Burnett in Chicago) encouragement that I, "Just keep on trying", I chided myself with the fact that I had failed to ask for a meeting with Mr. Fridovich himself, knowing that a face to face meeting is always the best way to make an impression and encourage a conversation between both parties - until I realized that that was his responsibility, or at least the brand's and not really mine. In terms of interactivity, the brand itself should have reached out to this consumer and made the experience easier. And both parties could have benefitted - and the brand would have been reading another blog post entirely, instead of this one.

Mr. Fridovich, if you're reading this, thanks for giving it a shot - because it seems that in this case, you didn't fail - but your brand did. Take a good clean, objective look at how your web presense, your front desk demeanor and your telephone response deals with interactivity - and ask yourself, and your superiors, if Publicis Groupe couldn't be doing a better job. Brands die daily in the face of Web 2.0 and beyond, because if interactivity and pleasant brand experiences don't start at the communications company, how are you ever going to instill those disciplines in the consumer brands, your agency brands represent?

Thanks to Seth Godin for the motivation here. I was just going to let this one pass but thought again after reading Seth's post.

For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!
II) Frankfurt
III) C'est Si Bon
IV) Bon Jour Paris!
V) Les Picassos en Paris
VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today
VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words
VIII) Au Revoir Paris
IX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?

Au Revoir Paris: The Wild Wild East Goes West VIII

As I make my exit from Paris, I head to my local Internet cafe to clear my mails and make final preparation for today's departure to Mali, Afrika - printing visas, touching base with Twitter Facebook, and the like - having a tiff with a friend over a little "confidential" firestorm - just your normal days workings in land land of international drama and intrigue. As far as drama and intrigue are concerned, savvy readers have detected more than a slight riff between my partner and I in these travels and I assure you, I suspect that riff is far from over. But on we will go. The path to Infinite Wisdom is no easy one, I assure you. Today is launched for me by the man at my Internet cafe, who only speaks French, bellowing "Bowie!, Monsieur David Bowie, bon jour!"- This pretty much cements my happiness for the day in knowing that it's not only in Asia where I seem to favour the great thin white duke, but also here in France. Bon jour Paris, and thank you. Au Revoir, until we meet again!

For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!
II) Frankfurt
III) C'est Si Bon
IV) Bon Jour Paris!
V) Les Picassos en Paris
VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today
VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words
VIII) Au Revoir Paris
IX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?

Paris Wallpaper - Sometimes the best prayers have no words: The Wild Wild East Goes West VII

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For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!
II) Frankfurt
III) C'est Si Bon
IV) Bon Jour Paris!
V) Les Picassos en Paris
VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today
VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words
VIII) Au Revoir Paris
IX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?

Nothing Much Happened (IX) en Paree Today: The Wild WildEast Goes West VI

Dang Hai Yen

18.08.09 - 8am: and the B&W girl is at the door. What could it be? She had packed her things and left the day before. Hungover as hell I open it to wash away a night of beer drinking and trying to figure out why women do what women do. Hopeless. I had found myself at 1 in the morning in a Scottish bar where you could not smoke trying to answer this question with a French Ph.D. in Psychology and Philosophy. He didn't have the answer - but maybe the beer did. We drank what we could to try to distill the said female information and ended up dry. Wet. But still dry. Idiots - we men.

"Uh huh", "Right", "I see", "Right again". Lesson #1 dudes: The woman is always right and you are always wrong. Once you get that down things will go a lot smoother.

11am: Three hours of this and it's agreed that we still disagree and believe me, that's a lot further along than we were the day before. Time to plan a day. A yogurt and a coffee remove the edge and it's time to get off to the Internet shop for a little email checking. Internet here costs a minimum of 2 Euro an hour (that's $2.80) and goes down the more time you spend but this kind of pricing tends to make you want to get the hell out the minute you got in, but things don't always go so quickly. Time to check mail.

12:00 noon: Erik has responded to my "Bon Jour Paris" post on LinkedIn and I'm happy to see that anybody has responded. Erik Vos is a Dutch designer living in Paris and his website shows you that he's quite the cool cat indeed, but I don't know that yet. He proposes a meeting at 4 and we make a plan. Oddly I do not have a phone here as my phone from Vietnam doesn't work in France and a phone purchased here would not work in Afrika so phuck the phone. We just need to go old skool and make what we can of things. Appointment set.

3pm: Hours go by easily when the entire plan you spent months contemplating has gone up in a blaze of feminine glory and you're busy trying to decide if it's back to Germany, Vietnam or wherever the fuck. Honestly who cares whatever or whomever got me on this trip and just as I said in the beginning, that I would have been and idiot not to have gone, I spend little time thinking of how much of an idiot I have become because of having gone. There's no point to that. At least I'm on the road and in homage to K

erouac whistle a little Willie Nelson tune. Home to shower and crunch a few crackers with brie, my hangover has subsided and I'm ready to go meet Erik at the entrance to Jardin du Luxembourg. For those not exactly in the know this park was Marie DiMedici's private little 28 hectare garden for awhile while the family was busy patronizing the arts of my university art history years and not much has been lost to the ages. It's positively fabulous. Beaux Arts facades and statues abound, the park is an odd yet totally harmonius collection of French formal gardens, English country lanes, and Italian inspired sculpture and decoration - and it's full of pagan-like Greek mythological figures and just flat out flights of middle ages old money fantasies. Do it on drugs if at all possible.

3:45pm: Off to meet Erik all I know is that he will be wearing an orange Polo shirt. That should be easy unless of course, the Orange Telecom Polo team shows up for a picnic. He arrives and rather than spend our time at a streetside cafe as most would in Paris he suggests that we take time in the park and at least look at the girls. And that seems exactly the right thing to do. It is Paris for chrissakes. Good idea. Erik is wonderful and we strike it off nicely. His designs are well throught and he has another million other good ideas in his back pocket. We talk of Afrika and more places to come and Italian real estate deals and god knows what else. Hours fly. This is the way a lazy Tuesday afternoon was meant to be.

5:30pm: And then I realize my bag is gone. Fuck. In the bag is my partner's camera as well as the notebook I carry always to write these posts and keep all sorts of other daily information and travel miscelleny. Fuck again. The bag has apparantly been lost in our moving of chairs after another convenience store trip to replentish our beverages and with my experience of publics and parcs does not seem to have much of a chance of coming abck at all. Fuck three times. Erik suggests that we check with the local gendarmarie and we dutifully trod off to the lost and found station which, in 28 hectares of garden fantasie, will not prove all so easy to find.

6pm: But found it is. And inside, a more than helpful and cheery park gendarme to help with our search. "Let's see", he ponders, "another stupid American tourist has lost a bag with a decent little Nikon inside and he expects we Parisians are so dumb as to waste our precious time traipsing of to the cop shop to drop it off so said American tourist will not have to put up with even more shit from a partner who already doesn't like him very much?" Fat chance. Or in this case, a Fat Tuesday's chance. I describe the bag, the Nikon and the notebook inside. I neglect to describe the dime bag of marijuana I might have had stashed in the inside front pocket had I visited this park when I was in my twenties and he checks the register. Check #1: Stupid American tourists? = Plenty. Check #2: Black bags with Nikons and notebooks inside? = One. Somebody's got to be shitting me? And rolling his chair towards a bin for storage he pulls out my bag exactly - with all contents in tact. Amazing. I thank him profusely in the most horrible and awkward French I can manage, and thank Erik for persevering with me to find the station.

6:30pm: It's time for Erik to get back home and we bid farewell, agreeing of course to keep in touch and keep up with the future. Two geeks in a park on a Tuesday afternoon and you don't find that everyday now, do you? Maybe everyday in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, but today in Jardin du Luxembourg? Nice.

7pm: I Finish my day with Rolando. He is drawing portraits and I ask him if I may see his sketchbook. It is thoughtful and full of all sorts of people from the park that day. He asks me if he may draw me, not to make money, but just for the time and experience and I agree - on one condition - the condition being that I get to draw him as well. He says ok on his condition that I draw him first and on we go. I have not made a drawing like this in over 30 years - sometime way back in school. It takes me awhile to get my sea legs but it all comes back. Just like riding a bike.

8pm: The tree is a chestnut tree. It's the same tree I had wondered about in Korea from my blog post last summer called "The Art Walk". In that post I had described how one of my past employees remarked that I always looked at the smallest things on my walk out of the office and down the hill each day. And today I found the answer to the the name of the trees that graced my Korean walk everyday. I guess sometimes we just have to wait for our answers.

9pm: And home. A regular reader here had wondered to me recently whether this blog was getting too personal - and whether I had gone astray from my professional expertise and field of snarky comment about all things marketing and all things snarky. In short, they had wondered if I had gone soft on y'all. And yes. Maybe so. And maybe so for all the right reasons. It would

be hard for me to explain all the reasons for going on this tour as well as all the reasons for not going on this tour, and all I can say at this point, is that I am here. I am here. I am here. And that is a far better place than I was just one month ago. It's even a better place than I was in Dalat just two months ago. For whatever reason I am here, I know it is to expand my thought and my field of vision in a way that would not have been possible had I stayed home (wherever I may have regarded that to be) and stuck my thumb up my butt some more. Doors open and we have but one choice: Go through them. We are not always able to know exactly what might be on the other side - but rather we should be happy that in our lives, doors are opening instead of closing and let the outcome rely on itself. Being in the game is always far better than just watching it. I know that by now.

12 midnight: I made a call requested of me by my partner and she asked for a surprise meeting on the street near le Pantheon. Things had changed again from just a day ago and it was agreed that tomorrow would be yet another new day with all old stories relegated to the pile where all old stories go and a new one to begin on the following morning. Arguing with that idea is just another bad notion, if one should have it. Time to sleep. New days are what this trip is all about, and Infinite Wisdom is but a carrot on a stick - and so, again - nothing much happened in Paree today.

For more in the "Nothing much happened" series, check below:

VIII People Are Just Dieing To Get Out of Here VII The Hair Job VI Happy New Year! Chúc Mừng Năm Mới! V The Vietnam sNews IV At The Center of Miss Universe III My Walk in the Park Today II The Stevie Wonder Post I Ear Cleaning

For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!

II) Frankfurt

III) C'est Si Bon

IV) Bon Jour Paris!

V) Les Picassos en Paris

VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today

VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words

VIII) Au Revoir ParisIX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?

Les Picassos En Paris: The Wild Wild East Goes West V

Ahh, the Louvre or Musee National Picasso Paris, no? No. The painters in Paris are real painters and the canvases, the buildings. The pictures? Our lives. To see Paris and only see the monuments, the places in the travel books should be a crime and would be in heaven, which is near to what this city has to offer. This morning on my trip to the Tabac (tobacco shop) I spied the man in front of me entering the shop, his pants spattered with the colours du jour for every day for a month. It made me think of the way our lives go by. Sometimes. Blue. Sometimes red. Sometimes another. But the number of colours pales in comparison to the number of people who can not see them - those who live their days in only black and white. Today for me will go down as a very blue day but for someone else it was just black or white - and that makes me sad. Because the rainbow was there and all she needed to do was reach out and touch it, but that would have erased the black and the white and those were the only colours she had convinced herself she was comfortable with. Au revoir dear Yen.

For more in the WWE Goes West Series check here:

I) The Wild Wild East Goes West: Onward Ho!
II) Frankfurt
III) C'est Si Bon
IV) Bon Jour Paris!
V) Les Picassos en Paris
VI) Nothing Much Happened en Paree Today
VII) Paris Wallpaper: Sometimes The Best Prayers Have No Words
VIII) Au Revoir Paris
IX) Is Publicis Groupe a Dead Brand?