What you need to know: 

• Former Tribal DDB chief Davy Rennie is now six months in at the helm of Publicis Groupe's CX and commerce units, Digitas and Balance and the combined firepower seems to be hitting the mark.
• The offering between the agencies has been rescoped, with a structural overhaul in May creating five clear service lines – but Rennie knocks back rumour that mass redundancies have been part and parcel, with only four roles gone across the two brands this year. 
• The new service lines – creative, CX, marketing operations, commerce and media – will attend to both sides of the "growth loop", per Rennie, with the customer at the centre.
• Increased demand for media to be brought into the CX mix has seen Digitas double its media billings in the latest COMvergence rankings, as "businesses look to get more value out of their first party data strategy and connect both media and CRM seamlessly”, per Rennie.
• No longer can once fragmented marketing challenges remain decoupled, he says, with CRM and commerce now core to creating "points of conversion" across the piste.
• The end-to-end shift sets up both agencies for the age of the metaverse. 
• Though even Meta seems to have stopped talking about it, Rennie says the next digital shift is already underway, just not as we'd first envisioned it. 

Six months into the job, Digitas boss Davy Rennie says all the pieces are falling into place.

The former Tribal DDB Group MD holds the chief executive title for the Publicis Groupe CX and CRM shop and its commerce-focused sibling, Balance – the Melbourne-based Adobe specialist was acquired by the French holdco in 2021, with reporting lines streamlined after Balance founder James Horne completed his earn out in January.

Rennie says he now has a clearer picture of where “Balance stops and Digitas begins”, with a structural overhaul in May having solidified five core service lines between the two brands. While the business has changed shape significantly in recent years, he knocks back industry speculation of mass redundancies – only four roles have been cut this year from a collective headcount of more than 140 across offices in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, and Vietnam. The latter accounts for approximately 20 per cent of that number, with the majority of the offshore team sitting inside Balance. 

Plugging into the resources of the broader group, Rennie says both agencies are now working in lockstep to fulfil what he describes as the left-hand and right-hand sides of what he calls “the growth loop” – i.e. working and non-working media.

He nods to the One Publicis platform as the foundation for that full circle thinking, and eliminating barriers between agencies and specialists. The model puts “creative beside media” and “media beside CRM”, in an approach that’s “shaped around modern marketing, media diets, [and] focused on solving some really complex problems”.

For Digitas and Balance, it’s seen a rescoping of services to capitalise on  demand for a joined up approach to CX, martech and commerce – with paid media filling the funnel.

Conscious recoupling 

In the 2023 COMvergence rankings, Publicis Media ranked in third place of the holding groups, behind Omnicom Media Group and GroupM.

Nonetheless, it was positive story for the French holdco, which was the only one of the big six to report any significant growth – pumping 21 per cent. Within that, Digitas was a quiet achiever. The agency might have only brought in $12 million of Publicis’ $805 million in local billings last year, but it was near double (up 94 per cent) year on year, making Digitas the fastest growing of Australia’s top 31 media agencies.

While the result came before his time, Rennie is clear that the growth comes down to a strategic shift. In part, it can be attributed to global collaboration between country leaders that has enabled Digitas Australia to service global clients via international centres of excellence. But it’s largely owing to the shift towards end-to-end.

“We're starting to see that our partners are asking us to service both sides, paid and owned, and earned, so that's where we start to see media [spend] increase as well.”

He’s expecting the agency’s media billings will only continue to grow as “businesses look to get more value out of their first party data strategy and connect both media and CRM seamlessly” to create a “single view of the customer”.

It’s not just a trend, but a global directive. Rennie says the global strategy for the Digitas brand is, in connecting both sides of that aforementioned “growth loop”, to create cohesive customer ecosystems. That’s where the market is headed, per Rennie, with clients looking to undo the fragmentation of marketing priorities and functions.

“Previous marketing challenge can no longer be easily decoupled,” he says. “So, media challenges, creative challenge, CX challenges, CRM, and earned challenges are all coming together. We’re in this headspace of trying to solve what customers want, which is everything all at once.”

With that in mind, Digitas has simplified its offering across five service lines. There’s creative, which spans CX, CRM and social media; intelligence, encompassing data and strategy; marketing operations, i.e. CRM and martech development and implementation; total commerce, via Balance; and integrated media.

“We're really there implementing smart solutions across that connected journey so that we can create points of conversion for our brands…We're not trying to sell more T shirts, we're [solving] problems in universities and problems in banking that require commerce solutions," per Rennie.

As for who they're doing it for, Digitas counts McDonald's, Beiersdorf, Miele, Mirvac and Superloop amongst its core clients, while Balance has the likes of Mitre 10, Blackmilk, Monash University and ServiceAustralia on its roster. 

No longer the luggage 

The togetherness of Digitas and Balance – though both still go to market on their own when the bill fits – is a long way from what were once insular worlds. CX is no longer just an app or a website, CRM has gone well beyond the world of email, while commerce is increasingly tied to content.

“I think for a long time, CRM was just matching luggage, and it was just one part of a campaign that had to be completed where there was a big above the line campaign, there would be a message replayed down into two emails.”

Now, Rennie describes CRM as a strategic pillar that has become the “genesis of a lot of [creative] ideas” – and he expects to see an uptick in CRM acquisitions across the agency sector as a result.

On the commerce side, Balance is pushing more into content with both headless and SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions that will bring the sides of the coin closer together. Doing so will be essential for both agencies’ growth, says Rennie.

“Our partners who are building commerce experiences also want to know how they get more people to those experiences, how they nurture loyalty, how they nurture long term customer lifecycle value, and also increase their sales through this channel and make the most of their investments,” says Rennie.

Metaverse not dead

Perhaps the epitome of customer centricity, for Rennie, is the metaverse.

Despite the noise having died down since the initial whirlwind in 2022 – replaced by the gen AI buzz – he claims it’s still alive and kicking.

“The metaverse was sort of mooted by so many brands as the answer to social, and the answer to this, and ‘we’ll have meetings in the metaverse’, and all these different things. The metaverse is so much bigger than that. It's a cultural moment in time where people are moving online to connect with people from different worlds, different societies, different cultures, and all coming together across shared interests and shared fandoms.”

Rather than the imagined 3D virtual space spruiked by the likes of Meta’s Zuckerberg, the Metaverse concept encompasses anywhere the physical and virtual realm converges.

“Gaming is the metaverse, if you look at these big open world games, cross-platform games, where people are engaging, not only with the game itself, but Twitch, with YouTube, with Instagram, Messenger, with the game, all in real time,” asserts Rennie. “It’s already happening, and I don’t think it’s so much in pockets.”

The opportunity for clients is not necessarily in creating their own branded spaces or experiences in the Metaverse but tapping into the experiences and fandoms that already exist – take US quick-service restaurant Wendy’s Fortnite stunt, for example.

While for now it’s only in it’s genesis, the true potential will come to light with future generations.

“If you look at generation alpha, it'll be the biggest generation of all time. They will spend more time online than has ever been spent, and they will create communities online like we created communities at schools and with friends.”

“I look at my 10-year-old son. He is so much further down the track with his understanding of the metaverse than anyone I know – he just expects it to happen. He expects to be connected. He expects the skin in Fortnite to be connected to FIFA, and his order for drive through to be put into the metaverse, so when he's hungry [while] playing the game, it's all connected. This is where we're going with the metaverse.”

With digital headed in that direction, and people increasingly discovering and buying brands “all at once”, Rennie is firm that “marketing challenges need to be solved by people who understand that you can't decouple them anymore”.

“The key thing for marketers to consider is how effective is your agency village, and how can it be more effective? And how can you ask your agencies to work harder together to connect your marketing challenges, connect the use of first party data, connect the left-hand side of the growth and the right-hand side will put the customer in the middle.”

“Bring your village together all around the fan and say, 'paid, earned, owned, they're not separate things anymore: it's all together'.”