March 5th-March 11th

Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. This week a big agency holdco is doing the acquiring…

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Publicis doubles consumer reach to 4 billion with Lotame acquisition
Source: Reuters
March 6th, 2025

Summary: Publicis is beefing up its Epsilon marketing tech and data arm with the acquisition of Lotame. One of the original data management platforms (DMP) founded 19+ years ago, Lotame pivoted to identity and data collaboration as privacy restrictions tightened and data clean rooms gained traction. By adding Lotame’s 1.9B consumer profiles to Epsilon’s 2.3B, Publicis will now have access to over 4B global profiles—91% of all adult internet users.

Publicis has poured $1.5B into data and tech in just six months and isn’t stopping. Expect another ~$1B in acquisitions this year. The company boasts 25K engineers and its CoreAI system, which tracks digital behavior, makes predictions, and nudges consumer decisions across screens.

Publicis is outpacing its peers, growing 3x faster. It projects 4-5% organic growth in 2025, while competitors like WPP and Dentsu anticipate flat or ~1% growth.

Deal Grades:
Lotame: INC
Publicis: INC
(Because price matters)

Opinion: This deal is about three things for Publicis:

1. Expanding Epsilon’s identity footprint globally (Epsilon is heavily US-based).

2. Strengthening and scaling Epsilon’s deterministic (email-based) ID with Lotame’s probabilistic Panorama ID.

3. Integrating Lotame’s managed services (e.g., data curation, data collaboration, etc.)—an area where Lotame excels, into the agency holdco managed service offering.

Publicis has been crushing it in recent years, winning new business largely on the Epsilon CoreID pitch. Lotame helps fill gaps in their ID story (scale, global reach, probabilistic modeling), widening Publicis’s lead over its agency holdco rivals in this area.

While Publicis is doubling down on data / tech, others—namely Omnicom and IPG—are betting on scale. We like Publicis’s bet.

Historically, agency holdcos have struggled to make tech acquisitions work. But Publicis (Epsilon), IPG (Acxiom), and Dentsu (Merkle) are proving that in the era of signal loss and identity, data-driven agencies that own data / tech actually have an edge. Unlike with media, marketers seem perfectly fine with these capabilities living within their agencies instead of paying for external tech.

And, of course, there’s the AI angle to consider.

The AI era will favor:
✅ Proprietary data
✅ Unique partnerships and tech integrations
✅ Scale and network effects

Multi-click UIs and generic data won’t cut it.

Publicis is betting that Lotame + Epsilon + CoreAI = 🔥 for this new era—and they might be right.

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