#77: Shannon Langrand on building an agency outside the legacy playbook

So first of all, Publicis reported its latest earnings results.

This is kind of boring in the sense that it's just, yet again, another quarter of 5% growth.

You just keep succeeding.

I know.

It's like we're getting tired of

me.

Yeah, what do we even say? But I think the thing that stuck out to me as interesting was the slight deceleration in the creative department.

Did that also stick out to you as something that is important or interesting? Or does it not matter because most of the money comes from media and media is doing well?

Yeah, I mean, it's really funny because they have done incredibly well with all of their businesses other than Sapient.

For a good long while, I think that that business has been outperforming the creative businesses.

It's been shocking that they've grown as strong as they have.

So if they're down to low single digit, but they're still in positive territory, I think that's pretty remarkable.

One thing that I think stands out again is like when I say it's boring that they're growing as they are, I mean, we can't understate how successful they are at this point in the industry among all their, certainly their peers at the scale that they're at.

So the fact that, hey, it's only a low single digit number, no big deal.

I think the Sabian thing is still a bit more troubling because they keep pointing to IT services, you know, facing headwinds.

And it's true they are there, but the vastly much bigger Accenture is not seeing the same thing.

So it does feel like it's either client specific or something else, but it's not as sector based as I think that they characterize.

That's the one point of challenge.

Shannon, I don't know, when holding companies report their results, do you care? Do you pay any attention to that?

Not too much, no, to be honest.

I mean, I think we love to talk about scale and what it can do and publicly traded companies, et cetera.

But we're at this pivotal thing we talk about a lot in our company.

Where are we in an age of mass intelligence? Right.

Great thinking becomes critical.

But we're also in this age of surveillance, right, where trust becomes critical.