#84: Finn Partners' Peter Finn

[upbeat music] Maybe the most, uh, important piece of news since we, Olivia and I, last had a chance to pine on this podcast, the PepsiCo news.

Oh, my God, that was bonkers.

I mean, where to begin? And, and Peter, you don't have to opine on the specifics, but have you ever had a large client surprise you by just leaving?

Well, that has happened to us, but I- I'm not sure it's necessarily I'd say a surprise.

It's usually the result of our main contact leaving and a new CMO coming in and saying, "Well, I, I have a team that I have a relationship I wanna, I wanna work with." That's mostly what's happened to us in terms of large clients leaving.

Sometimes clients will run into a budget problem, and they will either suspend work for a while, or sometimes they'll decide they have to move to a smaller, less expensive agency.

agency.Yeah.

But you kind of see it coming.

Like, it's not like all of a sudden, yeah, we're just, uh, picking up our toys and going somewhere else.

Um, no problems in our business.

We just, it's not you, it's us.

We won't go somewhere else.

Occasionally, occasionally it's a surprise, but usually we see it coming.

All right.

So what is so astounding about this is that it happened without a pitch.

The relationship with Omnicom was very, very old, so it seems almost intentionally abrupt.

Uh, it makes me wonder, did something go terribly wrong, or was there another reason why this happened? Brian, do you have any take on that?

No, I mean, we can all speculate.

I, I, my guess is that, this is a theory, uh, no actual information.

But if you're, uh, because Coca-Cola was going through a global pitch right now, if you were PepsiCo and you were thinking about looking for another place to go, you knew that you had a very short window to consider going, and it was go now or don't go at all for years.

And that's my best guess.

Publicis was probably always talking to them all along, and then this came about very abruptly.

Because otherwise, if you're Publicis, they were in the best position to actually win the global Coca-Cola business, given that they already had the North America business.

And for it to have played out this way must have been that PepsiCo realized that they needed to go somewhere else.

Publicis was probably gonna offer really good economics and off.