Vivaki prompts mixed response

its agencies to buy large-scale digital campaigns more easily.

The vision of Publicis Groupe Media chairman Jack Klues, Publicis chief
Maurice Levy and Digitas head David Kenny is for Vivaki to pool the
knowledge of its various agencies to create a powerful media negotiator
to match technology giants Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. At the same time
as negotiating with these media owners, Publicis also plans to partner
with them through Vivaki's new Audience on Demand Network, a trading
exchange that will allow Publicis to buy single campaigns across Google,
Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL.

Linda Smith, chief executive of Starcom MediaVest, remains confident
that the platform will be "up and running by autumn for a strong 2009"
and that the management structure - including the appointment of a UK
manager for the division - will be announced "within 60 days".

BT's head of media Stephen Huddleston, a client of Starcom, Zed and MEC,
said: "We believe the combining of the ad serving and analytic resources
will deliver huge value to BT."

However, some believe the creation of Vivaki is little more than a
restructure of Publicis' existing digital activities to even out
discrepancies between agencies strong in digital expertise - such as
Digitas and Zed - with agencies such as Starcom that, it is claimed,
have been slower to embrace digital.

Nigel Gwilliam, head of digital at the IPA, believes that Vivaki's
partnership with the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft makes sense, although
he questions whether the industry needs another ad trading platform.

"There are so many disparate ways in which advertising is planned and
traded online," he says, referring to Google's recent launch of Ad
Planner for media agencies. "The difficulty is to understand the
number-crunching and research and the type of planning on which they are
based."

Paul Frampton, head of digital at Havas-owned agency Media Contacts,
said Vivaki's Audience on Demand Network was not yet fully developed and
Yahoo's Right Media exchange was the only fully functioning ad platform
at present. "Most of the other big players' exchanges will not be fully
developed until next year," he added.

What does the Vivaki umbrella stand for?

MARK CREIGHTON, managing director, I-Level

The traditional media sector has a huge problem dealing with the
complexity of the digital landscape, where the scale of one's company
and clients doesn't really matter. Publicis claims Vivaki will allow it
to be a powerful media negotiator with scale. It's just another network
claiming to put digital at the heart of its business. It is playing
catch-up on a platform it has ignored until now.

BRENDAN CONDON, head of AOL Platform A's global operations

Publishing groups have global networks and now our partners are looking
to do the same to centralise their buying. In the past, we needed lots
of agencies and media owners, which made buying and measuring the
effectiveness of ads very challenging. Vivaki will enable clients to
reach global audiences with scale, in a targeted way, across any
platform.

NIGEL GWILLIAM, head of digital, IPA

It's a positive move to marry advertising with technology. The most
advanced platform within Vivaki appears to be Yahoo's Right Media, but
how that will work with Google's DoubleClick and AOL's Platform A is
less clear. If Vivaki can apply that with trading partners, then it is a
pretty interesting concept.

JACK KLUES, chairman, Publicis Groupe Media

Say you are trying to buy any given target audience, such as pet lovers,
for instance. Right now, it isn't that you can't find them. But to find
enough of them to generate a sufficiently aggregated reach would require
a lot of time and effort, going to multiple exchanges and ad networks.
We are saying to MSN, Google, Yahoo and AOL: "Let's put all those people
together."