Will Publicis buy Criteo?

If you asked me: Will Publicis buy Criteo? I’d answer: how am I supposed to know? What I can tell you, however, is that it’s a deal that would make sense. Certainly a lot more sense than the delusional idea that Publicis could “merge” as an equal partner with a much larger American company like Omnicom which, of course, just wanted to gobble them up.

Not to mention: Criteo could bring Publicis what they were apparently after, i.e. the number-crunching power they need if they want to stand a chance in the new digital advertising landscape — something that Omnicom never had, to my knowledge.

In this regard, few deals if any at all ever seemed as dumb as Omnicom-Publicis to me.

Five Little Piigs

The financial community has been giving us this bullshit about the Five Little Piigs countries for years. However, they have never attempted, to my knowledge, an analysis of what these five countries supposedly have in common. Precious little, imho. Let’s take a closer look.

Portugal
Portugal is well-known for having been for a long time running the European country with the highest number of PhDs in government. It ranks decently in terms of corruption and very well in terms of freedom of the press — higher than France and the UK, and just behind Germany. Portugal is not a very rich country, but they never tried to make things up. They had some luck in the ’90s with companies relocating there, only to be undercut by places in Eastern Europe like Slovakia. I hope they will be able to cash in on Brazil’s new status as an economic powerhouse. I wish them well, and hate those who scorn them.

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Ads. What else?

Ads. What else? Build a large enough mousetrap, and then splatter ads all over it. Whatever the mousetrap, ads are the only way to monetize. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram. And very soon SoundCloud as well.

Do you ever wonder what this tells us about our culture and our societies?

Professionalism

I hate “professionalism”. I know, it’s a requirement for many jobs. But I’d feel uneasy and unwelcome in such jobs and companies, so I might as well say: Just fuck it.

Professionalism is about average people posing as if they were smart. Professionalism is to the corporate world what political correctness is to politics. That is to say, bullshit.

The idea of “best practices” is no better. If everybody is doing something, how can it be the “best” thing to do? Average at best. More probably, mediocre, dumb and boring.