Havas Creative

Euro RSCG Worldwide S.A. is the leading advertising agency in Europe. With full-service operations in 30 countries and just over two percent of the US$300 billion global advertising market, France-based Euro RSCG ranks seventh among the world's largest agency networks. The firm is the only one of the industry's leading agencies that is not American, Japanese, or British, and the company has worn its distinctly European mantle with pride. Euro RSCG is part-owned by French media giant Havas Agence S.A. In the early 1990s, Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), a French bank, held 6.2 percent of the agency's equity, and another French financial institution, Societe General, owned another 1.9 percent. Euro RSCG is a "mega-agency" that formed as a result of the rather surprising 1991 merger of Eurocom S.A., France's top advertising agency, and Roux Séguéla Cayzac & Goudard, the country's third-ranked advertising firm. The billion-franc union was spurred by global industry consolidation as well as factors specific to the French advertising market. A spate of mergers and acquisitions in the late 1980s had transformed the structure of the global advertising industry. Marketing conglomerates (comprised of a holding company and several individual advertising agencies) that could offer their international clients comprehensive services proliferated throughout this period. Eurocom evolved from Univas, the international advertising division of French media giant Havas S.A. Havas, which shared ownership of Univas with the French government, was itself majority-government-owned. The agency formed a system of cross-ownerships and old-boy networks that permitted it to capture the advertising business of several companies in such state-controlled industries as banking and insurance without engendering outright conflicts of interest. Early clients included Air France, Berlitz, and L'Oreal. By the late 1970s, Univas' annual billings totaled an estimated US$230 million. Around this time, the firm made its first acquisitive move toward the United States, a market that had long been regarded as a key to internationalization. These efforts, though, resulted in failed affiliations with Needham, Harper & Steers and Kelly Nason, Inc. The latter was characterized as a "fiasco:" Kelly Nason "literally disintegrate[d] within a year of the purchase," and Univas lost an estimated US$2.5 million on the deal. Although Univas' billings continued to multiply to the point that it ranked in the global top twenty by 1980, the agency network was widely denigrated as a bureaucratic bastion of perks, privileges, and corruption. Corporate leadership changed with each federal administration, and individual agencies within the system were said by Debra Goldman of ADWEEK to be "filled with faceless civil servants and sons of clients who got their jobs through the elite who-you-know circuit." In the late 1960s and early 1970s, several independent agencies were founded as alternatives to the government ad regime. Roux Séguéla Cayzac & Goudard was one of these upstarts, created in 1972 under the creative leadership of Jacques Séguéla. Advertising was Séguéla's third career; he had previously tried pharmacy and journalism, then turned to media in his thirties. Under this "mercurial" leader, RSCG quickly earned a reputation for brash, unfettered creativity. One of the agency's first ads featured an unauthorized image of then-French President Georges Pompidou. Although all copies of the piece were ordered to be confiscated, the resulting publicity more than made up for the loss. A groundbreaking campaign for automaker Citroen won several awards for its use of slang, as opposed to "official" French. Within less than a decade of its inception, RSCG's estimated US$80.5 million in annual billings ranked it among France's top three advertising houses. Séguéla and his partners created their independent agency as a foil to the government-owned Havas/Univas. Ironically, the agency made