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Olivier Fleurot, left, executive chairman of Publicis Worldwide, and Richard Pinder, chief operating officer. (Publicis Worldwide)

ON ADVERTISING

Letting consumers do the work

LONDON: In a short video making the rounds among francophone Web surfers, the French comedian Jamel Debbouze interviews "Zimzim Zidane," who bears a slight resemblance to the French soccer star Zinédine Zidane, about his on-field exploits and his other great passion: Nescafé's Dolce Gusto, a machine that spits out ready-made espresso and cappuccino when the user inserts a coffee-laden capsule.

Nestlé, which owns Nescafé, is trying to market the devices to consumers younger than the typical buyers of its more upmarket Nespresso system. The video is one of a series in an Internet ad campaign starring Debbouze, a stand-up comic who has also appeared in films like "Amélie."

The humor may seem overly caffeinated, but the videos have been viewed more than one million times, according to Publicis Worldwide, the ad agency that created them. Nescafé didn't have to pay anything for advertising space or time; the videos were seeded on the Internet with the help of an advertising-focused social-networking service called Blogbang, majority owned by Publicis Groupe, which is based in Paris and is the parent of Publicis Worldwide. From there, it spread to other video sites and blogs.

Nescafé paid for only the cost of producing the ads; Publicis declined to disclose the amount, but based on similar exercises, it was probably considerably less than the $2.7 million price of 30 seconds of television time during the Super Bowl, the American football championship game. "If you do this right, you can end up spending a lot less on media," said Richard Pinder, chief operating officer of Publicis Worldwide.

Spending less on television time, newspaper space or other media advertising has not always been a goal of many advertising agencies. Their compensation has usually depended, to some extent at least, on the size of an ad campaign, measured in the amount of media spending.

But Pinder and other Publicis Worldwide executives say they are putting that goal at the center of their plans to remake the agency, one of three main advertising "networks" within Publicis Groupe, alongside Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett.

Instead of relying on paid-for ads to spread the word about a brand, they want consumers to do some of the work for them. Pinder said the agency was working with outside experts on word-of-mouth marketing to fine-tune its plans, which were described to employees last week.

Though the flagship of the company, in name at least, Publicis Worldwide has been a sluggish performer in recent years, with major offices, like London, losing a number of high-profile clients. Details of the plans to reposition the agency remain sketchy. Perhaps that is company policy. An announcement last week from Publicis Groupe, stating that it was working on digital advertising projects with Google, was similarly short on detail.

Indeed, a rival, the chief executive of the advertising company WPP Group, based in London, was dismissive of the talks with Google.

"What Publicis is doing represents a little bit of concern that they didn't get the technology right," Martin Sorrell, the WPP chief, told Reuters last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Like Publicis, WPP has been reviewing the structure of its ad agencies as it seeks to meet the needs of digital-age marketers. It is in the process of creating an entirely new agency to handle the consolidated marketing account of a newly won client, Dell, which used to work with hundreds of agencies globally.Publicis, WPP and other agency companies have also been investing heavily in digital acquisitions. The repositioning of Publicis Worldwide follows a move to integrate that agency group with Modem Media, a unit of Digitas, a digital-marketing specialist that Publicis Groupe acquired last year for $1.3 billion.

The changes at Publicis Worldwide don't mean that the agency will no longer make ads, in the traditional sense, or that it will fixate entirely on the Internet.

"A good idea can also be created in a traditional medium," said Olivier Fleurot, executive chairman of Publicis Worldwide. "A poster or a TV commercial or PR can also be the source of a contagious idea."

But even these ideas don't really spread until chatter grows on the Internet. So some agencies are now willing to go directly to the Web, even with a mainstream campaign like the Nescafé videos in France.

"It proved that online can be a mass strategy, that ordinary people can be your media strategy," said Julien Braun, the founder of Blogbang.

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