Hasta La Creative!

In case you missed it yesterday, Publicis Groupe attempted to make up for its own performance issues over the weekend by snapping up Sapient for $3.7 billion in cold cash (and so close to Christmas, too!).

It’s true that these talks could fall through just as the Publicis/Omnicom merger did last year, but for now it seems that the next phase in the group’s “transformation into a digital-technology company” will indeed go through this week.

As a reader put it this morning, “Idea engineers own the ad industry” — and Publicis is very interested in engineering as many ideas as possible. Moving forward, does this mean less focus on the work and more on the data behind it?

So far, the move has been good for business: USA Today notes that Sapient stock rose more than 40% this morning, largely because Publicis agreed to pay nearly 150 percent of each share’s most recent value.

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