By Carey Finn. The outgoing senior vice president, media at Publicis Groupe Africa talks to us about the three ways Publicis Media restructured during her tenure, and the results it brought.
Celia Collins doesn’t originally come from media, or even marketing. The outgoing senior vice president for media at Publicis Groupe Africa started out as a receptionist in an air conditioning company in the mid-90s. Her “real good element”, though, was in the numbers — and it shows.
Since Collins returned to Publicis Groupe Africa in 2022 (there’s a story there), the media agency has seen revenue increase by over 150%. “I think the agency has a brilliant proposition on what it is able to offer clients, and that also comes from a global perspective, and where Publicis is going,” she says. “It has restructured, and [the team is] looking at how to segregate the business into real pockets of what delivery looks like.”
Into Africa, again and again
Collins’ journey to Publicis Media was a colourful one, beginning with a side-hustle bookkeeping business she ran in her evenings, while working at the aircon company. One of her first clients was a “small creative agency that had some work with Nissan”. She would later join this agency to help take MTN into Africa, her geographical passion.
Soon realising that she “was not the creative person who makes the pretty pictures”, Collins set out to learn the ropes of media, doing a stint at Thomson Multimedia in London, and travelling the world. When she arrived back in South Africa, her former boss from the creative agency was ready to welcome her back.
Collins went “straight into building a media agency across Africa”, and as part of it, she found herself helping Starcom do a pitch for a cellular company and a bank. The late Gordon Patterson recognised her talent, and asked her “what she understood”. She could plan, and she could buy, but she needed “that strategic capability to actually write strategy”, she says. “And he said, ‘Great, I’m going to train you. Come across and open up our Africa network for us.’”
Learning the ropes, and then some
Over the next decade and a bit, Collins went from account manager all the way up to deputy managing director, before moving to dentsu. Four years of personal and business growth later, she got stuck in at Amplifi, “pioneering what dashboarding and reporting looked like in digital”. A year at OMD followed, but Publicis Groupe Africa’s CEO at the time, John Dixon, came calling. And he kept calling — asking her to help grow their media agency.
“I enjoyed the challenge of how to work a media agency in new business, and what we needed to do to structure the back-end for new business,” says Collins. “I don’t think I had really imagined what I was able to achieve.” Her accomplishments followed her, however, with Scopen hailing Collins as one of the top three media professionals on the continent, in 2023.
Putting the client first
Publicis Media has focused on three core elements in its restructuring. “The first is about client-centricity, and what that means,” Collins explains. “Becoming the partner that they can rely on, in terms of their maturity in digital, in where they are going.”
A few years ago, a trend would last for a few years, says Collins. Today, if a trend lasts for a month, that’s a long time. “You need that agility to be able to handle brands, and get them in front of consumers in the right way, which resonates for them,” she says. “So the first element is around how we service, and what we give our clients, and it’s all centered around delivery.”
Three agencies fall under the Publicis Media purview — Starcom, Zenith and Performics. Major clients serviced by Starcom include Absa, Mondelēz and Haleon. Meanwhile, Zenith works with Tiger Brands, Disney and Visa. The staff count within South Africa is roughly 140 people. Transformation is top of mind, with the Level 1 BBBEE company keeping its pledge to ensure that 30% of spend goes to 100% black-owned Enterprise and Supplier Development (ESD) partners.
Firing up the back engine of the business
The second restructuring element involves the “back engine of the actual business”, says Collins. “How we write strategies, our tools that we go to market with, and what makes that back-end tick,” she elaborates. “We’ve got so much being thrown at us, from an AI perspective, a tech and tools perspective, and the world is your oyster in how you build to maximise efficiencies.”
AI does have its limits, though — this is something Collins is clear on. “As much as AI can do certain elements, it can’t do it all,” she says. “You still need that human intervention.” The challenge lies in “figuring out what that human intervention is, and what the qualities are,” and then changing employees’ thinking to that ingenuity, and training them up into that function, she says, while managing the inherently high levels of churn within the industry.
“AI can do so much, it’s a really powerful tool,” says Collins. “But I think we have got to be very careful about what we feed, because you can very quickly come out with the wrong answer at the end, if the input isn’t right in the front end. It’s about making sure that we have got those efficiencies from AI, but driving the right outcomes.”
Trading productivity differently
The third and final piece of the restructuring puzzle is two-fold. “It’s about trading, making sure that every single cent that comes into the agency is optimised [in terms of] its rebate on what we are actually able to get,” says Collins. “It’s also about how to look at productivity for clients – because productivity is changing.”
Previously, discounts and how much a client could get off the bottom line were the name of the game; this is not what Collins believes the agency should be looking at in 2025. “We should be trading productivity into a form of looking at the long tail, and looking at the short tail,” she says. “So, what is the brand effectiveness, and the return on advertising spend, in terms of sales on a long-awareness consideration brand-love element, versus a short-term which is price-driven, instantaneous sales? And how do you find the balance between the two?”
Towards an “intellectual company”
Focusing on these three elements ensures the media agency is future fit. “Years ago, we were a media agency,” says Collins. “We then changed into a platform agency. We believe where [Publicis Media] is heading is an intellectual company. It’s about growth, it’s about client-centricity, it’s about moving the needle, and having the balance between brand and product, and [being] price driven, to help clients drive the addressability and what that means for them. So if we have a changing audience who rely on a one-month trend, how do you balance that long term?”
Another factor in the agency’s success is “the power of one”, adds Collins. “We’ve got numerous agencies within Publicis that we’re able to bring in and out on a flexi basis,” she says. Integration is key here, with one profit and loss against all of them. Gross billings from the past year came in at approximately R4.5 billion.
Africa remains a huge focus for Collins. In recent months, she had “been growing Africa again”, with approximately 200 staff members working with her on the continent, outside of North Africa. “It’s [been] around taking what we have in South Africa and global, and ensuring that we impart that knowledge to our partners on the ground,” she says.
Celia Collins is leaving Publicis Media at the end of July, to start the next chapter of her career.
Carey Finn is a contributing writer to MarkLives MEDIA and MarkLives.com.
