The “All-Digital Agency All the Time” – Part Two of Compass Points’ Agency of the Future Series.

Maurice Levy is perhaps the most underreported, undervalued person in advertising. In the span of 20 years, he has taken a smallish European network of agencies based in Paris and built it into a colossus.

Publicis Groupe today owns Publicis, Saatchi, Leo Burnett, Fallon, 49% of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Droga5, Starcom, Mediavest and now the digital giants, Digitas, the largest digital agency in the world, with Razorfish and VivaKi, Denuo and on and on.

But, though we hear all the time from Martin Sorrell of WPP, Michael Roth of Interpublic and occasionally even from press-shy John Wren of Omnicom, the American business press features Levy. When it came time for Business Week to do a cover story on advertising’s current problems, it bypassed Levy for the flamboyant (“Love Notes”), Australian-born CEO of the Saatchi network, Kevin Roberts.

One reason Levy has outdistanced his rivals in terms of turning in solid, quarter-on-quarter revenues and profits, is that he saw the downturn coming 10 or so years ago and began buying up digital assets. Today 25% of Publicis Groupe’s revenues come from digital advertising and media services. Levy saw the future, bet the farm on digital and now is worth a careful hearing.

A week ago MediaPost.com reported that Levy plans to transform Publicis Groupe into an “all-digital agency.” “We have very good numbers for growth in digital,” he said. “And this is something which is offsetting the decrease of some other activities.”

So I’ve been trying to figure out what Levy means by “all-digital agency.” First of all, I wish had he had been challenged on whether he was talking about just letting Digitas and his other digital assets grow and prosper, or whether he was speaking as head of the holding company, and meant that all his properties were going to become “all-digital.”

And then I started thinking about what that phrase would mean—if by it you really wanted to change mission statement of his three big traditional networks, Leo Burnett, Publicis and Saatchi.

Would that mean that these great monoliths would dare to call themselves All Digital—and jettison the layers of people they still have trying to shoehorn their clients into big branding campaigns played out in TV and print and in radio?

Or did he mean that he was going to force them to think of digital first, and come up with digital solutions that then could be applied in appropriate ways to other platforms and other media?

Or is All Digital a new language in branding—so all he was talking about was literacy in this new tongue? Or is it a strategy? Or is it just the natural evolution of where the business is going?

When Business Week in the Kevin Roberts’ cover story noted the drop in revenues at Saatchi and asked Levy what he was going to do about it, he responded that he wasn’t going to do anything about it—that that was Kevin Roberts problem. Quoting Business Week:

[Levy wondered] if a creative agency like Saatchi should continue to manage a client's branding efforts. Perhaps the digital specialists should do it….Levy expresses nothing but affection and admiration for Roberts. But he warns: "It is no longer necessarily the creative agency dictating what's best for the client."

Here I think Levy, visionary that he is, is pulling our leg. Saatchi has a number of major clients—led by global duties on Toyota. Until Toyota is ready to demand an “all digital agency”—I don’t think Roberts is ready to change its spots—nor is Levy about to demand it.

Ah me, sometimes we can see the future so clearly. But we have to wait months or years for what we see in our crystal balls to become reality.

Everyone is changing gears as fast as they can, led by clients who helped Internet advertising grow 37.5% in the second quarter of this year. But when and if Toyota is ready to make its big move, say transforming Prius into a separate division rather than a couple of hybrids, will it rely primarily on digital to make the change?

I think not. I think we are still in the nether world where it’s going to take us 10 years or so to resolve all these issues. Digital may be just a language, which becomes second nature to all of us. But it certainly is not a strategy. The strategy still is to build in consumers a feeling for the brand and a need for the brand. We know, then, that the Prius must act a certain way over time—and respond to consumers wherever they touch the brand, either in an ad, in a call to customer service, in the showroom, or on the Web.

I think where Levy is going is similar to what Bill Gates did at Microsoft, when he told his minions 10 years ago that from now on everything at Microsoft would be built to live on the Internet. Windows 7 still comes in a box. You still can buy it in a store (in fact soon you’re going to be able to buy it in a Microsoft store). But it must be available on the Web, and everything it does must easily move back and forth over the Web to other users. Levy, I think, is trying to take his empire to a similar place and he’s agnostic whether Kevin Roberts leads the charge or Laura Lang, CEO of Digitas Worldwide, leads it.

These are important real-life issues for agency heads, especially right now as they re-engineer their agencies and budgets for 2010. Unfortunately there are no hard answers. So they can either follow Levy, and seek to make major changes now, or take baby steps and let the future take care of itself.

But tens of thousands of jobs and tens of millions of dollars in revenue depend on each agency head making the right call. And All Digital, to me, is an intriguing concept.