Some Sanity Coming Back to the World

While it is still only speculation, I was pleased to read this Advertising Age article which speculates that WPP and Microsoft might orchestrate an asset swap with WPP taking over Avenue A and Microsoft taking over 247RealMedia’s Open AdStream. Imagine that, a publisher focusing on publisher services and an advertising agency focusing on advertising services.

Just when I started feeling quite a bit uneasy in this “cats are sleeping with dogs” world whereby conflicts of interest seem to be the soup de jour and the lines between publishers and agencies have blurred substantially – along comes this sane and practical article.

Boy wouldn’t that move make sense. Both parties ought to come to agreement fast even if it means selling the asset at far less than what they paid, since since the value of each of these (wonderful) assets, simply continues to decline as long as they are held by the wrong parent company. Divest and move on. In a perfect world, Microsoft would have had their buyer lined up already before pulling the trigger on aQuantive at all. Better late than never…