Publicis Groupe has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire 160over90 (as in an elevation of the blood pressure). The transaction, subject to the customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, is yet incomplete.
The combined Publicis Sports group will report to Suzy Deering, CEO of Publicis Sports, and sit within Publicis Media Exchange (PMX). 160over90’s President, Robbie Henchman, will be remaining at WME Group, serving as a Senior Partner, President of WME’s brand representation business and overseer of the partnership between WME and Publicis.
What the French advertising giant seeks to do is set up a digital platform that will in turn establish what it calls an “end-to-end ecosystem” – a “data-first optimization” to connect the various and at present disconnected players in these markets.
A new partnership with WME Group will gain it access to WME’s talent and IP roster, and this will tie in with Publicis’ existing Sports Intelligence platform, “powered by” Epsilon identity.
The general problem
Publicis and its rivals – especially in the multifaceted world of sports – seek to track and make monetizable sense of fan behavior. A game on TV, a game at the stadium, the day’s highlights on a phone, a jersey bought via sponsored link on social media, a QR code scanned at a brand tent or turnstile, a coupon redeemed at a concession stand – different systems, different companies. No visible chain of events. Only the fan sees all.
Digital advertising has yielded up a tool, the third-party cookie, with its trail of identity crumbs, to deal with this in part, but cookies are being deprecated or regulated out of use, and AI is replacing the search engine. What to do?
The specific problem
Though one of the Big Six in advertising – alongside WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Dentsu and Havas – Publicis has long been relegating the sports-media planning of its large clients to the Publicis Media entities Starcom and Spark Foundry. It has otherwise had a small sports and entertainment unit operating out of the UK, handling partnerships for Gillette, Samsung and Visa around UEFA and the Olympics. That’s about it.
The worldwide markets for sports media and sports sponsorships are big. The company’s own estimates (borrowed from Ken and Allied Research) set them at $150 billion and more than $90 billion respectively. But the company’s deficiency in this area wasn’t so apparent two years ago.
In late 2024 Publicis claimed that its €14 billion in annual net revenue had made it the largest of the Big Six. Within another year, though, Omnicom and IPG had merged (with unconditional approval from the European Commission), their combined annual revenues amounting to something like $23 billion.
Omnicom had the sports market covered by GMR Marketing (reported $250m in annual revenue). Pre-merger IPG had IPG DXTRA, a collective (launched in 2020) of 28 specialty agency brands, such as Weber Shandwick, Golin, Jack Morton and especially Octagon ($3.5bn in client sponsorship spending). Dentsu had Dentsu Sports International (DSI), a 60-year-old specialist in rights ownership and East-West connectivity, rather than activations. WPP had an internal unit called Prism Sport & Entertainment, with traditional operations in sponsorship consulting and rights negotiation.
Uh oh.
A stack from scratch in 12 months
160over90 is only the latest acquisition. Publicis began dealing with its deficiency in April 2025, when it acquired Adopt.
Adopt was founded in 2021 in Portland, Oregon, by two executives formerly of nearby Nike, David Creech and Josh Moore, and one sports agent, Rich Paul, whose clients have included Lebron James (Los Angeles Lakers) and Jalen Hurts (Philadelphia Eagles).
Back in 2012 Paul founded another agency, Klutch Sports Group (Los Angeles), which would later receive a “very significant investment” (Sportico) from United Talent Agency (UTA). UTA would also appoint Paul Co-Head of UTA Sports. He remains in the post to this day – and is also CEO of Klutch. Meanwhile, UTA has two big rivals: Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and WME – the seller of 160over90 to Publicis.
Adopt has served, among other clients, Lululemon, The North Face, Gatorade, Fortnite, Dwyane Wade, EA Sports, New Balance, Athletic Greens and Visa – familiar territory for us. Publicis’s next acquisition was different.
Bespoke Sports & Entertainment (Charlotte, North Carolina) entered the Publicis fold in July 2025. It’s a small operation – with a staff of less than 30, annual revenues of around $6 million, and clients dealing in food and sponsoring collegiate sports (e.g., Bush’s Beans and Farm Rich, with their SEC championships and tournaments).
But Bespoke was founded in 2014 by Mike Boykin and Greg Busch – two veterans from the venerable GMR Marketing. GMR has spent 40 years building the activation machinery for Super Bowls, NCAA Final Fours, Olympic sponsorships and collegiate championships for such clients as Capital One, AT&T, Nissan, Google Pixel and Reese’s. Founded in 1979, it was acquired in 1997 by Omnicom and expanded into a global operation of high repute in experiential marketing.
Publicis is solving what we’ve called the particular problem.
A saving grace?
As we’ve said, Publicis’ planned platform is to be “powered by” Epsilon – an acquisition dating to 2019 and costing $3.95 billion – less than the announced $4.4 billion but at the time still the second-largest deal in advertising, after Dentsu’s acquisition of Aegis Group ($4.9bn) in 2012.
Epsilon deals in identity resolution. Its chief product, Core ID, has two virtues in light of what we’ve called the general problem – it is persistent and offline. In other words, the collected data – name, address, transaction history – doesn’t vanish with a browser upgrade. Since 2012, through direct relations with publishers and retailers, Epsilon has amassed more than 200 million such consumer profiles.
Core ID integrates with The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, thereby reaching into digital media activation, and it sits beneath two other Epsilon assets: a loyalty platform with more than 600 million members and an email operation sending an annual 71 billion personalized messages.
No checkmate
Publicis is not alone in having an alternative to cookies.
Omnicom-IPG has Acxiom, Epsilon’s closest structural parallel. Acquired by IPG in 2018 for $2.3 billion, Acxiom was founded in 1969 and is among the oldest consumer-data businesses in the US. It too deals in persistent offline data. The Acxiom acquisition was in fact a company split. IPG took on the data business. The remainder, a connectivity platform, was renamed LiveRamp and now exists on its own.
Dentsu acquired a majority stake in Merkle in 2016 for $1.5 billion (and acquired the rest in 2020). Merkle is a performance-marketing and CRM agency with strengths in healthcare, financial services and retail. It appears to lack Epsilon’s scale in data but offers instead consulting and campaign execution. WPP established in 2015 a unit called ESP Properties, which for a while held a majority stake in a data firm called Two Circles, specialized in analytics and digital marketing for rights holders (NFL, Premier League, UEFA, Formula One, Wimbledon). WPP sold its stake in Two Circles in 2019, and the company is now independent. Only recently has WPP combined several internal assets into a data-products unit, called Choreograph – arguably the weakest of the all these companies in data management. This past January it established WPP Media Sports, an internal entity unifying WPP Media’s existing sports planning and buying teams. It relies on partnerships with GumGum and Relo Metrics for data measurement.
