Publicis Groupe’s €15m acquisition of French news and content agency Relaxnews will be key in helping its clients to take part in the “content revolution”.

That is the view of Sébastien Danet (pictured, centre), global managing partner at ZenithOptimedia, and Jérôme Doncieux (pictured, right), co-founder of Relaxnews, speaking exclusively to M&M Global.

The 100-strong, Paris-based business – which also employs a further 150 freelance content creators – has already recruited the likes of Globo, Microsoft and Yahoo as clients, offering a range of consultancy and content provision services.

The service is adaptable to global markets, too, with language options including English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin.

Relaxnews will be aligned with ZenithOptimedia, but its content platform and technology will be made available to the full range of Publicis’ global agency networks and “10,000 clients”.

From its Relaxnews dashboard, advertisers can see which stories are trending worldwide in their areas of internet, and can assign pieces of content to branded social media pages and websites. The content portfolio is significantly bolstered by a recently-renewed five-year deal with newswire AFP.

Clients will also be able to commission Relaxnews to produce original, “on demand” content to help “storytell” their brand’s marketing messages.

Lifestyle content

As hinted at by its name, Relaxnews focuses on lifestyle and “leisure” content, which Doncieux claimed helps brands to target consumers when they are in a “positive” frame of mind.

“There is a social trend with consumers are spending more and more time on leisure and lifestyle. They want to be informed on lifestyle, and when you are talking about a positive lifestyle, you relax,” said Doncieux.

Brands using Relaxnews will benefit from the firm’s “news agency quality and news agency know-how”, he added.

From a technological perspective, Doncieux also believes that good quality content is wasted without the right platform to ensure it reaches the maximum number of target consumers. Only a “unique combination of data, content and technology” can ensure success.

“Historically, news agencies have produced the wire, and we really believe a wire is great, but not enough. We believe in the notion of content ‘platformisation’ – if brands want to be strong in the content battlefield, in which they already have lots of assets, then they have to move from being traditional news agencies to being news platforms,” he said.

Digital connection

Publicis has been busy building its digital capabilities over the past few years, including its recent whopping $3.7bn acquisition of Sapient. For ZenithOptimedia’s Danet, this integration of Relaxnews will help “connect” the twin need for both technology and content.

“One driver, of course, is the importance of content,” said Danet. “We have already made a lot of acquisitions in the digital area, but we want to connect more and more that digital part with content, and we really believe this is a match which is going to be successful in the future.

“There is a huge potential across the group. All the technology can be used by our clients, as well as MSL for it PR work, by Digitas or Razorfish for their clients, who are looking at a lot of content. Nearly all the Publicis brands can bring this technology to another 5,000 or 10,000 clients globally,” he added.