Publicis Groupe Acquires Mars United to Boost Global Commerce Solutions

Publicis Groupe acquires today Mars United Commerce, an independent commerce marketing company. Mars, with over 1,000 employees worldwide based in 14 hubs, helps marketers make their products the top consumer choice for online and offline shopper ecosystems.

Founded 50 years ago, Mars is recognized for its heritage of innovation, deep understanding of shoppers, proprietary commerce insights platform, and long-standing relationships with retailers. Its proprietary technology and solutions will further scale and supercharge Publicis’ existing commerce capabilities, under the leadership of CEO Rob Rivenburgh.

Winning in commerce, by changing shopper behavior to drive business results, is increasingly a core element of marketeers’ winning strategies. But activating in commerce is getting rapidly too complex and fragmented with channels, media, technologies, and data across the board. Mars with Publicis Groupe in one house solves for this complexity by creating the world’s leading connected commerce solution that allows clients to plan and activate through the full marketing funnel and drive sales at point of purchase.

That means, concretely, Publicis Groupe clients can now build and deploy end-to-end commerce solutions that optimize strategy and insights by bringing together the first-person identity capabilities of Epsilon with Mars United’s proprietary data on shoppers and shopper behavior.

Media and Activation: Publicis Media and Mars United bring together the scale of Publicis Media with a deep understanding of retail organisations-understanding media, marketing, merchandising, and operations-to help clients win the last mile of purchase in both physical and digital locations through more efficient and effective campaigns.

Integrating insights from ecommerce sales and operations on Publicis’ digital shelf platform Profitero with Mars United’s commerce media performance data set will provide performance measurement to clients that gives a holistic view of their commerce marketing performance, whether online or offline, and provides an unparalleled ability to drive brand growth.

Joining Publicis Groupe will help Mars realise its vision of being the pre-eminent global commerce company faster and more completely. We are excited to have the support of Publicis to bring new opportunities to our existing clients and also to share our connected commerce solution with new clients around the globe. We look forward to writing the next chapter of commerce together.” Rob Rivenburgh, Global CEO of Mars United

Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe, said: “We are delighted to welcome Rob and his amazing teams at Mars to Publicis Groupe. Their creative energy and proprietary platforms will further connect and complement our existing capabilities to deliver industry-leading, end-to-end commerce solutions for our clients, both online and offline.”. With the addition of Influential this summer, and now Mars, Publicis uniquely sits at the center to help our clients understand both their current and future consumers, and connect that knowledge at the individual level to the new media channels that work hardest for their business: Connected TV, Commerce, and Creators. All this in clients’ own ecosystems-giving control over their customer relationships, and transparency in their investments and outcomes.