Boston tech is in the middle of a passionate love affair with an entire country: France. Today’s announcement that the Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing conglomerates, has acquired Boston-based Sapient for somewhere in the ballpark of $3.7 billion, is just another example of a relationship that is starting to develop into something more than just a few suggestive glances and flirtatious overtures.
Sapient, a marketing/consulting firm that offers business, marketing, and technology services, will be incorporated into Publicis.Sapient, a software platform that hopes to leverage both organizations’ digital media, marketing, commerce, and technology experience and knowledge.
“Sapient is a ‘crown jewel,’ a one of a kind company born in the technology space with strengths in marketing, communications, consulting, and omni-channel commerce,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman and chief executive of Publicis Groupe.
The Publicis deal is certainly the biggest in terms of the Boston-French connection, but it’s by no means the first and won’t be the last. It was almost eight years ago that Publicis acquired Digitas, another Boston digital marketing company.
Publicis is also firmly engrained in the Boston startup community as a major backer of Jana Mobile. Lévy feels so strongly about the company he sits on their board; it’s one of the only other companies in the world that the well-known and highly regarded ad/marketing leader plays an active role in.
Additionally, sources have told me that Publicis also recently acquired another local company, Relevant 24. Although the deal is much smaller, Relevant 24 is another great Boston-based digital advertising tech company that uses multimedia (and multiple advertising platform) to get brands noticed.
And Publicis isn’t the only French organization that is making doe eyes at Boston.
In September, Governor Deval Patrick and a host of other Massachusetts tech dignitaries traveled to Europe and made a flurry of partnerships in Paris.As part of that trip, it was announced that French biotech company Nanobiotix would be setting up an office in Mass., while Greentown Labs, LabCentral, and MassChallenge all announced specific partnerships with French tech-related organizations and municipalities like Paris and Lyon.
In early October, a large contingent from Lyon, including Gérard Collomb, the Senator-Mayor of Lyon and President of the Greater Lyon, also embarked on tour of Boston and all its tech hotspots, including MassChallenge. While at MassChallenge, Collumb signed an agreement with MassChallenge’s John Harthorne for the “MassChallenge International Bridge,” program aimed at a collaborative “exchange and investment in entrepreneurship between the two regions.”
Lyon, which doesn’t get as much notice as Paris, has a booming tech and biotech sector, and is especially interested in robotics — it holds an annual robot-focused conference Innorobo. Part of the strong relationship between the two cities is the fact that both serve as headquarters for Sanofi/Genzyme, since the French Sanofi acquired Cambridge’s Genzyme in 2011.
As Lyon’s Collomb said on his recent trip to MassChallenge, Lyon, like the Greater Boston area, has built a thriving life sciences and technology sector in the ashes of previous global business leadership in industries like textiles and early manufacturing. “To have a relationship between Boston and Cambridge, and Lyon, is very important,” Collumb said. “The cities are similar in industry and technology, and also in how older buildings are being regenerated…It’s important that we have a relationship with the governor and the mayor, but also institutions like MassChallenge.”
Lest we forget that the idea of entrepreneurship itself is derived from the French. It is French economist Jean Baptiste Say who is credited with popularizing the term for someone who “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”
It should be a compliment then that those intent on establishing a thriving tech and startup-fueled economy in France are turning to Boston for its ideas, investing in its companies, and seeing local companies as industry leaders to bolster some of the largest business organizations in the world.
So right about now, the Boston tech community should be blushing.
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