Facebook, Publicis Make Multi-Year Deal Worth Hundreds of Millions

Word is leaking today that social media giant Facebook has struck a new deal with multinational marketing and public relations conglomerate Publicis. While the fine details of the arrangement are being kept between the two firms, the deal is rumored to last multiple years, with an estimated value of approximately $500 million. For the duration of the deal, Facebook and Publicis are said to be “co-creating” a number of new products based around user data, video, and imagery, focusing on both Facebook itself and Instagram, the latter of which the social media behemoth bought for $1 billion in 2012.

Facebook Continues Its Year Long Blitz to Dominate the Social Sphere
The new partnership with Publicis is yet another huge move from the Silicon Valley giant in 2014. The company purchased mobile messaging company WhatsApp for $19 billion in February, followed by the confusing purchase of augmented reality hardware firm Oculus Rift for $2 billion in March. The company is now rumored to be developing “Slingshot,” a first-party competitor to Snapchat, which the company had put out a purchase offer for before buying WhatsApp. In other words, 2014, more than any other year, is set to be a huge time of change for the big blue social media leader.

What Does the Partnership Mean for Smaller Fish, Like Twitter?
It goes without saying that the deal reached with Publicis is another effort to strengthen Facebook’s attractiveness to potential and current marketing partners — not that the company has been doing poorly by a long shot. At the close of 2013, the company had generated nearly $8 billion in revenue, the company’s biggest year of growth on a five-year upward trend.

“This is a new breed of partnership between advertising networks and social media platforms. It’s a win for brand pages as you’re sure to see the creative advertising bar raised, as well as the ability for brands to micro-target consumers with access to better data in order to provide a better ROI for their respective clients.” says Mike Frey, Chief Visionary Officer at Paradux Media Group.

Unfortunately for Facebook’s smaller competitors, Twitter, for example, Facebook’s continued blasting through marketing walls like a juggernaut is not exactly good news. While Facebook continues to grow and expand to the fanfare of fans and stockholders alike, Twitter has seen a number of changes — most of which seem to be engineered to make the service more like Facebook, it should be noted — fall on deaf, even hostile, ears. The company saw its stocks drop to their lowest price in history at the beginning of the month. All of this to say that as Twitter, Google+, and others struggle to earn market share, Facebook continues bowling over the competition.