Publicis Groupe SA is a French advertising company.  This morning a person familiar with the transaction told the WSJ that Publicis will acquire Microsoft subsidiary Razorfish.  Publicis is seeking ways to make additional revenue from advertising on the Internet.  The deal is expected to be announced sometime today.

Microsoft was rumored to be in talks for selling Razorfish to WPP PLC, Omnicom Group Inc., and Dentsu in the last few weeks.  The acquisition price is rumored to be somewhere around $500 and $600 million.  Last week Omnicom made a $500 million bid for Razorfish according to a WSJ source.

Aside from the purchase price, one of the additional components of the transaction that Publicis agreed to is to buy advertising space over the next several years on Microsoft’s online properties such as Bing.

Microsoft has been reportedly searching for a buyer of Razorfish over the last year.  Razorfish was the subsidiary of aQuantive, which Microsoft bought out for $6 billion in May 2007.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) has found a buyer for Performics, a Chicago, Ill. subsidiary of DoubleClick.  The buyer is France-based advertising company, Publicis.  Publicis stated that they are aiming to generate 25% of all of their future advertising sales on the Internet by 2010.  The value of the transaction was undisclosed.

Publicis’ new Internet entity where Performics will be rolled into is called VivaKi.  VivaKi is a consortium of advertising company that draws on the strengths of each other.  VivaKi includes firms such as Digitas, Starcom MediaVest, ZenithOptimedia, and Denuo with new services and tools. 

Performics launched in 1998 and has about 200 employees. Performics has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, Hamburg, Sydney, Singapore and Beijing. 

“Publicis Groupe has been a leader in the advertising industry for decades, and we believe Performics’ growing business will benefit from being a part of it,” stated Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “We look forward to working with Performics as a partner.”

Related Links:
1. Performics
2. Publicis
3. Reuters