9th December 2024
Publicis ends 2024 on a high as it becomes the largest holding company in the world for the first time in its history. Green Square’s Tony Walford analyzes why 2024 has been fantastique for Arthur Sadoun and his team.
Every year Publicis’ inimitable CEO Arthur Sadoun puts out a pre-Christmas short film to all staff thanking them for their global contribution called the “Wishes”. It’s quite something, and 2023 saw each of its 100,000 staff being sent a personal video created in AI with Arthur featuring his digital twin.
Yesterday saw the release of the 2024 “Wishes” in which Snoop Dogg, or “Le Snoop” as he rebrands himself in the piece, announces Publicis as global Top Dog.
The end of this year is very likely to see Publicis as the largest agency network in the world, with its €13.9bn revenue forecast edging ahead of WPP, which has worn the global revenue crown for the last couple of decades.
The film is very amusing. The French love Snoop, so this is a smart choice particularly on the back of the Olympics, and features Sadoun unsuccessfully trying to do the C-Walk, ending with a cameo of former CEO and industry legend, Maurice Levy, on a balcony showing everyone how it should actually be done.
Sadoun is a very charismatic leader, as was Levy before him, and his enthusiasm is always a joy to watch (even in boring old investor presentations). But putting that aside, how did Publicis achieve this lofty height historically dominated by WPP for so long?
The first thing that sprung to mind was a piece I wrote in a coffee bar in Amsterdam back in 2018 (the morning after giving an evening M&A seminar for The Drum) about how Publicis was leading the charge by simplifying its offer around the “Power of One”.
It’s funny how specific moments and places in time trigger a memory and, given where I wrote it (which was after a very late night with The Drum team), I was a bit worried how it would read when I went back to it today! It finishes with the line “Power of One seems to be not just another vacuous corporate restructuring exercise, rather a genuine attempt to create a new model that will see the whole group face its clients in a very different way going forward”.
Fast-forward six years (me with a lot less hair, but Arthur only shifting from black to grey), and it’s clear this focus has paid enormous dividends. Don’t get me wrong; all the networks have embraced the need to change how they operate, with Mark Read at WPP being particularly voracious in merging the biggest agencies in that group, but Publicis was at the forefront of this paradigm shift.
However, it’s one thing to talk about the Power of One, and another to deliver it. And is this why revenues have grown so much?
M&A has actually played a major part, with Publicis making several very large strategic acquisitions to strengthen its position in key areas. A significant moment was the $4.4bn acquisition of Epsilon in 2019, bringing the group valuable consumer data and AI capabilities which have become a fundamental part of Publicis’s offer. This sizable deal followed its bold $3.7bn acquisition of Sapient in 2015, which it merged with Razorfish (remember that?), to create Publicis Sapient and kickstart Levy and Sadoun’s “Power of One” strategy.
While this year has been relatively quiet for holding company M&A, with PE-backed outfits and the challenger group Stagwell being more active, 2024 saw Publicis make two further significant moves.
The first was its acquisition of Influential, the largest global influencer marketing company by revenue, giving it access to over 3 million creators and 90% of global influencers with more than 1 million followers. Publicis immediately started integrating its own data with Influential’s platform to offer more targeted and effective influencer marketing solutions with its press release stating “By combining our Epsilon data, which allow us to see 2.3 billion people around the world, with connected TV, commerce, and now creators, we can enable our clients to truly know and understand their customers and prospects, and engage with them on a one-to-one basis, wherever they are, both online and offline”.
The second was the acquisition of Mars United, the world’s biggest independent commerce marketing agency. Retail media is currently one of the hottest areas in marketing, with Next15 lauding its retail specialist SMG (which I’m proud to say was a Green Square deal), as a bit of a savior in what has otherwise been a very difficult year for that group (but that’s another story).
Publicis’s acquisition of Mars in September completed the holy trinity of data, targeting and effective retail media deployment for Publicis, and further cemented the Power of One philosophy. From the press release: “The combined forces of Publicis Groupe and Mars will allow clients to influence the complete commerce journey for billions of global Shoppers, through an offering that begins with the industry’s deepest and richest database of consumer & shopper behavior and ends at the digital and physical shelves of the world’s leading online and offline retailers.”
Thus, Publicis’ rise to become the world’s biggest agency group by revenue has not been entirely organic but facilitated by some very substantial acquisitions. That said, Publicis has not engaged in acquisitions simply for the sake of size, it only made a handful in 2024, and they were smart. Sadoun has absolutely stuck to his strategy of bringing a single point of focus for all Publicis’ clients’ needs and, given Influential and Mars only happened in the second half of this year, their further integration in 2025 should bring the group even more global blue-chip client opportunities.
This is the first time a French agency group will be the world’s largest. France is currently suffering significant economic and political turmoil, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Emmanuel Macron hasn’t already called Sadoun to thank him for bringing this glimmer of Christmas light!
Looking forward to 2025, Publicis’ holistic offering, scale and clear positioning put it alongside the highly acquisitive Stagwell and the soon-to-be-decoupled and separately listed Havas as the most interesting groups to watch next year.