An Advert for Change

Publicis is the world’s third largest ad agency, but CEO Maurice Lévy runs it with a distinctly French approach. TIME’s Paris correspondent Bruce Crumley recently rendezvoused with him.

Despite the recession, Publicis remained profitable in 2009. How’d you do that?
First, we anticipated innovations in the market before our competitors. That not only helped us grow in developing segments, namely digital, but also helped us in traditional areas by enhancing our image. Also, we have a challenger’s spirit. Recessions are never good, but they make your mind work harder and force you to make extra effort.

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And you acquired two online-advertising businesses.
They were two beautiful acquisitions that transformed Publicis and clearly made us the digital-advertising specialist.

Unlike in previous recessions, which saw clients cut ad spending, you’re also dealing with big media partners facing an existential crisis.
It’s posing a triple challenge. First, it’s now crucial for all our clients — all companies — to increase market share even as they deal with very fragile financial situations. Exposure to risk is considerably greater. Second, social changes are much deeper and faster: consumers are empowered and have total access to vast and unverified information, and social networks can change the view of a situation or a company’s reputation rapidly. Third, media — what had been the strongest link in the agency-advertiser-media triangle — is now the weakest and faces an uncertain future. So our business is radically transforming with that. It’s no longer necessary just to have a good idea to help a client. You also need very complex capacities to do that, using very fast and reactive tools of measurement.

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But with information everywhere and consumer attention spans shortened, isn’t advertising itself in danger?
Most consumers are no longer passive. We expect reactions from them, and they don’t hold back from giving them. Consumers have also become nomads — from channel to channel, medium to medium, to video on demand — so we really have to go out and find them without becoming invasive. Once we’ve done that, the key is to create a link with them — which you do with emotion. The successful advertising equation now is intelligence quotient plus emotional quotient. And that’s why I believe that no matter how media and companies finally harness the Internet, they’ll need ad agencies to create that all-important emotional bond.

You have the reputation of being a manager who’s attuned to social concerns. How do you balance that in a world obsessed with the bottom line?
Finding the right spot to place the fulcrum and locate the balance between demands on results and your responsibility to society and employees is the most difficult thing of all — especially during a recession. Rather than laying employees off, we’re taking advantage of the relatively high turnover in this sector by hiring one new person for each two who leave — with arrivals usually having talents in both the analog and digital worlds. That’s much more difficult and complicated than layoffs, but it reflects our attention to human and employment concerns — something that gets amplified in the attitude and performance of employees.

Is this approach particularly, even exclusively, French?
In France we have legal constraints and restrictive labor rules that oblige us to think differently. It’s harder to lay people off when businesses need to, and when they do, some encounter very negative reactions from society, unions and even angry workers, like we see in boss-nappings. You don’t see that in other countries. It forces you to think in different ways.

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