As Publicis Groupe marks its hundredth year with a sweeping new film just as the ink dries on Omnicom’s takeover of IPG, Arthur Sadoun says the ad industry is entering “a new paradigm” shaped by investors, AI and a very different competitive order.
Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet in the early days of Publicis Groupe / Publicis
Even by the standards of a tumultuous 2025 for holding companies, the last few days have been remarkable. From Omnicom’s dramatic agency overhaul after completing its takeover of IPG to WPP falling out of the FTSE 100, the holding company landscape is being redrawn in front of our eyes. Amid all this upheaval, Publicis Groupe, which has enjoyed relative serenity compared with its peers this year, is reminding the industry that it, too, knows a thing or two about change.
The French firm is today releasing the latest incarnation of Wishes, its annual Christmas address for staff and clients. But instead of reflecting on the events of 2025, the dramatic film tells the story of the last 100 years of Publicis Groupe as the company gears up for its centenary year in 2026.
Last year’s Wishes film became an industry talking point in its own right. Built around a playful cameo from Snoop Dogg, it saw Publicis boast about becoming the world’s number one holding company by revenue. Days later, that brag became a punchline when Omnicom announced its historic acquisition of IPG, a move that shifted the hierarchy overnight and set the stage for the consolidation shockwaves still rolling through the industry today. This year’s film lands in a very different mood, one where Publicis is reflecting on a century of reinvention at the same time the category around it is being redefined.
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Publicis Groupe chief executive Arthur Sadoun calls Wishes “the one time where I am the client,” and this year, he gave global creative leader Marco Venturelli and Agathe Bousquet, president of Publicis Groupe France, an open brief: “Do whatever you want. I don’t need to see it before it is done.”
Venturelli responded with an idea centered on a lion that refuses to give up. “The lion is the symbol of the three leaders,” Bousquet says. “Marcel [Bleustein-Blanchet, the company founder], Maurice [Lévy, its longstanding second CEO] and Arthur. It is the main character, and it is an odyssey, a one-hundred-year odyssey.” The team resisted the temptation to build an anniversary film around accolades. “We could have done a film about all our victories,” she says. “But we decided to show our capacity to reinvent ourselves and face any surprises, bad and good. This group never gives up and always reinvents itself.”
Production became its own demonstration of that message. Around a third of the film is live-action, while the rest blends archival material with AI techniques that changed weekly over the past year. “Sometimes when we had issues creating a scene, suddenly a new acceleration in AI helped us manage the craft,” Bousquet says. “Even last week, we managed to improve the Leo Burnett [segment] compared with two months ago.” She describes the year-long work as “an R&D journey” that continued “until this morning.”
Sadoun says that evolution captures how Publicis sees AI. “What truly impressed me is the quality of what they have been able to do with AI to give reality to one century,” he says. “Without great creative minds, you don’t deliver great work. But thanks to AI, you can make very ambitious ideas possible.”
Digging into the company’s archive also gave Sadoun a new appreciation for its roots. He singles out the wartime period as the most striking. “Marcel at 30 was already an icon in France. He was a millionaire. He had invented advertising as we knew it,” he says. “He blew up his own radio station to make sure the Nazis would not get access to it. When he came back, he had the same appetite and willingness to continue to transform. He said the only thing he was interested in was the future.”
That focus on the future is reinforced by a century of unusually stable leadership. Publicis has had only three CEOs in its 100-year history. “Culture matters,” Sadoun says. “This culture of daring, reinvention, creativity, and making bets has been true forever. The fact that there have been only three CEOs makes a difference to preserve and enhance the culture.”
Bousquet adds: “Marcel chose Maurice and worked with him before giving him the power. When Arthur was appointed, they knew each other so well. It is about trust and values. These are leaders who know the job and reinvent the job every day.”
Sadoun’s own decade fits that lineage. “It has definitely been a very challenging decade,” he says. “We were challenged by the financial market. People were saying Google and Facebook would put us out of business. Then we made the Epsilon acquisition when the market was expecting us to do share buybacks. Then the war in Ukraine. I got cancer. And in the middle of that, we had to manage Covid.” What held the strategy together, he says, was committing early to capabilities rather than financial engineering. “It comes back to people, culture – spending €12bn in data, technology and AI during the last decade, while our competitors were spending exactly the same amount in share buyback to reassure the market.”
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Alongside the Wishes film, Publicis has released a 35-minute documentary featuring Élisabeth Badinter, Lévy and Sadoun. It offers a fuller, more personal account of the last century, including the 1972 fire that swept through the company’s headquarters on the Champs-Élysées and threatened to put Publicis out of business. As Bousquet puts it, the film captures “a bit of history that even internally, nobody really knows.”
But what of the future, especially now the industry is adjusting to the post-Omnicom–IPG landscape? “As we embark on our new century, the industry is really entering a new paradigm,” Sadoun says. “Two things are important there. The first is that with the acquisition of IPG by Omnicom, investors have ended the legacy holding company landscape as we knew it. To give you just one number, 80% of the market capitalization is Publicis plus Omnicom. Two players are representing 80%. So the [agency] landscape as we knew it is totally different. This is very important because it’s all going to be about investment in new technologies.”
AI is further altering the competitive dynamic. “AI has totally reset the competitive environment. And now, honestly, everyone is a frenemy,” Sadoun says. “The walled gardens, the software companies, the system integrators, even the consultants, they are increasingly positioning themselves as competitors.” At the same time, he notes, traditional rivals are becoming collaborators in specific areas. “A good example is our influencer platform. It is used not only by Publicis but by some of our competitors,” he says. “We are evolving into a landscape redefined by investors.”
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He also maintains that the industry needs strong rivals to stay healthy. “We all have an interest in having strong and healthy competitors,” he says. “In WPP, it’s too early to say. I think that time will tell if Cindy [Rose, CEO] and Devika [Bulchandani, COO] are capable of turning round the ship. What is certain is that a WPP that is weakened hurts the entire industry.”
As Publicis enters its centenary year, Sadoun is clear about what comes next. “We are not going to play the consolidation game. We are not interested in more of the same,” he says. “Our objective is not to be the largest. We want to be the MVP of the industry. Not the most valuable player but the most valuable partner.” That ambition extends to clients, talent and investors alike. “It is still a people business. The future of AI will be our people,” he says. “We want to continue to build a future for our people and continue to outperform our industry on every KPI.”
For Bousquet, that is exactly why the company wanted to tell its story now. “Resilience and reinvention are the driving forces of this history,” she says. “This group never gives up and always reinvents itself.” Sadoun agrees. “At the moment when everyone is talking about merger efficiencies, margin improvements and firing,” he says, “we want to talk about what matters: how do we continue to invent our industry?”