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France’s Publicis overtook rival WPP to become the world’s biggest advertising company last year after a series of acquisitions helped it grow in the US and push ahead in digital marketing, according to its chief executive.
“We had a very strong Q4, which now makes us absolutely certain to be the largest advertising company in 2024,” Arthur Sadoun told the Financial Times in an interview. “Everyone knows we’re winning more than others in new business, but we’re also losing less.”
He also said the “acquisitions we’ve made for more than $12bn in the past decade have been growing by 40 per cent”.
The Paris-listed group grew 6.3 per cent on an organic basis in the fourth quarter, ahead of company-provided consensus estimates, in order to deliver net annual revenues of €14bn in 2024.
WPP is expected to deliver £11.4bn in sales when it reports results this month, according to Visible Alpha estimates. London-listed WPP has been hampered by weak revenue growth after a period of upheaval that followed the departure of its founder Sir Martin Sorrell.
Publicis’s operating income grew by more than a quarter year on year to €2.2bn.
However, its moment in the top spot may prove shortlived once Omnicom’s $13bn takeover of rival Interpublic, announced in December, closes, creating a group with more than $25bn in revenues.
Sadoun said the industry consolidation would provide opportunities for Publicis as the new group went through several years of restructuring and integration.
Publicis was struggling with low growth and falling shares when Sadoun took over as chief executive in 2017 as the industry’s traditional agency model was disrupted by online platforms such as Facebook and Google.
Deals such as the $3.9bn acquisition of Epsilon, a US digital agency that allows advertisers to target consumers using data, have helped transform the business. Its shares used to trade at a discount to WPP and Omnicom, but have gained on them since 2020 and now outpace them.
The group benefited from the rebound in US tech client spending this year and has been growing three times faster than its peers there in the past four years, according to Sadoun. “We’re the largest media buyer — we’re buying every one dollar out of three” in the US advertising space, he said.
Sadoun said it was too early to assess the impact of recent changes to content moderation policies on Facebook announced by Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of parent company Meta.
A big change in the moderation and content policies at X, formerly Twitter, after the platform was bought by Elon Musk in 2022 resulted in a marked decline in advertising spending by clients, though that has now stabilised.
“We’ll be looking very closely at brand safety on Facebook in the future,” Sadoun said.
