The following feature was originally published in Advertising Age.
Jean-Yves Naouri is in the bar of a five-star hotel in Singapore, armed with six cellphones, an iPad and a laptop. It may seem like the corporate edition of The Amazing Race, but Naouri says they’re simply his tools for staying current in a world where digital communication is so ubiquitous that the very word “digital” will soon be obsolete.
“It will be so natural, it will be entrenched, embedded in everything that we do,” said Naouri, who is on the road as many as 200 days a year as he juggles the multiple roles of chief operating officer of French advertising conglomerate Publicis Groupe, executive chairman of agency network Publicis Worldwide and, sometimes, heir apparent to Maurice Levy.
Maybe it’s less Amazing Race and more epic marathon to the top of the $7.2 billion advertising holding company, whose assets include name-brand agencies such as Leo Burnett and Saatchi & Saatchi. Levy, chairman-CEO of Publicis, was originally scheduled to retire at the end of this year. Instead, the network bought time by upping the retirement age for management board members to 75 from 70 before Levy, whose birthday is in February, turns 70 next year. And the company, not yet ready to pick a winner or divide up Levy’s duties among several people, has set up some challenges for insiders.
Naouri, 51, was recently given additional responsibility to spearhead China strategy and improve Publicis companies’ laggard performance in Asia. He is committed to spending one week each month in China, where he immerses himself in doubling the group’s size in the country within three years. The company also elbowed aside Richard Pinder, the Publicis agency network’s chief operating officer, to give Naouri a chance to demonstrate his ability to run a global network; Naouri was named executive chairman in March.
While Naouri is being tested in new ways, another rising star and a new business hotshot is Arthur Sadoun, who at just 40 years old is still too unseasoned to run the whole group but is being given a shot at proving himself beyond France. In April, his role as president-CEO of Publicis France was expanded to managing director of the Publicis network, putting him in charge of Western Europe, and adding worldwide responsibility for strategic planning and creativity. The extremely tall, lanky Sadoun says he now splits his time equally among France, elsewhere in Western Europe and the rest of the world, but without losing his client focus.
“I spend 90% of my time on clients,” he said. “I don’t do a trip if I’m not meeting clients, and I keep internal meetings to an absolute minimum.”
Others are moving up in the inner circle, too. Publicis Groupe’s hard-working chief financial officer, Jean-Michel Etienne, was named to the five-person management board in June 2010 to finish the term of David Kenny, who had just quit as VivaKi managing partner (the departure of the American Kenny, another rising star, makes it all but certain that Levy’s successor is going to be French, although the company says that’s not required). Publicis is unlikely to give a top job to a CFO who lacks client ties and hasn’t run a global network, but Etienne could be a big help to a less experienced player like Sadoun. One area to watch is whether any of the management board — Levy, Naouri, Etienne, VivaKi CEO Jack Klues and Saatchi & Saatchi CEO Kevin Roberts — changes when their four-year terms all expire at the end of 2011.
Generational change is clearly ahead at Publicis, but Levy may not retire anytime soon. Besides, it doesn’t hurt Publicis, some insiders say, to have multiple workaholics competing harder than ever for advancement.
“It’s a perfect situation,” said the head of a Publicis operating company. “[Maurice] is there. They’ve got other prospects. Some are given a nudge and a wink. They’ll work with passion and commitment as long as they’re in the race. Why not keep the race going as long as possible?”
“Jean-Yves’ experience makes him a viable contender,” said one person within the Publicis Groupe with knowledge of senior management moves. “But, truthfully, Naouri needs to be associated with a big success to make it an easier decision. It’s the supervisory board that has to agree and they are the ones that have to be comfortable with a successor.”
It’s hard for anyone outside France to fully comprehend the magnitude of this changing of the guard for Publicis. Levy’s eventual retirement is only the second time the leader at the top has changed since Publicis was founded in 1926 by very young legendary adman and later war hero Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. The first handover was in 1987, when Bleustein-Blanchet retired at 80 and entrusted the company to Maurice Levy, then 45, who built it into the world’s third-largest ad-holding company. (Bleustein-Blanchet was involved in the business until his death in 1996; years later his office remained untouched, as if awaiting his return, at the group’s corporate headquarters in a former Paris hotel on the Champs-Elysees that served as Allied headquarters during World War II).
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