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Publicis chief executive Arthur Sadoun has ruled out making a bid for the international business of rival Dentsu after the world’s largest advertising group raised forecasts for revenue growth for the second time this year.
The French advertising network on Tuesday promised to outperform the market again in 2026, but Sadoun said that this would not be through acquiring large rival operations.
In August, the FT reported that Japanese advertising group Dentsu had appointed banks to explore the sale of its international business, which made more than $4.5bn in net revenues last year.
Publicis was being tipped by rival executives as the most likely of the large advertising holding companies to consider a bid given the management upheaval at WPP and the merger of US rivals Interpublic Group and Omnicom.
However, Sadoun ruled out any interest and told the FT that “we have a view that is very different from Omnicom when it comes to M&A . . . we believe that consolidation of more of the same for the sake of efficiency is yesterday’s logic.”
Instead, Sadoun said Publicis would continue to invest in its AI tools to help clients create advertising faster, cheaper and more effectively. This could include acquisitions of agencies with skills or technology that would add to this strategy, he added.
Sadoun credited Publicis’s strong performance this year to clients seeking AI marketing expertise.
On Tuesday, the group reported that organic revenues grew by 5.7 per cent to €3.5bn in the third quarter, with revenues growing by 7.1 per cent in its US business and by 10.7 per cent in the UK. Europe as a whole was a drag on performance, with organic revenues growing by only 2.8 per cent.
Publicis upgraded its 2025 guidance for organic revenue growth for the second time this year. It now expects growth in a range of 5 to 5.5 per cent, up from close to 5 per cent.
The group’s performance is at odds with the rest of the industry, which is grappling with slowing client spending and the disruptive threat of AI. WPP slashed its dividend after its profits fell by almost 50 per cent in the first half of the year.
Sadoun said that Publicis — which last year overtook WPP to become the world’s largest advertising agency by revenues — had seen no slowdown in client demand despite the threat of tariffs and wider macroeconomic uncertainty. Net new billings for the first nine months of the year have already met the total in 2024.
“Not only did we not experience any material cuts in marketing spend, but we also saw an acceleration in demand for our AI-led products and services,” he said.
Publicis’s CEO said that the company’s use of AI had not led to any job cuts. He admitted that AI would “definitely take some of the jobs in the future” but added this would “take time because it’s not that easy” and those roles would be replaced by new ones.
“This is what we call progress,” Sadoun said. “The question to ourselves is are we growing fast enough to make sure that we can preserve the jobs, meaning reallocating people to new accounts, replacing some with agents and overall keeping the number of people that work for us pretty stable? Future will tell.”
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