Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of the Publicis Groupe, talked about the changes in the advertising industry, and how Publicis is evolving with it to help you be the CMO of the future at the Razorfish Client Summit in Boston on October 14th.

1. RAZORFISH 2010 CLIENT SUMMIT
BOSTON, 12‐14 Oct. 2010
Presentation by Maurice Lévy, Publicis Groupe Chairman and CEO
Bonjour,
The theme of this Summit is “Evolve”.
In France, our culture has difficulty in coping with EVOLUTION
But there is nothing we like more than REVOLUTION.
And I believe this is what it takes to be a good adman, a good marketer in tomorrow’s world.
I’m not sure Bob will be happy that I’m taking the liberty to move from Evolve to Revolution, but this
is really what I think.
We are used to believing that it takes time to change. And history tells us that people evolve
progressively.
But history also teaches us that the speed of progress and evolution is accelerating.
If you take a step back and look at what happened in the last 200 years, you see that each cycle is
transforming our society and that changes are faster with each new technological revolution. It is a
kind of Moore’s law applicable to people’s behaviors.
We all believe that we are evolving, but the fact is that we often are facing revolution.
We are moving along on solid ground … we think we are on the right track … and suddenly we find
ourselves in unknown territory. We went over the cliff. Changes happened and we did not notice
them.
Innovation will not wait for us to evolve or adapt. Technology moves fast. We can expect that new
players will come into the game and change the rules
Who would have said only ten years ago that the global giants would be:
Who would have said that Sony would be surpassed by Samsung? Or that Nokia would find itself
facing challenges?
Who would have said only five years ago that Apple,
Apple again, would have revolutionized the music industry and the mobile phone industry?
Who would have said only one year ago that Apple would now be creating a revolution in the
newspaper industry?
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2.
All these players and thousands of small start ups have brought us new technologies which have
transformed our lives.
Closer to home and to our core skills, are the changes in consumer behavior. They click and surf with
the virtuosity of a concert pianist. They learn, get acquainted, get educated, informed and
entertained through the digital world. They buy, meet, shop, spread news. They blog, buzz, share
and tweet. All through the net. Their best friends are virtual. They have never met physically and yet
they share intimate secrets.
They have a voice with a power that was unheard of 5 years ago.
They know how to use it. And surprise, surprise – they do.
The consumer’s voice is capable of enhancing or destroying a reputation. Something new to all of us.
These are not changes of consumers per se. But they are changes in how consumers relate to each
other and to us. They are changes in the relationship between consumer and producer; they are
changes in how business is conducted; strangely, they effectively change the size of the world, and
the ability of people from different countries to participate in our society. And the sheer numbers
involved mean that this is not the bedroom experiment of a few teenage geeks: these changes are
transforming our society. We are building the post industrial society. Now. Before our own eyes.
As advertisers, marketers, media people, we should not believe that we are just “on the brink” of
change. If we want to market to our target audiences in the most effective way, if we want to win in
tomorrow’s world, we must think and act as if we were already in tomorrow’s world.
That’s why I believe we should embrace “Revolution” and not “Evolution”.
It would be reductive to say that this is just a digital revolution. It is a societal revolution.
The entire generation of digital natives, the people who are leading the revolution, holds a different
set of beliefs and we need to be in synch with their heartbeat. Why do you think we call digital
natives the “Millenial Radicals”? Because they are revolutionaries. They demand change. They reject
a lot of our values and behaviors. It is not a revolution on the streets ‘a la sixties’. It is less visible and
more profound. They care about the planet’s future. They care about other people.
They are less selfish and they set new rules. For many of them, it is aspirational to own less and to
consume less, not to own and to consume more, and these Millenial Radicals are the opinion leaders
who are influencing others, and ushering us slowly towards a society of ethical consumption, maybe
even a post‐materialist society.
If we want to stay connected, we will need to be in tune with how they think.We will have to change
our values, our mind‐sets, and our references. We will have to become ethical corporations in the
way we behave, to our very core.
But we also have to change our very way of communicating, because the entire way they relate to
brands and products is different.
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3.
They are a demanding audience and they want transparency. They are quick to question what we do.
They are quick to criticize and share with “friends”, who share with more “friends”, and on and on.
And we have to engage with them in a whole new digital way.
For customers like these, we cannot appear like brush salesmen, or cold‐callers, barging in the door
when we are not wanted.
We don’t live in the Mad Men era anymore, sad though that is in some respects.
It is not right, it is not appropriate, in this day and age, that we act against the interests of our
customers. Worse, it is counterproductive. One idea I very much believe in, is that we will no longer
market our brands, our products to consumers. I strongly believe that the best marketing tomorrow
and already today, is to engage people in a conversation with the brand, to ensure that they enjoy
the product and start to feel like owners of the brand. Only like that can they become true and
willing advocates for our brands, and only like that can we survive in the digital era.
For consumers as sophisticated as these, we must be able to reflect them not only as a group of
millions or billions – we must reflect them as individuals. They have grown up knowing that we have
the technology to engage with them. They expect us to remember what sort of books and music they
like and suggest new ones; to remember whether they prefer to be contacted by email or sms;
where they prefer to sit on a plane. They expect, in short, that we should know about them and be
able to continually improve their experience.
And if we do surprise and delight them, innovate to please them, what do they do? They want to
share their positive experiences, and so they blog, tweet, poke, buzz….etc. In short, they become
friends of the brand.
In short, we are rapidly moving towards a time when the best way to be loved by the crowd is to
worship the individual.
We must forget what we have learned about mass marketing, and advertising by assertion and start
learning how to engage with them individually and collectively as people, as actors in a conversation.
Not consumers. Don’t call them consumers, any more. They are people with hearts, minds and souls.
We must beware of image and questionable claims, and think more of positive, tangible experiences,
authentic truths and proofs.
So, not only have we to change our way of working, of thinking, but our organizations. And we must
do it now
If we want to be ready for this new world.
That is why Publicis Groupe has already taken huge steps in investing in change and revolutionizing
our structures. And I know that we are only at the beginning of a process.
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4. To face the future, to be there before the competition, to help our clients get access to the best of
the new technologies, we have had to change ourselves dramatically.
In 2006 we anticipated that the world would move faster and decided that we had to re‐invent the
agency. It looks ambitious, maybe a bit pretentious, but we thought that we will not be able to best
serve our clients if we did not take into account the new digital world, and if we were not capable of
linking technology with emotion.
IQ + TQ + EQ: The Human Digital Agency
This is what we wanted to create.
We embarked on a journey of investment and change which were second to none.
We invested. In America you say ‘put your money where your mouth is’, this is why we invested so
much.
We acquired Digitas and Razorfish…..
….the two biggest digital companies in the marketplace. Not just because they were the biggest, but
because they were the best and because they had the most visionary leadership, the strongest
cultures and the greatest ambition. In this challenging new environment where there are so few
signposts, we knew that we wanted to bring proven winners to our team.
Digitas has a very, very strong culture driven around the performance that digital marketing can
create, and a creative approach in the broadest sense – not only in pictures, but in adopting new
technological approaches.
Razorfish, on the other hand, recognized earlier than almost anybody else that digital has the
potential to change the very experiences that consumers have. Their strategy is to create captivating
experiences for their consumers, and they do it better than anyone in the marketplace.
So, in short, we have two world class digital specialists offering different, complementary
specializations.
Digitas comes from a CRM heritage, and Razorfish has a pure technology DNA. Working in the same
Group, they provide a range of expertise that nobody can match.
So, Why Digitas and Razorfish?
Not only because we believe these are the best assets in the industry, but also because we could not
make the necessary changes without:
Scale is vital in the digital age. All the numbers are huge: from Internet users to Google users,
Facebook subscribers, mobile phones, etc. Clicks, time spent, websites. We need volume and scale
to get the best from the digital world.
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5. Why is this scale important? What will it bring us? Paradoxically, scale is what will allow us to be
more personal. It will allow us to better understand our customers, and that provides something for
everyone, because it is driven by one thought at the heart:
It is scale that will allow us to understand people. It is scale that will allow us to listen more. Not the
agglomerated statistics numbers or indications that market research is providing us with. No! We
must listen to their heart beats, their emotions, their unsaid feelings. This is how we will better
communicate. Through search, social graphing, past purchase, click through rates etc, When we can
understand these in a sensitive, human way, then we will be able to engage better at all levels.
It is scale that will allow us to innovate and create the systems for delivering messages or experience
at the right time, at the right place, to the right person. To find them on mobile, TV, computer at a
time when it suits them, not just when it suits us ‐ something we call audience on demand.
It is scale that will allow us to be leaders on behalf of our clients.
But we have done more than accumulate talent. We have changed our structures, our organization
and created:
Why VivaKi?
Because we believe we are in a Revolution and not an Evolution, we were not content with “change”.
We are entering a new era, a new world. We should not fool ourselves that the world may change
but we can continue in the same old way just by adding more digital resources, powerful though they
are. That will not be enough in this new world.
We have built silos over time. Because specialization was better. Better suited to clients’ needs,
better suited to our people. But by building silos we have created separation between the media
and the message.
We had to invent a structure, an organization, where people will work together.
Something that will provide a flexible structure and a single access point through which our clients
can access all the talents and scale at our disposal.
We have to bring down silos, and collaborate to help our clients engage holistically with consumers
(people, people!), using analog or digital together to create a dialogue with our customers and get
the most out of our client’s investment.
To that end, Vivaki groups all our digital and media assets into one structure, and as you can see that
puts a formidable amount of talent into one place, including not only Digitas and Razorfish but the
media assets of StarcomMediavestGroup, and of Zenith Optimedia. Including not only the best of
data management, but some of the best creative thinkers in the business.
The challenge for Vivaki is to be the first, the best and the only. Innovation is baked into its charter,
and I imagine you can understand why from my speech so far. We want also to be the best, not only
in the qualitative sense, with the best people, but in a harder edged sense with the best research and
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6. the best media rates to deliver tangible value to clients. And lastly, to be the only. There is no other
global company that is creating the sort of global partnerships that we are with Google, with
Microsoft, with Yahoo. And, we believe that these big, ambitious steps into the future, done at scale,
will be profoundly valuable for us, and for our clients.
Lastly, but not least, there is the Vivaki Nerve Centre. Drawing resources from all the Vivaki
companies, and supporting them all, it is effectively an incubator, an R&D lab and a testing ground.
There is nothing like it in any other holding company, and we firmly believe that it will be a deep
source of growth in the coming years.
So, we are once again creating more flexible, integrated resources, and being able to leverage them
for all our clients.
But, in the last decade we also made another big mistake, (though we were not alone in making it).
As our clients were looking for efficiencies and more for less, we became more effective, more
mindful of time, of productive hours and made our organizations both more effective and more
productive, and we eliminated any part of unproductive time.
But if we live in a world where the revolution will never again be finished, it will just gather speed,
then the time spent on imagining a better future is not idle dreaming, it is an essential part of staying
ahead of the curve.
If we live in a world of people, of communication, of medias and emotions, the useless is useful, the
unnecessary is necessary.
Whoever heard of an advertising agency having an R&D department? Well, in the world of constant
technological revolution we are entering today, the entire organization must BE an R&D department.
Like the best companies today, the Apples, the Googles, we must become a company where
everybody is a technology visionary, and a human visionary. Where everybody is obsessed with the
future, not for its own sake but for how it can create better lives for the customers we serve.
We must become a company where our organization is idea‐centric, and where we collaborate
around ideas, ending the dictatorship of the 30’ commercial.
We must become a company where we demolish silos. In our organizations, but on the client side
also. And where our clients work as part of the idea team. They have to be part of the process, not be
in front, but at the center, not them versus us, but all, ‘we’.
If we can do that, then we will be able to truly create valuable experiences for customers and by
doing so we will truly create value for clients.
It will be a more complex, challenging, fast moving world, but a more rewarding world.
Vive la Revolution!
END
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