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Publicis posts strong Q3 with 5.8% organic growth

Questions asked about Omnicom numbers

Publicis Groupe has reported Q3 2024 organic growth of 5.8%, slightly behind US rival Omnicom on 6.5% although there is a caveat: the two groups compute their figures differently, of which more later*.

All regions reported positive growth in all regions with, by discipline, creative up although consultancy Publicis Sapient, a recent star performer, was down owing to client caution. The company has also revealed for the first time the cost of its two big acquisitions – influencer Influential and commerce business Mars United – at $1bn.

Publicis uis upgrading its 2024 full year forecast from 5% to 5.5%.

CEO Arthur Sadoun (above) says: “Once again, we were able to gain market share by capturing a disproportionate amount of client demand for personalization at scale, with our combined media and Epsilon activities growing at almost +10%. All of our regions delivered strongly, with the US at +4%, Europe at +4.9% and APAC at +6.4%, with China accelerating to +12.4%.

“The strength of our model is also reflected in our net new business performance. Not only have we topped new business league table since the beginning of 2024, for the fifth year in a row we also led the ranking in Q3 which was very active quarter when it comes to pitch activity.

“Despite an increasingly challenging macroeconomic environment, we expect to sustain our momentum in Q4. We are in a position to upgrade our organic growth guidance for the full year. This means that we should outperform the industry by close to 400 basis points on average in 2024.

“Beyond our immediate results, in Q3 we also took steps to continue to stay ahead of the industry thanks to our model. We invested 1 billion dollars in acquiring Influential, the world’s largest influencer marketing platform and Mars United Commerce, the #1 independent commerce marketing company. We are now clearly leading on 3 critical expertise for our clients: addressable media, Creators and Commerce. We are then able to directly link this expertise with Epsilon’s identities around the world to create a connected media ecosystem that we can build transparently within our clients’ owned environments.”

So pretty much everything in the Publicis garden is lovely (the financials anyway) and the Groupe has enough financial headroom to make further big acquisitions if desired.

*Publicis will be annoyed to see Omnicom come in with a higher organic growth figure. City analyst Ian Whittaker said of Omnicom in a recent LinkedIn post: “Stated organic revenue growth was +6.5% which looks impressive but the key is that OMC does not report organic growth like other agencies in that the organic number is gross of principal revenues, not new. While OMC does not provide a like for like number, stripping out the growth where they act as principal suggests a like for like organic revenue growth might be more like 3.5% (which is still decent.)”

We’ll have to see how this plays out (if it does.) Either way it’s a nice problem to have for both groups.

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