Publicis secures ad holding group top spot with 6.3% growth in Q4
As forecast (by Messrs Levy and Sadoun) Publicis Groupe ended 2024 as the world’s biggest ad holding company with strong growth of 6.3% in Q4 helping to total 5.8% for the year, ahead of its rivals, and a market cap in excess of €26bn (1/1 in dollars.)
For a while it looked as though the planned Omnicom/IPG merger (still to be approved) would, consign the French group to second place later in 2025 although at this rate of growth (Publicis is forecasting 5% for 2025) it may well challenge Omnicon/IPG’s estimated $30bn.
CEO Arthur Sadoun (above) says: “Thanks to a very strong Q4, Publicis became the largest advertising company in the world in 2024.We are ending the year in the number one position across the board, growing three times faster than our holding company peers, and five times faster than the IT consultancies. We delivered industry-high financial ratios while stepping up the pace of our investments in AI and talent. Once again, we topped the charts in new business rankings.
“But even more importantly, we are accelerating on our status as a Category of One (market-beating company) thanks to our unmatched 1st-party data capabilities, our connected media ecosystem, our creative firepower, and our 25,000 engineers, brought together through the Power of One. This makes us confident in significantly outperforming the industry in 2025 for the 6th year in a row.”
Interesting that 25,000 engineers now play a role in ad holding companies.
Is anything likely to derail to Publicis bandwagon? Just over half its business is in the US and, with Donald Trump waving a big tariff stick at overseas companies, French-domiciled Publicis must have some concerns. So far, though, service companies have mostly evaded his threats.
Key to much of what Publicis now does with its squadrons of engineers is personalisation and there’s always a chance that regulators, in the US as elsewhere, will try harder to call a halt to this as clearly there are privacy issues. Clients too may row back on marketing methods that increasingly aggravate consumers.
Until they do the Publicis bandwagon looks set to keep rolling. It has seen off Britain’s WPP in terms of market value (worth three times as much.) Now it looks like a fight with US-based Omnicom/IPG.