1. As the rules of growth are being rewritten by technological velocity and shifting client and consumer expectations, what is your strategic north star for Publicis UK over the next three years?

Publicis’ North Star has remained constant for a century. When Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet founded the company, his vision was clear: help brands connect more meaningfully with people. That guiding principle has never wavered. Today, our focus remains firmly on our clients, helping them connect in more meaningful ways with their customers.

While our purpose hasn’t changed, the way we deliver on it has evolved dramatically. Over the past 100 years, we’ve been relentlessly innovative, continually refining how we help clients invest their marketing resources, measure impact, and drive growth.

In the age of data, technology, and AI, we’ve invested in world-class capabilities in measurement and predictive insight. This empowers our clients not only to compete for attention and loyalty today, but to anticipate where and how to win tomorrow.

So, the vision endures but what’s changing, and what makes this moment so exciting, is how we bring that vision to life.

2. Many organisations stall in perpetual pilots. What operating model takes you from proof of concept to market ready and how do you decide when to build, buy or partner to accelerate outcomes?

The pace of change demands constant experimentation, validation, and evolution. That restlessness is part of our DNA, and it’s what keeps us ahead. But it must be balanced with stability. Clients need confidence that what we deploy works, scales, and drives growth. So, while we’re always testing the next idea, we’re also focused on how we operationalise it across the organisation. This is where you need a model to prioritise what goes wide and deep, versus what pilots are meant to teach in the short term.

Here I think a lot about what I call “Organisational Darwinism”; the idea that the best ideas, technologies, and ways of working naturally rise to the top. When something proves its value, it spreads fast. A great example is our investment in Identity. In 2019, we acquired Epsilon. At the time, we knew the potential was there, but scaling it would require additional investment. As the client benefits became clearer and clearer, it built momentum and then the business case was clear. Now, five years later it is embedded across our company with robust training programmes and access for our people.

3. Publicis has positioned AI as a primary driver of growth, underpinned by significant investment in data and technology. How are you turning that strategy into differentiated client value at Publicis Media UK, and what does leadership look like when AI moves from a capability to the core of competitive advantage?

The reason AI is a differentiated capability for us, and our clients, is because of our significant investment in proprietary data and how we’ve connected it across the UK. We have an unrivalled understanding of people which allows us to use AI not just to analyse, but to predict point of market entry, moments that matter and messaging that resonates. We’re also able to identify where to most effectively reach and engage people across a connected media ecosystem. That grounding in real data is a fundamental advantage. AI built on small surveys of stated intent has value, but it’s prone to hallucination. When AI is trained on large volumes of high quality information, it provides insights based on reality. The quality of the output from AI depends entirely on the quality of what you put in.

The second critical factor is how people use it. Publicis Groupe, from 2024 – 2026, we’re investing €300m into AI, 50% of which will be spent on talent and training, and the other 50% on tech. Training is essential, not just on what AI can do, but on how to ask the right questions. If you ask an LLM to write an article, it will. But if you ask it to act as an investigative journalist and extract insights from you before writing, the result is far more powerful. That shift in engagement is what we’re embedding across our organization.  In the UK, we spent the last two years training our people to not only understand AI’s capabilities but to become experts in using it effectively.

We’re also building new technologies. Earlier this year, agentic AI launched, and we’ve developed tools rooted in our data to help our teams unlock even greater value from our data. These agents can now help unpack strategy, explore new opportunities, and accelerate value. What’s emerging is a new kind of differentiation, one driven by curiosity, creativity, and inventiveness. The best results come from those who push the boundaries of what AI can reveal.

Instead of spending weeks analysing millions of rows of data, our teams can now focus on solving problems and crafting strategy, with everything at their fingertips. It’s a transformative shift in how we work, and it’s unlocking new possibilities for our clients every day.

4. As consumers and employees redefine value - fairness, quality, time and trust - how is Publicis reframing client outcomes beyond reach and CPMs?

In the UK, of the £66 billion spent last year on advertising and marketing services, £45 billion went to media - nearly 66%. While media is a significant part of our business, our approach reflects the full scope of marketing and advertising. This is important because media in isolation doesn’t reflect the full consumer experience.

Real customer engagement happens when someone holds a product, uses an app, interacts via CRM or calls the client, or experiences the brand through influencers. Chasing cheap reach – delivering as much messaging as possible, as cheaply as possible - is a flawed strategy. It leads to wasted investment and misses the bigger picture.

We’re reframing measurement around the connected consumer journey and KPIs that truly matter. These include lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, products per order, and orders per new customer. These metrics are far more aligned with business success than only media KPIs.

That’s not to dismiss traditional media metrics such as brand salience, consideration and purchase intent that are still valuable. But they must ladder up to a bigger question: is our client’s business growing? Are we helping stem losses, uncover new growth opportunities, identify new market entry points or unlock new consumer segments?

This is the shift we’re making, from measuring isolated media performance to evaluating how we drive real business impact across the entire consumer journey.

5. What’s the most enduring piece of advice you’ve received that continues to shape how you lead teams and drive innovation?

When I started my first company in my late teens, someone told me that passion and enthusiasm are essential. They help people believe in you and want to come on the journey with you. I’ve lived by that for nearly 30 years now. If you’re passionate about something, show it. Put energy into what you care about. If you’re not, people will see through it. And if you hide it, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

In my twenties, I began leading large teams and learned that setting a bold vision isn’t enough. If the vision is five steps ahead of where people are, you need to help build the bridges. Think about what step four and three look like, then encourage people to build their own step one and two. That way, step three becomes a shared creation. You have to take people on the journey, but they need to build part of it themselves. If you do it all for them, they’re not truly part of it. If you leave them to do everything, they’re actually disempowered. Finding that balance takes time and intention.

I’ve also learned that moving faster is almost always better. It’s counterintuitive - speed brings mistakes and uncertainty. But the bigger risk is moving too slowly. You don’t learn, you don’t make mistakes, and you don’t grow. But to enable that, it’s important to be in an organisation with a culture that allows people to try things, whilst knowing not everything will work.