Publicis skips the pitch and sells AI anxiety directly to CEOs

Publicis Groupe grew net revenue 5% to €3.529 billion ($3.95 billion) in the third quarter and, more tellingly, says it is now pitching chief executives directly on AI rather than marketing chiefs. "We are increasingly seeing CEOs involved in what we do," chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun told analysts, "because CEOs are passionate about AI, and they understand that if they want to continue to lead their company, they need to understand AI. This has to start from the top." The strategy is working: Publicis won PepsiCo without a pitch and walked away from Coca-Cola's review, and Sadoun said its Sapient arm was instrumental in winning "the two biggest accounts of the year without a pitch" plus three AI-led transformation assignments. New clients are adding about 2% organic growth heading into 2027, roughly €300 million ($335.5 million). The anxiety he is monetising is real: a Harris Poll survey cited by Digiday found 80% of chief executives believe their jobs are at risk if their AI initiatives fail. AdExchanger's roundup adds the sharpener: as principal media grows, the agency is "supposed to act as its client's agent, representing its interests," and the old conflict-of-interest guardrails have quietly dissolved. Sadoun waved off conflict concerns, insisting "the three players [Publicis, Omnicom and WPP] are big enough to manage conflict" so long as data firewalls hold, though he was happy to note that turmoil among rivals is not unwelcome: "Some have made the choice to externalize their IT professionals," a swipe at Omnicom's outsourcing of IT and developer jobs, while clients "don't expect us to reorganize... They are expecting us to invest on their behalf."

The crux

The holding company that wins is the one that repackages AI fear as transformation spend at the CEO level, which is shifting new-business value away from pitch credentials and toward technology and principal-media economics, at the direct expense of the traditional agency-as-agent model.

Sell-side read

When agency budgets are won at the CEO level on AI capability, the media is bought more like technology, and that compresses the room for publisher sales teams selling on audience and context rather than measurable outcome. Publishers selling to agencies need the outcome and first-party data story ready, because that is the language the CEO-level brief is now written in.

Watch

whether the PepsiCo account's media buying flows through principal media and how much of the €300 million new-business lift translates into working media spend rather than technology services.