Publicis Groupe CEO Tries to Calm Alarm Over His Cannes Ban
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Two days after stunning the ad industry by pledging that Publicis Groupe will sit out next year’s Cannes International Festival of Creativity, President-CEO Arthur Sadoun spent Thursday trying to ease fears inside his holding company that the move would backfire.
In a closed-door meeting at the luxurious Majestic hotel, Sadoun assembled 200 of his top creative leaders and singled out what he described as a symbol of the agency world’s woes: The Snapchat-branded ferris wheel that towers near the entrance of the nearby Palais.
“This is making me even angrier,” he said as he showed a picture of the wheel to his troops, he recalled in an interview with Ad Age after the meeting. To him the carnival-like wheel — and the fact that it rests on valuable festival real estate — “symbolizes the fact that our companies, the holding companies, have lost their thought leadership in Cannes.”
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