Hasta La Creative!

Revenue at Publicis Groupe increased 5.2% to $9.5 billion in 2013, boosted by a 13.9% rise in digital revenue for the year, the agency holding company said in Paris on Thursday. Organic revenue growth totaled 2.6% in 2013, the company said.

Net income increased 11.5% to $1 billion, or 792 million euros, beating the 763.8 million-euro estimate by analysts in a Bloomberg survey.

Those figures exclude the costs of the company’s planned merger with New York-based Omnicom, which will form a new global agency colossus when it is completed later this year. Publicis Chairman-CEO Maurice Levy took the occasion of the latest earnings release to assert his own group’s superiority in digital media and on the balance sheet while conceding Omnicom’s creative dominance.

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