Maurice Levy focuses on digital revealing plans to sharpen strategy by acquiring smaller digital agencies
Maurice Levy has revealed plans to shift the Publicis group deeper into digital services following the collapse of the Omnicom merger earlier in the year.
Speaking at Cannes Lions, Levy told Reuters the collapse of the merger has left him needing to regroup and rebuild investor confidence before he steps down next year and that he's looking to acquire smaller digital companies in order to achieve that goal.
After the collapse of the deal Levy said there would be "zero" chance of revisiting the merger adding that he was "100 per cent focussed on the future" and that he was "not very much interested in the past; it is the end of the story".
With the company starting to look for a successor to Levy later in the year the Frenchman said his focus was on "how we are going to sharpen our strategy".
The ill fated $35bn merger between Publicis and Omnicom would have seen the group become the world's largest ad agency and on Friday Levy admitted cultural differences between the two networks had become an issue, though he denied Sir Martin Sorrell's claims that the group had become distracted and had lost work during the merger process.
