After Buying Up Online-Ad Specialists, Publicis CEO Seeks to Make Them Grow

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"There is nothing big left to buy," Mr. Lévy, chief executive of Publicis, said in an interview Monday.

"However, digital advertising still heralds many unknown opportunities."
Mr. Lévy's 23-year tenure as head of Publicis has been marked by aggressive acquisitions. In recent years, those deals have been focused on digital advertising, as companies have shifted more ad spending to the Internet and away from conventional media like print and television.

Publicis bought the online-marketing business Digitas for $1.3 billion in 2007. It bought search-marketing business Performics from Google Inc. in 2008. Last summer, it paid Microsoft Corp. $530 million for Razorfish, the last big digital agency up for grabs.

In 2009 Publicis made more than a quarter of its €4.52 billion ($5.55 billion) revenue from digital ads, more than its Dublin-based rival WPP PLC or U.S behemoth Omnicom Group Inc.—respectively the world's biggest and second-biggest advertising agencies, ahead of No. 3 Publicis.

Industry analysts agree that digital advertising will be a major growth driver. But they say that marketers still need to crack how to make bigger profits by better targeting audiences and measuring the impact of ads.

"The benefit in the short term is that [digital] is faster growing," says Thomas Singlehurst, an analyst at Citigroup. "But are the returns in digital the same as those in traditional marketing services? These are slight unknowns."