BETC’s MD Helps Clients and Creatives Speak The Same Language

Mathieu Laugier tenure at BETC stretches across 15 years; an impressive feat at a time when agency hopping is more de rigueur than loyalty. Now the agency’s managing director, he has no plans to leave as he works on key accounts, new business, and special projects. He’s also singularly committed to furthering the value of creativity, having seen how an investment in big ideas – taking risks where suitable – amounts to good business. “When you work in one of the most creative agencies, you need to be creative to be effective,” he states.

Mathieu doesn’t paper over the fact that his job is “super hard” saying “you need to find a little bit of pleasure in it and I find it in the creative part” even though he’s not a ‘creative’ himself. In his own words, his task is to “find the right strategy to help clients to understand why it’s important to make good, bold, effective campaigns. I'm also here to find data to help them understand that if you compare two campaigns, the more creative one will be more effective, and this is data that we have,” he states.

Mathieu is focused on communicating the value of creativity, because he believes in it and because it’s good for business. On the other hand, he works with creatives to help them “understand in as few words as possible the business situation of a brand.”

A good brief remains the backbone to good work yet often briefs still land “too many data points, too many figures [...] too many details,” says Mathieu, which aren’t often necessary, so “my job is just to talk business with creatives at the beginning of every brief to make it short and understandable.”

He summarises how he approaches his job pithily. “Sometimes my job is to be mad at clients because they don't want to risk anything. And I can also be mad at creatives because they just want to do something creative, forgetting business objectives.”

The marriage of big creative ideas and effectiveness can be seen across multiple BETC campaigns. The first is the work for Canal+, a client the agency has worked with for over 15 years, with Mathieu calling it “a real partnership because we know the brand really well, we know their business issues.” Over the years, BETC has created a number of highly entertaining campaigns and spots ranging from comedic to dramatic – always bold – to help the channel communicate its value to viewers in the face of competitors like Netflix and Amazon.

BETC also helped Heetch, a French competitor to Uber and Bolt, reclaim market share. Heetch reached out with “brand and business issues”, per Mathieu, by going back to the brand’s very origin to find a new raison d'etre. “We did really risky work with Heetch because we talked about something that the French and the Parisians don't always talk about – Paris’s suburbs, a territory that suffers from a lot of clichés in the media about the kind of people that live there and about criminality,” he explains.

With Heetch, BETC took a calculated, strategic risk by positioning the company as “a proud sponsor of the Parisian suburbs” complete with a sports sponsorship of a football team from the suburbs, naturally, to really drive the point home. At that point, Mathieu notes, most of the business was in Paris yet the new positioning helped Heetch find a new audience and differentiate it from the competition in a way that felt meaningful to both business and culture, exemplifying perfectly the power of what creativity can do for effectiveness. “We found the positioning, we found the creative part and we worked with a client that just allowed us to do it,” he adds.

And it’s a cause close to BETC’s heart seeing as the agency’s office of over a decade is located in the suburbs of Pantin; it has also been heavily involved in the Grand Paris initiative, aiming to broaden people's definition of the city, which is often defined though economic and racial lenses.

At the end of last year, Mathieu served on the jury at the Eurobest awards in the Creative Effectiveness and Creative Strategy categories among a group of majority C-suiters. “Honestly, in that room, I was almost the creative one,” he says with a laugh. What he saw during judging was “the return of good old advertising” like “big campaigns and big marketing moves from brands.” He continues, “I'm not saying that the small activations weren't awarded at all. They were, of course. But to me, it was good to see that the campaign that we loved the most was the biggest one. Massive 360 campaigns with real insights, with real deployment, something that we all saw somewhere that we didn't have to dig for.”

The other trend Mathieu spotted was a return to humour following the introduction of the category at Cannes Lions back in 2024; a trend he calls "comforting" amid a global period of difficulties.

Looking across to what 2026 might hold, Mathieu cautions, “We will need to be careful with AI.” No technopessimist, he says “the tools are great, they help us a lot on a day-to-day basis,” while adding, “I'm just scared about fake news, scared about what just those kinds of fake images can do to the world and, in the end, to the job that we have to do for brands.” And even more humour is something Mathieu hopes this year has in store. “Humour is good. If 2026 can go back to advertising that makes you smile, at least, that would be nice.”

Speaking to Mathieu, it’s clear how unwavering his support for the big creative idea is. What’s surprising – in the best way – is that he’s not a ‘creative’ in the typical sense but someone dedicated to communicating creativity’s value at every opportunity for the sake of of it, yes, and for business’s sake too.