Publicis Leaders Move Into Challenger Mode, Point Staff at “The Same Boss”: The Work

It’s tough out there in the advertising world, so ​Agathe Bousquet and Marco Venturelli are grateful to have each other. Despite Publicis Groupe’s bullish financial performance, the global Leo co-CEOs and Publicis France execs aren’t taking anything for granted and say they’re in “challenger” mode.

One thing is clear. While they are co-CEOs and presidents of the Constellation, every person in the business ultimately has one boss: the work.

“In reality, we all have the same boss, which should be the idea, the work,” Marco, who also serves as CCO of Publicis Groupe France, tells LBB. “So when you start thinking like that, it's pretty easy to be aligned.”

Asked about a creative leader running the business alongside her, Agathe -- Leo co-CEO and CEO of Publicis Groupe France --  says, “I don’t see another way.” Together, they can fight harder to protect ideas and their people.

“I do not know how the others do it. My job is to protect the best ideas for my clients. And for that, you need a safe zone for the strategists and the creative geniuses that we have within our network. And the most talented one, the most awarded one, is at the top and [has] the exact same power that I have.”

Marco -- who could spend “10 hours” talking about how much Agathe helps him do his job -- observes, “What we're living now, as an intensity and pressure and complexity, humanly, it's kind of unbearable if you are alone.

“We never really had a moment where I felt we could do that alone. It's a tough job what we do. It's very hard.”

His peers often “just don’t say how tough it is, because there is this rhetoric of, 'I'm a superhuman, I can do it'. But no, it's super tough and you are challenged every day and you're questioning every day, and so the human connection and the trust is so precious. And I think it's something that is going to become much more important.”

That’s especially true in a hyper-competitive industry navigating consolidation, marketing budget pressures, the impact of AI, economic and political volatility, and much more. Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG to form the largest advertising holding company in the world also forces any network to work harder for points. According to Marco, speaking to LBB at Cannes Lions, with a CCO’s eye on the creative rankings, his rival showed up at Cannes last month largely “as one player” despite comprising “different entities”, making it an unusual year for attributing creative success.

“On one side, it is great, because it puts us really back to the position that as a group I think we express ourselves better [in], which is the challenger.

"So we need to understand how to punch above our weight, given the fact that we are very big, but we are facing very, very big competition.”

Agathe and Marco spend more time “by far” with each other than they do their respective husband and wife. It requires enormous trust -- “I mean, you need more than a lot, you need trust with a big T,” Agathe says -- a lack of ego, an absence of power plays, genuinely enjoying each other’s company, and autonomy.

“When we launched Leo one year and a half ago, we said to Arthur [Sadoun, Publicis Groupe’s global CEO], it will only work if we have the power to protect, to hire, to fire also if it's not good enough,” Agathe adds.

It can be tricky to be tough on the work and kind on the people from a distance. Being “nice people to each other” is critical, Marco says, but that doesn’t mean not being truly tough on the work. It does require closeness and respect, “because what happens in reality is that if you don't trust someone, if you feel that you are in danger, it's very difficult to give real feedback without making people feel that you are attacking them,” Marco says.

The pair are 18 months into the new era of Leo -- since the ‘Burnett’ was dropped, Humankind and Publicis Worldwide were folded in, and the ‘Constellation’ introduced.

As Agathe puts it, “We really want to gather creative and strategic people that we view as stars all around the world with a strong belonging spirit, acting really like a collective, fighting together to the best work for creative excellence and on real clients to connect with real people. It's not a constellation with some stars in five or six places, it has to be everywhere.”

​Clare Pickens, the former Wieden+Kennedy exec, took the reins as CEO of Leo Australia a little over two years ago. A few months into her tenure, the Constellation was born. It’s been “honestly, game-changing,” Clare says. She and CCO Andy Fergusson have the same kind of relationship as Agathe and Marco’s, she says. “There's trust, there's a shared vision.

“I don't understand anybody that does that differently. I don't understand how you're not putting the creative first and then paving that path so everything is very mirrored on a global level.”

For insurer GIO, part of the Suncorp business, the Australian team asked the Constellation for help on a brief. “Within 48 hours, we had eight agencies globally” working on cracking the idea, Clare recalls. “I was like, 'Oh my god, this is the dream version of what we're able to do.’”

The Australian business won the Dan Wieden Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes this year for its ‘Haven’ project for Suncorp, helping Australians protect their homes from climate risks. Publicis Conseil’s ‘Three Words’ for AXA won the show’s top award last year (plus two further Grands Prix) and this year added a Grand Prix in the Creative Effectiveness category to the tally. In 2024 and 2025, Publicis Conseil was Cannes Lions’ Agency of the Year -- how does he feel about the 2026 body of work?

“It's not a bad year. I think we are underperforming to my expectations, but by definition, we are underperforming on my expectations.”

Agathe jumps in. “Last year, we were Agency of the Year. I'm not sure he was that happy in terms of performance. So honestly, it's a never-ending story.”

Marco adds, “I normally spend a lot of time talking about the results in Cannes, because for me it's the concrete metric that we are doing things in the right way. This time, I'm a bit less interested, because for Leo, it was a transition year. We are very young, as a group of people, and in the last year and a half I saw incredible, incredible progression in what really matters: creating a collective of people … for me, [that] was the most important metric.

“Seeing the way we are happy for other agencies [that are] part of the Constellation for me was the number one KPI, and we are Network of the Year on that one. Then for the Cannes Network of the Year, I give myself a bit more time.”

Ultimately, he wants conversations about top quality work to top the agenda across the whole year.

“I think we don't do it enough as an industry, outside of Cannes," he says. “The conversations I like are those that are starting from the work and ending on the work.”