AD Agencies
Publicis powers ahead with a pitch-perfect Q1
MUMBAI: Publicis Groupe has come out swinging in 2025, delivering a knockout first quarter with organic growth clockin
g in at a robust 4.9 per cent and net revenue up 9.4 per cent. Not too shabby in a jittery global economy.
Despite storm clouds on the macro front, the Paris-based ad titan bagged a record haul of new business—about a dozen juicy wins—keeping the growth engine humming and the champagne flowing.
Publicis now confidently reaffirms full-year guidance of four to five per cent organic growth and a tidy €1.9–€2.0bn in free cash flow (before working capital shifts).
Since January, the group has splashed out €500m on M&A, snapping up assets in data, digital media and influencer marketing. That war chest spending cements its self-styled “Category of One” status, a blend of consultancy cool and creative chops.
“We’ve never been in a stronger position to help our clients, in the good times, and even more importantly, in the challenging ones.,” said chairman and CEO Arthur Sadoun, who’s clearly in campaign mode. “Thanks to our unrivalled identity graph and 25,000 engineers, we’re future-proofing clients in the AI era while helping them spend smarter and grow faster.”
Publicis continues to punch above its weight, proudly touting an industry-high margin of 18 per cent last year, with more juice to come in 2025. Diversified revenues and a connected media ecosystem are helping it dodge economic wobbles while keeping competitors in the rear-view mirror.
As consolidation looms in adland, Publicis is eyeing not just another year of outperformance—but long-term dominance. Watch this space.
AD Agencies
Kevin Vaz opens FICCI-EY report with a declaration: India’s M&E industry set to breach Rs 3 trillion mark by 2027
In a keynote address at the FICCI-EY report launch, Kevin Vaz says sport, AI and the connected TV boom are driving a multi-screen revolution with no signs of slowing
MUMBAI: India’s media and entertainment industry is growing faster than the economy, reshaping global benchmarks and is on course to blow past Rs 3 trillion by 2027. That was the headline message from Kevin Vaz, chairman of the FICCI Media and Entertainment Committee and chief executive of entertainment at JioStar, who delivered the opening keynote at the launch of the FICCI-EY Media and Entertainment Report 2026 in Mumbai on Monday. He did not waste much time on caveats.
The industry hit Rs 2.78 trillion in 2025, outpacing GDP per capita growth and surpassing even last year’s bullish forecasts. Vaz described the year in three words: scale, convergence, transformation. The numbers, he suggested, were only half the story. The other half was how that growth was happening.
Digital has become the industry’s largest segment, driven by advertising, subscriptions and commerce. But Vaz was quick to puncture the familiar narrative of digital killing everything else. India, he argued, is not an either-or market. It is an AND market. Connected TV is surging. Linear television, mobile, films and print are all still expanding. AVGC, the animation, visual effects, gaming and comics sector, is emerging as a serious growth engine, opening new storytelling formats and new global revenue streams. Nothing, he said, is replacing anything. Everything is reinforcing everything else.
Nowhere is that more vivid than in sport. In an on-demand world where audiences can watch anything, anytime, Indians still show up live. “Sports don’t fragment audiences,” Vaz said. “They unite them, just on different screens.” The ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026 made the point emphatically. During the final, JioHotstar delivered 72.5 million concurrent streams, a global record. Group chats exploded. Families renegotiated control of the television. Advertisers, Vaz noted with undisguised relish, stopped asking where audiences were and started asking how fast they could get in.
Cinema had its own landmark year. More than 1,900 films were released, with several crossing the Rs 1 billion mark. Dhurandhar was singled out as proof that Indian audiences will still turn up in large numbers for content that grips them. Live experiences, too, are getting bigger and more immersive, though Vaz suggested the surface has barely been scratched.
Then there is artificial intelligence, which he described as quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, reshaping everything. AI is enabling personalisation, efficiency and scale, but Vaz argued its deeper significance lies in what it is doing to creativity itself. He pointed to Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, billed as the world’s first AI-produced show, as evidence that the technology can amplify creative ambition rather than hollow it out. He also used the platform to call on Indian policymakers to engage seriously with the creative industry on AI and copyright, ensuring that creators are fairly compensated as the technology spreads.
The picture that emerges from the report, and from Vaz’s keynote, is of an industry that has stopped thinking of itself as a fast-growing emerging market and started thinking of itself as a global template. Scale, diversity and innovation, he said, are no longer in tension in India. They are coexisting, and the rest of the world is taking notes.
The Rs 3 trillion milestone is two years away. As the man who chairs the committee that shapes the industry’s policy agenda and runs the country’s most powerful entertainment platform, Vaz set the tone for the day with characteristic directness: India’s media business is not just chasing growth. It is deciding what the country talks about at dinner. That is a different kind of power altogether.
