France's Leading Salesman
	Maurice Lévy, 60 Advertising executive
	By DELPHINE SCHRANK

Posted Sunday, April 14, 2002; 15.05GMT
The last thing Publicis chairman and CEO Maurice Lévy seemed destined for was advertising stardom. A stern, secretive man in the flamboyant, self-promoting world of advertising, Lévy has quietly transformed Publicis from a family-controlled French agency into a world-wide network, which is now nicely weathering a severe advertising downturn.

In March — as some analysts estimated that last year's ad spending had slumped by as much 9.4% globally — Publicis posted an 18% rise in profits to 1151 million for 2001, fueled in part by 12.43 billion in new business. Despite such success, Lévy maintains a low profile — centering attention instead on the agency's work for clients like Renault, l'Oréal and Coca-Cola. Lévy is as unusual in France's clubby management circles as he is in the advertising milieu. Born in French Morocco, he was trained as a computer scientist and hired by Publicis as an IT specialist. Promoted to management, he directed Publicis' European expansion until his appointment as chairman in 1988. Lévy's development plans were subdued for most of the 1990s by Publicis' acrimonious and ultimately doomed partnership with U.S. group True North. Since exiting that arrangement in 1997, Lévy has cautiously acquired new agencies, including Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide and Fallon Worldwide.

That process clearly isn't over: last month — just hours after revealing his vibrant 2001 results — Lévy announced that Publicis would buy U.S. agency Bcom3, thus becoming the world's fourth largest ad group. "Our goals in reacting to the recession were not only to remain profitable, but also to exploit opportunities arising from it," Lévy explains. "The result is Publicis will be even stronger once it's over."

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