Publicis Groupe did not conclude any significant agreements or any agreements conferring a significant obligation or commitment on the Groupe, with the exception of those concluded in the normal course of business, during the two years preceding the date of this Universal Registration Document.
The Groupe does not believe that it is dependent on any specific patent or license to operate its businesses.
R&D within Publicis Groupe has always taken an applied form, as it is directly linked to the search for concrete technological solutions designed to help our clients, to developing and improving the performance of our products, technological platforms or internal tools, to taking advantage of the latest technological advances to offer new options to our clients. Several PhD students work within the Groupe, most of them at Sapient and Epsilon.
In particular, at Epsilon, more than 60 PhD students in Decision Science are continuously optimizing the algorithms of our platforms to make them more precise, more powerful, and ultimately, more effective. Sapient has developed seven Labs in several countries, which are centers of technical expertise to respond in real time to clients’ technological issues. Our experts are available to answer client questions regarding the implementation of different platforms, the search for optimal solutions and these teams can conduct Research & Development projects on behalf of clients to improve the performance of their tools or develop a new application environment (website, app, internal network). In addition, two recent initiatives enable the internal community of engineers to work together more effectively: one the one hand, an internal collaborative space where several teams of engineers can collaborate on the same project; and, on the other hand, an agnostic solution for the Cloud, for artificial intelligence/machine learning projects that bring together engineers and data scientists to gain in efficiency and speed for large-scale solutions.
Lastly, the Groupe’s Media activities invest significant resources in mathematical and statistical processing in order to best advise their clients in their media choices (particularly in terms of modelling the marketing mix or calculating the effectiveness of media actions), and many doctoral students are also part of these teams.
