Publicis Groupe will continue its investments to provide proposals and solutions to its clients faced with numerous challenges (consumer behavior, multiplication of communication channels, increasing weight of omni‑channel commerce, emergence of new players from digital technologies). Thus, all future investments will aim to improve our offering, combining our creative, media, data and technological expertise.
Moreover, at December 31, 2023 the Groupe also had commitments of euro 253 million under earn‑out payments and euro 23 million for non‑controlling interest buy‑outs, a total of euro 276 million, of which euro 64 million is due in less than one year.
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, and 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.
At Epsilon, more than 70 PhD students in decision science are continuously optimizing the algorithms of our platforms to make them more precise, more powerful, and ultimately, more effective. A specific program hosts 15 PhD students for one year to monitor the work of the Decision Science teams.
Publicis Sapient has developed seven Labs in North America, Europe, India and Latin America, 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 and 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 engineering community to work more effectively together. On the one hand, thanks to an internal collaboration platform several teams of engineers can cooperate simultaneously on the same project. On the other hand, it is an agnostic solution for the cloud, artificial intelligence/machine learning projects bring together engineers and data scientists in order to gain efficiency and speed for large‑scale solutions. With the explosion of AI and Generative AI, Publicis Sapient’s expertise in this area is an asset in terms of innovation for clients, on how to use these new tools to improve products, services and user experiences. The skills spectrum covers Data Science, Data Strategy, Data Engineering and Data Analytics, which are partners in AI Accelerators and AI Labs, thus enabling rapid experimentation with new solutions. These teams also include Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Physics and Engineering specialists.
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.
