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By Mathieu Rosemain
PARIS, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Publicis, the world's
third-biggest advertising company, reported quarterly results in
line with expectations after a series of disappointments but
stressed the road ahead would be bumpy in a sector shaken up by
U.S. tech giants.
The French company is banking on being able to run digital
campaigns for clients in addition to its traditional creative
ads as competition from Facebook and Alphabet's Google
continues to squeeze revenue.
Publicis, which recently spent $4 billion on data-focused
marketing business Epsilon and has been integrating its digital
arm Publicis.Sapient, downgraded its targets twice last year.
"The market is moving in a direction that matches the
vision that has been developed over the past several months,"
Chief Executive Arthur Sadoun told reporters in a call.
It confirmed its outlook for 2020 saying underlying sales
would be somewhere in the range of down 2% to up 1%, helping to
push up its shares up by more than 4% in early trading.
The company, which competes against bigger rivals WPP
and Omnicom, said fourth-quarter underlying
sales dropped 4.5% from a year earlier to 2.87 billion euros
($3.2 billion) as major clients continued to slash spending.
Underlying sales growth for 2019 fell 2.3%, in line with its
expectations and slightly above the average analyst forecast.
Sadoun said Google's recent decision to restrict advertising
software companies and other organizations from connecting their
browser cookies was a sign that the investment in Epsilon, which
processes large pools of data, was the right move.
($1 = 0.9093 euros)
(Reporting by Mathieu Rosemain; Editing by David Clarke)
