Profile: Maurice Lévy

Early in Maurice Lévy's Publicis career, a fire almost wiped out the company's entire records. Handily, Lévy was IT director at the time and had just introduced a data security system. He was the hero of the day and the rest, as they say, is history. Lévy will have been at the advertising group Publicis for 40 years when he steps down next year . For 23 of those years he has been chairman and chief executive, having succeeded the owner, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet. Lévy has been instrumental in growing Publicis from its founding days in 1926 in a small apartment above a butcher to the world's third largest advertising group. Under Lévy's stewardship, the French group has taken in ad agency networks such as Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett and media buying operations including ZenithOptimedia and Starcom MediaVest. Levy has long jousted, both verbally and acquisitvely, with his fellow doyen of the advertising world Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP. Publicis, which also has a majority stake in Matthew Freud's PR firm, is trying to reduce its dependence on traditional advertising, with digital acquisitions including the $1.3bn (£660m) purchase of Digitas and a $530m (£317m) deal to buy Razorfish from Microsoft. The French media establishment have always been proud of having two of the largest advertising and marketing groups, the other being Vincent Bolloré's significantly smaller Havas. In media circles, the neat conspiracy theory that has been whispered behind closed doors is that to ensure the continuation of a mighty Gallic presence on the global stage one day Bollore, 58, might emerge as a leader of a combined Publicis/Havas. Lévy, married with three sons and six grandchildren, and was born in Morocco. His CV boasts an extraordinarily long list of awards: Commandeur of the French Légion d'Honneur and Grand Officier of the Ordre National du Mérite; the Scopus Award from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Benjamin Franklin Award from the French American Foundation in New York; the 2008 International Leadership Award from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); also in 2008, Communication Man of the Year" by the Delaney Report and the French awards show, Le Grand Prix des Agences de L'Année; and in 2009, Institutional Investor Magazine named him Europe's best CEO in the media industry.