Maurice Levy is an easily caricatured Frenchman: cosmopolitan, liberal, wealthy, condescending, probably a fan of escargot (I was just in France and man, they really eat that, for real yall, no fooling!). He sent this message to all 15,000 of his employees worldwide after the election:

“Congratulations on such a great choice,” he wrote. “Once again the American people have proved that they are right there when it comes to turning points in history — and they know how to make history.”

Haha, as long as you don't extend that logic back, say, four years! Publicis is going to get slammed like every other ad conglomerate in the coming year because of the shitty economy. Which he blames on the following: "Capitalism cannot only be about profit." How does his multibillion dollar ADVERTISING firm, for fuck's sake, fit into that?

“We don’t lie to them, we don’t cheat them,” he said. “We don’t tell them something is a triple-A product when it is not a triple-A product.”

Aha. [NYT; pic via Adforum]

We're not there yet in terms of large-scale output production. We believe that not only must we learn now as it's still in its infancy, and above all be ready when we — when the economies of scale kick in.

Levy said that the search engine and advertising conglomerate plan to swap executives and work together to develop new products and tools. Know what you call that? Frenemies with benefits. Leading the lovefest will be ad-sales executives Tim Armstong and Penry Price from Google and Digitas CEO David Kenny for Publicis. Hawt.