Michael Rebelo. Credit: Publicis Group
Agency CEOs and leaders are cycling out across the industry faster than at any point in recent memory but Publicis Groupe's ANZ leadership bench has barely moved.
Five of the holdco’s leaders told AdNews that continuity now shows up directly in the numbers.
Publicis in Australia delivered organic growth of 9.5% in the December quarter, closing the full year at 7.3% and opening 2026 at 7.6%, well ahead of the network's global growth rate of 4.5%.
Meanwhile, Publicis Media ranked first globally in the COMvergence 2025 Full Year New Business Barometer, with Australia number one in total and net new business and New Zealand number one in net new business.
Across the group's top 20 ANZ clients, the average client now works with four to five Publicis agencies and stays a median eight years.
Michael Rebelo, CEO of Publicis Groupe ANZ, has been with the company for 29 years and has run the ANZ business since 2019, working with the same CFO and chief talent officer for the entire time.
Rebelo said tenure only matters if it is doing work, not sitting on a resume.
"It can't just be tenure for tenure's sake. At the leadership level, tenure is only important if you are leading the business through transformation and growth,” Rebelo told AdNews.
He said the payoff, done properly, is momentum.
"What leadership tenure can really unlock is trust and momentum for a business," he said.
Rebelo's case is that tenure compounds into trust and trust removes friction.
"Trust is created through the evidence of your actions and compounds over time," he said.
"Creating trust with your clients, people and stakeholders over time allows you to take bigger, bolder steps, be more courageous, remain adaptive and move faster."
He credits that dynamic directly with the network's local restructure.
"This has been the bedrock of how we have transformed Publicis Groupe in ANZ since 2019," Rebelo said.
He pointed to the current wave of industry departures as the reason the advantage matters now.
"In a world where there is significant leadership change across our industry, trust becomes a genuine competitive advantage," Rebelo said.
Jason Tonelli, CEO of Zenith, has been in the Publicis network for 14 years, moving through Performics and Razorfish before taking the top job at Zenith almost four years ago.
Zenith topped last year's COMvergence new business rankings and won Tourism Australia last month.
Tonelli told AdNews the trust built across a long-serving leadership cohort compounds at group level, not just inside one agency.
"When you've got tenure and you're working with the same people day in, day out, particularly at a CEO cohort level and there are 18 of us, that tenure comes with a lot of trust, a lot of support for one another and a deep understanding of how to connect," Tonelli said.
Tonelli's case for tenure is speed rather than sentiment. Long-serving leaders skip the paperwork, he said.
"Long tenure allows us to move faster because it's a text message or a phone call, not an official meeting with three pages of documents," Tonelli said.
"It's fast, it's agile, and in this market that agility is critical for clients." He said the same dynamic runs through Zenith's own leadership bench, which spans an average tenure of nine years across ten executives, including a staff member of more than 20 years alongside one just past two.
"That combination brings so much to the business," he said.
Speaking later in the interview about client relationships, Tonelli added that tenure's value is often overlooked.
"Tenure and reliability are probably underestimated in this industry," he said.
Patrick Rowe, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, has clocked more than 26 years at Publicis and has led the agency for close to four.
Saatchi picked up six Effie wins last year and has built a reputation as the network's effectiveness agency.
Rowe said the practical payoff of long tenure is relationships that compound into speed.
"Working in one place for a long time gives you institutional knowledge and relationships," Rowe told AdNews.
"You build a lot of relationships, and that gives you the muscle memory to navigate complexity."
Rowe's argument centres on judgment: tenure teaches a leader what to leave alone.
"Quality strategy and great creative thinking are the constants," he said.
"Channels will change. Skills will evolve. The way you activate an idea will change. There are lots of variables."
His proof point is Toyota, a client relationship running more than 40 years and tracing back to Saatchi's original "Oh, what a feeling!" campaign from the 1980s.
Tenure also buys resilience when a campaign underperforms, according to Rowe.
"You build a track record of getting results, particularly over the long term," he said.
"You build up credits in the bank, so when bad things happen and they do happen to everyone in this business, they're seen as the vagaries of the market rather than a personal failing."
Skye Lambley began as managing director of PR agency HERD MSL and now runs Publicis Groupe's Influence Practice, which spans HERD MSL plus two agencies she has since launched, Influential and Salterbaxter.
Lambley's case for tenure is less about staying the course and more about what a track record buys a leader permission to do.
"People aren't going to take a chance on you if you haven't got some wins under your belt," Lambley told AdNews.
Her record at H/ERD MSL, not a business case built from scratch, is what she credits with winning backing to launch two additional agencies rather than folding new capability into the one she already ran.
Lambley said that same track record is what makes fast collaboration across the group possible.
"Over time, you build trust and collaboration. Our ability to make things happen, come together, work through solutions and think about what's next comes from those relationships,” she said.
Imogen Hewitt is Publicis Groupe chief media officer and CEO of Spark Foundry ANZ, and has been with the network for seven years.
Publicis Groupe created the chief media officer position in 2024 because clients increasingly needed connected capability spanning media, data, technology and content, rather than expertise sitting inside one channel.
Hewitt said the role has accelerated innovation, growth and integration across the Groupe's media practice, and described it as connective rather than managerial.
"It's about creating the mechanisms that connect the expertise across our agencies, scaling innovation, and ensuring clients have access to the very best capabilities being developed across the network," she told AdNews.
Hewitt said tenure is what makes that connective model function rather than sit as an org chart exercise.
"I think tenure is really about trust," she said.
"That trust is probably the single most important factor when you're leading this kind of change."
She said the value goes beyond comfort with familiar faces.
It's not just about the comfort that comes from knowing people's personalities, motivations and strengths, which we absolutely do, but also the continuity that comes with that.
"Instead of starting from scratch every time, you can build on what's already there."
She argued client retention is not the interesting metric, instead expanding scope is.
"Clients don't trust you with larger, more transformational business challenges unless you've consistently delivered results," Hewitt said.
None of the four treats continuity as automatically good.
Tonelli raised the risk of groupthink unprompted, and pointed to newer arrivals such as Leo CEO Claire as a deliberate counterweight.
"You need new people coming in so you don't end up with groupthink," he said.
Different backgrounds bring what he called cognitive diversity to the leadership cohort. Lambley made a similar point about her own agencies, warning that tenure needs to be balanced against social-first, digitally native junior talent or the advantage turns into a blind spot.
Rebelo's closing argument ties the two ideas together: continuity is only worth having if paired with growth and renewal, and the industry's current churn is what makes it visible.
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