What headwinds? Why Jane Lin-Baden doesn’t fear tariffs, competitors, overextension or the commoditisation of creativity

“We’re not adjusting because of a competitor,” Jane Lin-Baden says straight away, in response to a question about consolidation at rivals WPP, Omnicom and IPG. “We have very clear direction and will continue the implementation plan started six to seven years ago.” 

And why would Publicis Groupe’s chief executive in APAC want to change much? After closing out 2024 on record results as the world’s largest advertising holding company with a very public display of swagger and a 7% salary hike for its employees, the good times have continued to roll into 2025, as evidenced this week by wrestling the global Mars media account from WPP. Much to the bewilderment of an industry grappling with a global trade slowdown, tumultuous markets and caution blankets thrown onto brand marketing budgets, the Groupe grew nearly another 5% organically in the first quarter of the year, both globally and in APAC, with key competitors wallowing between plus two and minus three percent globally. 

But business momentum is subject to fast swings in a world where executive orders are reshaping brand fortunes alongside the outlooks of the world’s largest economies from week to week. Meanwhile, competitors are retooling, with WPP restructuring its network of media agencies into a single powerhouse P&L and the impending merger of rivals Omnicom and IPG looming to create a business of scale never seen before. All this, while the speed of AI’s automation of marketing is overturning the ad agency business model overnight.  

In a wide-ranging interview with Campaign in Singapore, Lin-Baden never dismisses these currents in the air, but maintains her business is in pole position to adjust and capitalise. What has set them up for their recent success, she argues, is the fact that Publicis already went through its own series of lengthy and difficult restructurings over the past six years to shift its business to a solution-based model and bring all agencies together in one business in each of their markets.  

Competitor consolidation and scale

“You’re seeing the other holding companies trying to bring in a similar model—the right model—but it comes with cost. We’ve paid that cost, but at a time when the cost of change was much smaller,” Lin-Baden says. “When you have a bigger business, the cost of the change is going to be massive.” 

Baked into that cost is the time and energy spent on internally on cultural transformation that Lin-Baden expects will preoccupy those working to simplify their business, reduce duplication, break the mindset of unit loyalties and deliver across a wider business with fluid teams. “I wouldn’t underestimate the challenge, because we’ve gone through that,” she says. “This isn’t something you can finish in a short period of time, because we’re talking about people. We’re not talking about changing laptops.”  

While competitors may be focused in the near term on getting their houses in order and reducing duplication, these endeavours at WPP, Omnicom and IPG will nonetheless yield larger entities with greater scale and global footprint than ever before. Here, Lin-Baden echoes the sentiments of Publicis global CEO Arthur Sadoun in welcoming larger competitors, in part because the consolidation reduces the number of competitors, but also because larger players will challenge them.  

“We are happy to see IPG-Omnicom consolidation because we think this is helpful for the industry,” she says, “The industry needs strong competition to make it better. If you have fragmented and weak peers, we’re not going to help each other to help our clients. So, if IPG and Omnicom coming together can help us push each other, that’s great.”  

Asia-Pacific factors

Another reason why Lin-Baden believes she can take on larger challengers is due to more favourable regional implications in APAC. Whereas the IPG-Omnicom merger vastly tilts the scales in regions like North America, she argues there are only two or three APAC markets where business rankings will be significantly affected, while in many others the scale still isn’t there.  

“Scale matters in our industry, but to a certain point. In media you need to be so large to be relevant and meaningful for clients and platforms, but do you need to be number one? If number one and two are not significantly different then it really doesn’t matter.”  

Certainly Publicis has been scaling its business in Asia-Pacific in recent years. The region’s organic growth in FY 2024 was +6.3%, outpacing the US, Europe and the global average, with a further +7.5% gain in net revenues in Q1 of 2025. This surge, Lin-Baden stresses, is well-balanced across the region and currently void of weak spots, with India, Southeast Asia, ANZ and China leading the growth charge, while traditionally flat markets in North Asia like Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been delivering up to double-digit growth recently.  

Publicis Groupe APAC leadership

The big question, of course, is how long the growth trajectory can last.  Publicis has been the prime beneficiary of GroupM’s media struggles in China in the wake of the media rebate corruption scandal there. But with the Chinese investigation now widening across industry, a newly rebranded WPP Media may be less vulnerable. And while Publicis has been winning a high proportion of new business across the region—further augmented by this week's global Mars win—at some point a robust brand portfolio begins to limit the number of new pitches it can win due to client conflict.  

Lin-Baden concedes the new business pipeline could shrink at some stage, but for now still characterises their pipeline as “active” with strong client retention. “Nobody knows [what will happen] next year,” she cautions. “Certainly, if business is not good and clients aren’t calling pitches, this will be a challenge.”  

The tariff impact on Asia and China’s response

This, of course, is a big unknown. The US-led global trade war continues to dominate news headlines, is already being acutely felt by Asian manufacturers and is innately problematic for global brands reassessing which markets they can realistically compete in and devote marketing budget to. The scale of the challenge is underlined by a recent downgrade in global advertising spend forecasts: WARC has reduced its projections for next year by nearly $19.8 billion, citing mounting macroeconomic and regulatory uncertainty. The outlook, now at 6.7% growth, reflects concerns that escalating trade tensions and new tariffs could deal a blow to sectors such as automotive, retail and technology, particularly in the latter half of 2025.

Against this backdrop, Lin-Baden is measured about the implications for Publicis and the wider agency. She says we’re only at the beginning of this dilemma, so the full impacts in the region are yet to come. “If certain tariffs remain, we know that clients will be struggling with margins because of the increased costs of raw materials and this might contribute to the adjustment of advertising spending later on. We need to be very cautious and observe this.”  

While Lin-Baden sees some vulnerabilities in Asia’s heavy export markets, like in Southeast Asia, she also feels many global prognosticators are underestimating the resilience of Asian economies and overestimating the role of manufacturing exports.  

This is particularly true, she says, in a market like China, where Lin-Baden is based, where Publicis hit +9.3% organic growth in Q1 2025. Publicis’ clients in the market are 60% global and 40% local, some of whom are export-focused, but most are squarely focused on China’s gigantic domestic economy. That economy has slowed since Covid, but consumer spending and confidence has stabilised since last year.

Publicis monitors consumer spending power in more than 300 cities in China on a weekly basis. “The tariffs are not impacting consumer spending. Tariffs are not impacting how consumers select brands,” Lin Baden argues. However, what the agency group has noticed is that price sensitivity overall has become a bigger factor for consumers in brand choices which will continue to pose challenges for brands in deciding product and channel mix.  

Nonetheless, Lin-Baden argues that international brands have misread the Chinese domestic market by overly focusing on Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, ignoring the consumption growth in Tier 3 and Tier 4 cities which still have not yet been exposed to enough brands.  

“I do think China will have a very different way of responding to the tariffs this year and actually it’s going to be a good opportunity for brands because they will be forced to focus on Tier 3 and 4 versus Tier 1 and 2.” 

This increasingly will be a focus for Publicis, as it seeks to lead its global clients deeper into China’s heartlands.  What is key,  Lin-Baden warns, is to be very precise using addressable ID to find those in smaller cities with brand affinity, or budgets can be easily wasted in such vast and dispersed markets.  

Creativity’s tech and media-driven future

The Chinese market isn’t the only business opportunity that too many are writing off prematurely, according to Lin-Baden. The creative business is another. To be clear, the revenue mix at Publicis, as with most large agency holding companies, has skewed steadily in favour of media over creative for many years now, with more clients also increasing their spend with them on tech-based solutions. Lin-Baden sees more opportunity for creative by embracing and leveraging the technology and media capabilities clients increasingly want. 

“I see the creative business growing in our group. It’s not dying,” Lin-Baden says. “I see the creative business growing when they work close together with media.” 

Already, creative production, which used to be solely the function of creative teams, has evolved into a much more engineered process—like media distribution has— driven by content production tech stacks.  Yes, some legacy processes remain, but Lin-Baden sees a more complementary skill set developing between creative and media with the help of technology and automation. 

Since its restructuring, Publicis dislikes placing its client work in 'swim lanes’ like creative, media and PR. Lin-Baden points out that much of their media business is actually driven by their creative agencies.  Some creative clients might have a smaller budget without a full-blown media plan but want their content idea driven and positioned through media, and so media experts are brought in as a capability support for creative.  

“Client requirements move from today to tomorrow,” Lin-Baden says, which is why they want to work with teams that can tap into different capabilities quickly.  

“A client may say: ‘I need a big integrated marketing communication (IMC), so give me your chief creative officer’. Six months later they say: ‘I love your idea but I have a new product launch’ which requires a precision media plan. Do you want to change the IMC again? They may not, and this is where empowering creative agencies to have a super strong media expertise is very important,” Lin-Baden says.  

“We train creative people to understand media, so when they propose an idea to a client, it’s very media-executable,” she adds. The creative teams’ work stream nowadays is focused on becoming more AI-driven, she points out, not just through generative AI, but in using data to see which creative story lands best with a certain segment, allowing for better audience-driven creative planning early.  

“And you will be amazed to see how creative people love learning media because they want to have an idea that works well across platforms. To do that, they have to know the nuance of media, the words that work and about the audiences on certain media,” Lin-Baden points out. 

Still a talent-led business?

So, while some see the rise of creators alongside the demise of the traditional creative agency model as a problem for the industry in recruiting young talent, Lin-Baden suggests we’re missing the point when it comes to engaging creative youth.  

“The best way for our industry to flourish is by not putting people in a box,” Lin-Baden says. Younger talent are adept at multitasking and they like having flexibility, which is why joining a ‘Groupe’ of 35 agencies without barriers is better than joining a single one, she posits.  

But is talent still an agency’s number one selling point? Or have we already moved to an era where an agency’s technology tools and applications are what differentiates one agency’s advantage over another? 

“The origin of this industry is to have amazing thinking and creative qualities in order to identify a new opportunity, a source of growth, relevance for our clients and even a new product,” Lin-Baden says.  She argues the real talent challenge in the industry today is in having enough people who know how to read different types of data. It’s like learning a new language, and AI will help to train people in that language.  

“We need quality people who know how to bring those languages together and imagine [what’s possible],” she says. AI may become more sentient in future, but today we cannot expect AI to imagine, even using the best prompts. Conversely, we need the technology and data to prompt our imaginations and free up time and space for them.  

“If you ask the young people coming into our office why they want to join an agency, they say: ‘l love the creativity and the passion in the work’. If a year later they’re saying: ‘Now I’m only doing repetitive work’, that’s not what we want to see.”