• The New York Times, Monday, March 28, 2011 12:17 PM

Among other achievements, Publicis recently winning a big chunk of Microsoft's North American ad account proves that the agency's digital strategy is paying off. Publicis CEO Maurice Lévy certainly feels that way, and so does The New York Times.

"In the tradition-bound advertising industry, Mr. Lévy has been one of the strongest advocates of new digital forms of marketing, and he has backed up his words by writing big checks," writes NYT. Five years ago, Lévy spent $1.3 billion on digital agency Digitas, and later $530 million on Razorfish. Since then, the company's growth has outpaced the market, Lévy tells the NYT, while "the digital skills it has acquired are helping it with technology-conscious clients like Microsoft, for which Publicis will manage more than $600 million in North American ad spending."

Says Lévy: "We looked at digital and we invested in digital early on ... We then decided that the shift would be huge, so we invested massively. It happens that we were right."

Read the whole story at The New York Times »