Publicis was set for a big day today, with a virtual seminar headlined by Michelle Obama.
Everything was about set to go when YouTube, which Publicis was utilizing as a live video platform for the event hosted over Marcel, suddenly went down this morning as part of a larger Google outage.
Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun explained the issue and resulting postponement with a lighthearted video which also references the recent end-of-year with former CEO Maurice Lévy.
Sadoun was not shy about his frustration with the latest thing to go wrong in 2020 and joked about what it said about clients and Publicis alike needing to decrease their reliance on platforms.
While Google was quickly back online today, Sadoun explained that they made the difficult decision to postpone out of concern that anyone might not be able to watch the seminar live.
He outlined the seminar sessions for the rest of the week, starting tomorrow with a session featuring Michelle Obama, which will address Publicis’ DEI agenda and vision for 2021, one Wednesday featuring Bob Iger about “Winning in a Platform World” and concluding Thursday with a session dedicated to “The Future of Work” featuring Satya Nadella.