MattCreamer.com

I made a trip to Paris this winter to meet the French financier/corporate raider/industrialist Vincent Bollore. He was pretty much unknown in the U.S. until about a three or so years ago when he took over Havas, the French company that owns a bunch of ad agencies including Euro RSCG. It’s not that Euro’s a household name in America. But owning a big chunk of the ad busines, most of which is in NY and London, ramped up Bollore’s awareness in those places. A lot of ad power brokers right now are keeping an eye on what moves Bollore, who has a lot of cash to use as well as a favorable Euro-to-dollar exchange rate, makes. Nonetheless, Bollore remains something of an enigma, partially because that’s the way raiders do things and partially because, I think, he’s still trying to figure out how to shape his media and advertising empire. In this profile, I try to get at what he’s been up to and where he’s going while giving some insight into his personality. It’s long, but bear with it.

Here’s the opening

Part of Vincent Bolloré’s media empire — a TV station, a radio station and two newspapers — is stuffed into three floors in an unspectacular office building just across the Seine from Paris, in a suburb called Puteaux. One afternoon in March, Mr. Bolloré led a few visitors on a whirlwind tour through his collection of media outlets, striding briskly and dispensing a bonjour here, a ça va there to the hired young hands.

 

On the fourth floor, standing amid a bank of Mac workstations manned by people producing his free afternoon paper, Direct Soir, Mr. Bolloré observed, “They look to be doing nothing, but they’re putting out the paper.”

Later, while Mr. Bolloré was bounding down a stairwell with plaster chipping off the walls, the topic was his friend Rupert Murdoch, whom Mr. Bolloré mistakenly insisted is wedded to a paid model for his newspapers. (In fact, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp. publishes The London Paper, a free sheet.) When it comes to media and advertising, he said, “I know 10% of what I should.”

That’s an interesting statement coming from the man who has arguably become the leading protagonist in the final phase of the two-decade-long big bang that’s consolidated the marketing-services business, l’homme who will decide the futures of Havas and Aegis Group and, perhaps indirectly, even Interpublic and Publicis Groupe. Still, the knowledge gap is forgivable when you consider his newness to the business and that in the vast scope of his holdings, his media and advertising business has the feel of a well-tended model train occupying a central place in a large mansion. It is a conversation piece, a bright, shiny, relatively new thing that grabs attention, but it is not the main event. That would be the amazingly diverse collection of businesses Mr. Bolloré began accumulating in 1981, when, as a junior investment banker, he bought a paper company begun by his family back from Edmond de Rothschild for a single, symbolic franc….