City profile

Maurice Lévy

“To be extremely honest, I rejected the idea at first,” said Publicis chairman Maurice Lévy, who has taken on the daunting task of stemming “the flow of bad news” at WeWork as “interim chief marketing officer”. A younger person might have suited the role better, the French advertising grandee told the FT, “but there is an emergency situation”. Lévy, 77, expects to be in the role for no more than “a few weeks or months”, and is talking up the turnaround of the property company, which has lost nearly $40bn in value this year, as “an interesting and fun challenge”. Tell that to the 2,400 people who are losing their jobs, or the 1,000 more earmarked to be outsourced.

Lévy’s appointment was one of the most astonishing of 2019, said Katie Deighton on The Drum. It has baffled some WeWorkers, who reckon the loss-making firm’s problems stem less from “branding” issues than from a fundamentally faulty business model. And the ethics of installing the wily Publicis “patriarch” – a longtime associate of WeWork’s “fix-it-fast” chairman, Marcelo Claure – seem dubious. “Maurice is an ad man, so it’s unlikely he’s going to say, ‘WeWork don’t need advertising’,” said Allen Adamson of the NYU Stern School of Business. At a time when they’ll “be watching every penny, they now have a fox watching the henhouse”. But this seems to be part of the deal. WeWork decided to hire Publicis, says Lévy, “and as part of this agreement, Marcelo asked me to help fix the marketing and communications issues.”