DMB&B

The DMB&B name has a distinguished heritage. A New Yorker by birth, Mike Masius came to London in the 1930s to run the local office of American agency Lord & Thomas. He recruited William Fergusson and relaunched the agency as Masius & Fergusson with Colgate-Palmolive as its largest client. Jack Wynne-Williams, who took it over in the 1950s, established it as one of the country's largest agencies with his capture of a string of accounts from Forrest Mars' privately owned Food & Confectionery Group (now Mars). Masius & Fergusson launched that company's Kit-E-Kat and Pal petfood products and other brands including Mars Bar and Maltesers. Following the death of Mike Masius, Wynne-Williams acquired control of the agency and renamed it Masius Wynne-Williams in 1964. In 1973, Masius Wynne-Williams was acquired by D'Arcy MacManus International. A subsequent merger with Benton & Bowles in 1985 created D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles or DMB&B which by then was the country's second biggest agency after JWT with an extensive international network. DMB&B merged in 1999 with the Leo Burnett Group which in turn was acquired by the Publicis Groupe in 2002. Publicis Groupe is currently the world's third largest communications group operating in more than a hundred countries and provides traditional advertising through worldwide networks such as Leo Burnett, Publicis and Saatchi & Saatchi, and agencies like Fallon, BBH and Kaplan Thaler. It also provides digital and media services through Digitas, Razorfish, Starcom MediaVest Group & Zenith Optimedia. Headquartered in Paris, the group was founded in 1926 by Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, known as the "father of French advertising". Publicis is now headed by Maurice Lévy, CEO and Chairman of the Management Board. Elisabeth Badinter, Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet's daughter, is Chair of the Supervisory Board. Publicis Groupe is listed on the Euronext Paris [FR0000130577] and is part of the CAC 40.