Name: Jennifer Fischer Designation: Chief Innovation and Growth Officer, Publicis Groupe MENA Years in the industry: 20 years Years in the Middle East region: 18 years
Jennifer Fischer is Chief Innovation and Growth Officer at Publicis Groupe MENA, where she drives cross-disciplinary collaboration across more than 17 agencies and more than 3,600 talents, uniting creativity, data, technology and media to shape the next chapter of growth for brands and the industry at large.
A brilliant team that inspired me every day, winning Best New Business Team and partnering to put seven companies on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list. Together we launched the Resilience Business Pulse at the height of geopolitical uncertainty, interviewing leaders across the region; ran the third edition of Growth Club; delivered LionX sprints with brands such as Visa; launched VivaTech Trends; brought Youth Studio to life; processed and supported hundreds of pitches; and kicked off Atelier Potentialis and Publicis Groupe’s Foresight stream. A year of building, not promising, and doing it with joy. My thanks to Publicis Groupe and Bassel Kakish for the space to build things that matter.
Best book you’ve read in the past 12 months It opens with: “I open my eyes and don’t know where I am or who I am.” Andre Agassi tells his story beautifully, narrating the psychology of tennis and the reality of physical and mental exhaustion. Read Open: An Autobiography .
One thing the industry needs to improve as a priority: Fewer promises, more proof. The tech-ification of advertising pulls us towards hype. Our job is to resist that gravity and ship real solutions.
One point of focus for 2026 within the organisation Foresight, building the muscle to explore potential futures rather than simply reacting to the present one.
One quality essential to leadership Care. Backed by consistency.
Words of advice to young leaders Lean into your fears. More often than not, they point at exactly what you need to do to grow.
One ad that you enjoyed in the past 12 months Trade Republic’s World Cup spot in France: “This is Brad Pitt. And now that I have your attention, here are three benefits of Trade Republic…”
One thing that you’ve unlearnt in the past 12 months The idea that what you’ve learnt has to be immediately useful.
POWER ESSAY: WHAT A 100-YEAR-OLD INDUSTRY CAN LEARN FROM 250 MILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTION
Modern advertising is about a century old. Evolution has been running the same experiment called “what survives change?” for 250 million years, and it has notes for us.
Lesson one: size is not resilience – The Permian-Triassic extinction, 252 million years ago, remains the worst thing that ever happened to life on Earth. Around 90 per cent of all species vanished. Then, 66 million years ago, a meteorite ended the dinosaurs. In both cases, the same pattern held: the dominant rarely made it. The survivors were the small, the odd and the adaptable – the species nobody would have bet on. The lesson isn’t that being big is bad. It’s that being big and brittle is a fatal combination. Our industry is currently running a live experiment on this exact question. Some are betting that the answer is scale – that if you become the biggest thing in the room, you win. But if your model leans on one revenue stream, one client type and one way of making money, then you’re built for the last disruption, not the next one. Dominance feels like safety. It’s often just a larger target.
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