Interview with publicist Jacques Séguéla

Abstract

Jacques Séguéla, a French advertising creative and executive, was still working at the Havas Group when he gave me this interview, in the form of a statement, in the final year of the lockdown, on March 12, 2021. At his request, we continued the conversation on the 15th of the same month. He was born in Paris on February 23, 1934. He entered advertising by chance, as he explained in the conversation. He became one of the most successful, prestigious and influential advertising professionals in France and the world, both as a creative and as an executive, having co-founded the RSCG agency in 1970, which was integrated into Havas in 1996, part of the Vivendi group, where he was when I interviewed him. He is the author of 35 books, two dozen of which are about advertising. His experience and reflection from six decades in French and global advertising were evident in this interview.
For more than an hour, the conversation took place via audiovisual means Paris-Lisbon. The interview was provided by Pedro Graça, president of Havas Worldwide Portugal, as part of a series of interviews I conducted to complement and clarify the research for the History of Advertising in Portugal - With a Case Study of the CUF Group (Parede: Principia, 2023). Due to the topics covered, which did not deal with advertising in Portugal, the interview ended up being used only occasionally in my book, thus justifying its publication, which was actually requested from Séguéla at the beginning of the conversation. I edited the interview for reasons of space and clarity and to add the character of a testimony, while maintaining the fluency of the speech.