Publicis Groupe Appoints Enver Kikava as Chief Executive Officer in Ukraine

Publicis Groupe announced today the appointment of Enver Kikava as Chief Executive Officer in Ukraine to strengthen and accelerate the Groupe’s offering across the country.

Kikava will report to Oleg Popenko, CEO Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Kazakhstan), part of the Groupe’s Central & Northern Europe market, which is led by CEO Jarek Ziebinski.

Kikava has more than 15 years of experience in advertising and media. He joined Starcom in 2003 as a research and analytics specialist and was appointed Managing Director in 2008. Under his leadership, Starcom was consistently one of the best performing agencies in the market - taking top positions at industry rankings, including Agency of the Year awards. In 2017, Kikava was promoted to a new role of Media Business Director responsible for the development of the media agency brands for Publicis One.

Kikava commented, “This appointment is a great honour and great responsibility. Our clients, locally and globally, are seeking new operating models and added value to their businesses in the midst of growing economic uncertainties and technology disruption. We believe that an integrated proposal built on the alchemy of creativity and technology is the best answer to these challenges. In Ukraine, we have strong agency brands across creative, media and performance marketing disciplines which provides a unique opportunity for a truly holistic, integrated offering to our existing and future clients. My key focus as CEO will be to help our agency teams make this vision a reality.”

Popenko added, “Our Ukrainian offices have an impressive history of achievements, growing from a small agency to a market-leading communication group. Our agencies have maintained their leading positions for more than a decade - by constantly evolving, looking for the smartest ways to deliver on areas that matter most to our clients’ businesses. I’m confident that Enver is absolutely the right leader to accelerate our client-focused transformation in the times of great changes in the industry.”

This appointment comes after the Groupe’s recent announcement that it would extend its country model to cover all areas where it is present, appointing leaders across its eight key markets: North America, the United Kingdom, France, DACH (Germany, Switzerland and Austria), Northern & Central Europe, Southern Europe, Asia Pacific & Middle East/Africa, and Latin America.