Former Ogilvy Paris president and CCO, Matthieu Elkaim, has been appointed managing director of La Pac, where he will lead the company’s growth in the French market alongside president Jérôme Denis. Denis will remain closely involved in La Pac while focusing increasingly on the development of the wider group and its activities in France and internationally.

Elkaim has worked at some of advertising’s most prestigious agencies, including TBWA, DDB, CLM BBDO and Ogilvy in a multi-awarded career of 25 years. After beginning his career as a copywriter, he went on to become one of France’s youngest creative leaders before being named president of Ogilvy Paris in 2020.

Over the course of his career, he has created campaigns for an extensive roster of famous brands, from Nike and Mercedes to Ubisoft and, more recently, Dove, Coca-Cola and Perrier. He has also been a longstanding presence on the international creative awards circuit, serving on many of the industry’s leading juries and chairing a number of them in France and abroad.

But production has always been an important part of Elkaim’s work. Alongside his advertising career, he founded independent production company, Jack n’a qu’un œil, in 2018, producing several award-winning films and series, including Les Papillons Noirs, which achieved both critical and popular success well beyond France. After leaving Ogilvy last May, moving to the production side of the industry was a natural next step – particularly at a time when the lines between advertising, entertainment and cultural content are becoming increasingly blurred.

Why La Pac? For Elkaim and Denis, the partnership has been more than fifteen years in the making. The two first met in 2008 and, over the years, discovered a shared curiosity and vision of the industry, the same desire to continually question how it works and how it can evolve, and a common commitment to creative excellence and human values. All that was missing was the right moment to work together.

Elkaim was also drawn to La Pac for its remarkable legacy. With more than fifty years of history and an extraordinary body of work – from Chanel’s Égoïste and the Evian babies to Perrier’s lioness and Leroy Merlin’s Life’s Adventure – La Pac is one of the world’s longest-standing production companies still in operation. More than half a century after its creation, it remains an renowned name in French production and one of the country’s top three advertising film production companies.

This is also a new chapter for La Pac. In the eleven years since Jérôme Denis took over the company, it has expanded well beyond its historic advertising production business to become a broader Rosaal entertainment group.

Today, the group encompasses La Pac, Pac Story, La Pac Films, Very Content, Omar Films and 2001, and also represents directors from Stink Paris and Superprime Paris. This diversification has allowed it to build new synergies across its companies and talent, in France, while maintaining the strong human values at the heart of the business – summed up in La Pac’s motto, “It’s all about people,” and its emphasis on talent, experience, expertise, trust and loyalty.

Elkaim’s appointment is designed to accelerate this next phase. As managing director, he will take responsibility for La Pac’s operations and development in France, helping the company navigate the challenges and opportunities emerging as the advertising and production industries continue to evolve.

The new structure will also allow Denis to devote more of his attention to the wider group, its partners and its growing activities across branded entertainment, fiction and documentary, while continuing to work closely with Elkaim on La Pac’s development.

Matthieu Elkaim commented, “Ridley Scott, Jean-Paul Goude, John McTiernan, Roman Coppola, Damien Chazelle, David LaChapelle… joining La Pac is intimidating, but it’s also incredibly exciting. Ultimately, this is why I got into the industry in the first place: to be on set and make films.

Twenty-five years later, moving into production feels almost inevitable, particularly after my detour into cinema and fiction – another world that brands will undoubtedly engage with more and more in the future. Joining Jérôme, his teams and La Pac’s incredibly talented directors is a new chapter I’m hugely excited about. It feels like exactly where I should be.”

Jérôme Denis added, “I first met Matthieu on the Tiji Ballons campaign in 2008, when he was working with Pierrette Diaz at DDB under Alexandre Hervé and I was a producer at Wanda. Since then, I’ve come to know him as someone who is endlessly curious and deeply loyal, with a sharp but positive critical eye, great warmth and a genuine ability to bring people together.

As La Pac continues to grow, and as advertising and the wider audiovisual industry undergo major changes, Matthieu’s experience at the intersection of advertising, production and fiction makes him the ideal person to write La Pac’s next chapter alongside me.”