Publicis China parts ways with executive following subway incident

Publicis China has parted ways with Gregory Wu, formerly GM for digital partnerships with Zenith, after a video surfaced in which he was accused of taking video under a woman's skirt on a Shanghai subway.

The widely circulated video shows a man and woman confronting Wu in a subway, accusing him of surreptitiously taking video under the woman's skirt. This action is not shown in the video, but the man appears to delete something from Wu's phone and Wu does not appear to be denying the accusation.

According to a Publicis spokesperson, the incident occurred and the video appeared online before the Mid-Autumn Festival last week, but the video went viral yesterday.

After the incident, Publicis China dealt with the matter quickly. An official statement provided to Campaign Asia-Pacific said:

At Publicis Groupe, we have a strict policy regarding employee behavior and we do not condone behaviors that are not in line with the Chinese law and employees must behavior [sic] with highest level of ethics. As such, the said personnel is no longer an employee of the company.

The company used similar language in an internal memo obtained by Campaign.

Wu has more than 10 years of experience in the field of digital marketing. Before Publicis, he worked for MTV Asia, Baidu, Saatchi & Saatchi, Carat, Maxus and 180China. He was named to Campaign Asia-Pacific's China Digital A-List in 2016, at which time he was listed as working for Starcom MediaVest Group.