Tough media survivor sees a global game plan fall his way: John Perriss is basking in his better-late-than-never predictions. (Headliner).(profile, chief executive officer at Zenith Optimedia)(Brief Article)

Everybody in media keeps boasting about how big they are. The current jostling for top slot in the global media rankings has come to resemble a bunch of overly competitive men comparing the size of their manhoods. In which case John Perriss, the newly installed chief executive of the Publicis Groupe's super-agency Zenith Optimedia, has arrived al the table with the fourth-largest in town.

Perriss is not as boastful as some of his rivals, but says: "There is this debate about research, and the thing about size is that it enables you to hire good people in that area and create good resources. You're handicapped when you're small."

The decision to link the Zenith and Optimedia brands will also bring increased buying clout, with Perriss saying that the next task is to examine ways of working together in each market.

Perriss says he has always had the ambition to run a global media operation. His proposition to Maurice Saatchi in 1986, when he was the media director at Saatchi & Saatchi, was that within five years the media industry would be dominated by five or six global players and the agency needed to back a specialist media brand to capitalise on this. The birth of Zenith followed in 1988, though Perriss admits he overestimated the speed of change.

"I got the timing of how quickly all this would happen hopelessly wrong, but we are one of those [networks] now," he says.

The impressive thing about Perriss is that he is a great survivor. After more than 30 years in the media business he is still landing bigger, better jobs. As he puts it: "At the point when a lot of people thought I was going off into the sunset this happens, and I'm going to be around for some time now."

Those who know Perriss say that this is because he is an extremely tough operator. He is self-effacing, affable and charming, but this disguises his ruthless ambition. Martin Bowley, the chief executive of Carlton Sales, says: "He's the perfect man for this role. All those years ago he had the idea of forming Zenith. The most obvious quality he has is steel. He's still there. He hasn't just hung on, he's driven things, ...