Monday mash-up: JWT in tatters, daft job titles and league tables

Resigned: JWT CEO Gustavo Martinez

With the reputational disaster engulfing JWT, some interesting – and risible – job titles emerging from the woodwork, and Campaign’s annual league tables and school reports, it’s been a busy week for Dominic Mills to sink his teeth into.

There was a time when JWT was a byword for probity, integrity and decency. You rarely met someone from JWT who didn’t live up to those qualities.

Today its reputation – painstakingly built over the course of 150 years – is in tatters.

The allegations of sexism and racism by JWT’s comms director, Erin Johnson, which forced the resignation of its CEO, Gustavo Martinez, last Thursday, have sullied its name and some of its responses have made it a laughing stock.

You can read the full list of allegations in the court documents here. And what a tawdry, vulgar, tale is revealed.

It is as yet unclear whether Johnson will settle out of court. WPP will be desperate enough to pay her a fortune to do so, but in a way that would be unfortunate for the rest of us: the full story deserves out.

In the meantime, though, WPP will have to ask itself some extraordinarily painful questions, including:
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– How did it appoint a man with such views to do this job, not least to an organisation which stands for everything he doesn’t? Did he successfully hide his true colours, and only let them off the leash when he got the job?

– How did both JWT and WPP fail to deal with Johnson’s earlier complaints? Individuals at both organisations, certainly JWT’s chief talent officer (what a laughable title that now turns out to be), Laura Agostini, who seems to have wilfully ignored Johnson, must surely be culpable.

(If you want something to make you stick your fingers down your throat, here’s her bio and job description, taken from the JWT website:

“As J. Walter Thompson’s Chief Talent Officer, Laura leads the charge to actualize [sic] our international talent and HR strategies, bringing to life our goal to attract, develop and retain the talent of the future.” (Eeeurgh. Makes me cringe.)

– To what extent did Martinez colour the culture at JWT, so that other employees thought sexism and racism were acceptable? After all, staff take their behavioural cues from those at the top, and there may be those who, observing Martinez, thought that sort of thing was OK. It appears Agostini, and possibly others at WPP, thought it was.

– And who was the idiot lawyer at JWT or WPP, who sought to claim that a video Johnson submitted as evidence was inadmissible because it would give away some of JWT’s proprietary practices, and “disclosure to competitors through a public filing would cause significant damage to it”?

Yeah, well, not half as much damage as a) the case itself and b) hiding behind such a patently ridiculous excuse.

Welcome back, daft jobs

Thanks to my colleagues Ellen Hammett and David Pidgeon for drawing my attention to the latest trends in daft job titles.

Apparently data scientists and analysts are just too boring to be cool. The new, new thing is ‘data artists‘.

The data ‘artist’, apparently, combines both left- and right-brain thinking, and has so much brain power that they can “synthesise vast amounts of data, whether it’s qual or quant, or whether it’s structured or unstructured.”

Hmm. Well, if I was that chuffing brain-powered, the last thing I would be in would be data – unless, of course, all these powers had left no room for any social skills.

But as my colleagues point out to me, the thing about artists is that they’re all individuals. So you could put three artists in front of the same scene – say sunset over Waterloo Bridge – and get either a Turner, a Jackson Pollock or a Damien Hirst-type dead animal. Same ‘data’, different interpretations. Back to the drawing board on that one.

Still, while we’re having fun with job titles, I can imagine JWT or WPP is drawing up job specs for some new roles to replace the clearly soon-to-depart chief talent officer Laura Agostini: no more CTOs, welcome to the world of the CDO, CWO, CSO, and CRO.

That’s Chief Denial Officer; Chief Whitewash Officer; Chief Sexist Officer; and Chief Racist Officer (possible job share).

League table heaven

The annual study session that is Campaign league tables, requiring an extended, if thoroughly rewarding read, is back.

Having broken through the £500m billings barrier, AMV tops the table. There’s not much surprise there, but it’s worth noting that it has consistently done so. To the best of my knowledge, it has done so for about 20 years, while challengers like McCann, JWT, O&M, M&C Saatchi, old Saatchi and BBH have fallen away.

It’s hard to get to the top, but it’s even harder to stay there (just ask Man U fans or Tesco shareholders). One client hit – look at Rainey Kelly (down 19%), or M&C Saatchi (down 28%) – can make a major dent. Yet AMV sails on serenely, seemingly immune to the vicissitudes of client behaviour, and buoyed by a consistency – of output and leadership – that others can only envy.

Pretty much the same applies to MediaCom, which has sat atop the table for almost as long as AMV, and this in a discipline where the wins (and losses) tend to be of a higher magnitude, meaning agencies can shift up and down the table with greater rapidity. As with AMV its magic sauce is consistency.

Sticking with media, note the continuing slide of IPG’s mainstream media agencies, UM (down 8%) and Initiative (down 21%). Their combined billings – £310m – are just over a quarter of Mediacom’s. This is no one-off: the slide has been inexorable. Something needs to happen, and the most likely solution, short of IPG getting out of media altogether, is a merger.

Looking at media billings on a holding company basis, WPP dominates with £2.8bn. If you take total UK display spend as around £19bn, that gives it a market share of about 14-15% or, to put it another way, £1 in every £7 spent in UK media goes through WPP. Remember when Tesco’s share of high street spend was about the same? Just saying…