Inside GroupM’s ‘journey of transformation’
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Uncertainty is the new normal.
That was one takeaway from GroupM’s global head of business intelligence Kate Scott-Dawkins at the tail end of last year, as she unpacked the state of the global ad market.
The same is perhaps true of GroupM itself and its parent WPP, which have undergone a transition that in recent years has led to high turnover among senior leadership and concern from the City that the once-world-leading media group has fallen behind competitors.
“We’re on a journey of transformation,” GroupM UK CEO Kate Rowlinson said in an interview with The Media Leader. “There’s nothing more certain than change in our industry and in our business.”
In early March, investment bank UBS reiterated its “sell” rating on shares of WPP, asking rhetorically: “Will WPP ever grow again?”
“We do not think operating performance is likely to improve without a change in strategy or asset mix,” the report, seen by The Media Leader, reads.
In its full-year 2024 earnings results in February, WPP reported a 0.7% decline in revenue, although GroupM was a relative bright spot within the holding group, with revenue up 2.7% year on year.
‘Pressure to perform’
In July 2024, GroupM announced that Brian Lesser would succeed Christian Juhl as global CEO after Juhl’s five-year tenure.
Lesser’s adtech experience was seen as a boon to GroupM’s “comprehensive efforts” to improve its “competitive positioning” via greater investment in AI, data and proprietary media. The company has lost a number of high-profile accounts recently, including Sky in the UK and Coca-Cola in North America, despite Lesser reportedly being hands on during the latter’s review.
Matthew Bloxham, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, thought the “jury is still out” on WPP’s growth strategy under Lesser.
“It hasn’t delivered market-leading top-line growth or margin expansion,” he told The Media Leader. “The cautious approach on M&A hasn’t delivered a step change in capabilities or taken them into new high-growth markets.
“The investments in AI are encouraging, but it’s hard to see how they are differentiated from what rivals are doing.”
Meanwhile, The Media Leader understands that senior leadership turnover has caused anxiety among top GroupM employees. EMEA CEO Josh Krichefski announced he was stepping down last month after 14 years at the agency. His Europe remit was filled by Mindshare global chief operating officer Michael Karg.
Under Lesser, GroupM has removed global agency CEO roles. Nick Lawson, EssenceMediacom’s global CEO, left in December and last month that agency’s global chief operating officer, Frances Ralston-Good, also announced her departure.
On the other hand, Mindshare global CEO Adam Gerhart was promoted to GroupM’s global chief client officer and Wavemaker global CEO Toby Jenner became GroupM global chief business officer.
McKinsey & Company partner Emily Del Greco also joined at the start of the year as GroupM’s global chief operating officer.
Bloxham said the high turnover among senior leadership “isn’t much of a surprise”, given the large amount of agency consolidation at WPP — along with other holding groups — in recent years.
“The pressure to perform has never been higher given the multi-year total return underperformance vs rivals like Publicis and Omnicom,” he added. “It doesn’t seem like GroupM is firing on all cylinders in the key US market, so a lot of focus is on getting that right.”
However, one former employee at a GroupM agency told The Media Leader that the internal mood music, at least in the UK, is “probably less savage than it feels externally”, with the vast majority of employees remaining heads down and focused on day-to-day work — especially if they are client-facing.
“Is everything brilliant? No. Is everything terrible? Also no,” this person explained, noting that GroupM agencies have also won or retained a great deal of global business in the past year, including Amazon, Unilever and Electronic Arts. GroupM also retained Coke’s UK business despite the loss across the Atlantic.
“It’s cyclical,” they added, suggesting that while Publicis has more recently had its day in the sun (Publicis has outstripped rivals in terms of organic growth in recent years), that can come to an end at any time.
InfoSum acquisition ‘affirms’ Lesser’s data-led vision
Since joining, The Media Leader understands that Lesser has made a mixed impression on colleagues.
At an all-staff meeting held last month and relayed to The Media Leader by multiple sources, Lesser controversially indicated that, within the next four or five years, there will “probably” be plans that “leave the building” that no planner ever saw.
Some staff, particularly planners, took that to mean their jobs could be at risk, although The Media Leader understands that Lesser was not outlining such a drastic change.
Indeed, Rowlinson clarified that Lesser “certainly didn’t say [media] plans wouldn’t be overseen by humans”.
“What he was talking about was the degree to which tactical planning and optimisation will increasingly be managed by machines,” she continued. “And it is already, right? A lot of the in-campaign optimisation and tactical optimisation is already done by AI.
“What it means is that our talent and our people all move upstream, so planning becomes much more about strategy, innovation, measurement, analytics. Let the machines do the heavy lifting and the optimisation, and then the humans take that and turn it into strategies for next year and iterate on the results that come out of the platform.”
Lesser’s digital focus has extended into mergers and acquisitions, and he is likely to have had a strong hand in WPP’s acquisition of data platform InfoSum last week (Lesser was chairman and CEO of InfoSum from 2020 to 2024). The holding group heralded the move as a “major strategic step forward for WPP’s AI-driven data offer”.
“It’s a really exciting acquisition for us,” Rowlinson said. “It allows us to really accelerate the Open Intelligence data approach. It allows us to move from ID to AI; to have a data approach that doesn’t require clients to rely solely on IDs, doesn’t require clients to move their data and allows us to apply federated learning to how we deliver solutions for clients.”
As Rowlinson described, WPP Open, WPP’s AI-driven marketing operating system, is central to the group’s future growth and InfoSum’s integration will further enrich the offering.
According to WPP, the marketing tech can deliver 29% year-on-year increases in productivity, 86% reduced delivery times and 75% reduced costs.
Another former GroupM agency employee told The Media Leader that they were sceptical of the acquisition, noting that InfoSum doesn’t have data of its own (unlike Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services) nor modelling capabilities, among other concerns.
“The GroupM crowd have always fantasised of having a data ‘spine’, but at most what they’ve bought with InfoSum is some expensive cloud storage, some client relationships that would be hard to activate and some technology that is being commodified by the hyper-scalers,” they argued. “A logo for another doomed pitch deck, in other words.”
Meanwhile, multiple current and former members of staff indicated that Lesser has hosted office hours-esque meetings, known as “More with Lesser”, in an attempt to be transparent with staff about his strategy.
One former employee called the meetings “very weird”, although they indicated support for Lesser’s future-first mindset — something that Rowlinson also championed.
“Brian has brought a new energy around data technology, a renewed energy around innovation,” Rowlinson pointed out. “The acquisition of InfoSum really just affirms all that.”
What is GroupM in 2025?
Still, employees have been on edge for other reasons.
A controversial four-day-a-week return-to-office (RTO) policy was met with a 15,000-strong petition to suspend the effort. Ultimately, the policy came into effect last week, albeit with complaints from staff spilling out into the public over a lack of seating at the New York office.
While acknowledging the RTO policy has “not been without its challenges” and “probably came as a bit of surprise to our people”, Rowlinson commented: “I’d like to think that people have just got used to the idea now. We are in this incredible new campus, 1 Southwark Bridge. The environment is honestly fantastic. It’s the best office I’ve ever worked in, personally.”
She added that since media is a “relationship business”, face-to-face interaction is key to winning and retaining business, although she indicated that GroupM will continue to be flexible on working arrangements where necessary.
Perhaps more alarming is the context within which the RTO rollback is occurring. The media industry has found itself swept up in wider political upheaval stirred by the election of US president Donald Trump and moves by him and his aide, X owner Elon Musk, to roll back DEI practices and reportedly strong-arm advertisers into spending on X.
WPP CEO Mark Read raised eyebrows in an interview with the Financial Times last month in which he said the group “certainly saw more clients coming back to [X] in the past few months”, adding: “We’re talking about how we can support [X] in getting their message across that it’s safer to advertise, that it’s time to come back to the platform.”
When asked by The Media Leader whether GroupM agrees with the stance outlined by Read, Rowlinson declined to comment.
Why uncertainty is the new normal — with GroupM’s Kate Scott-Dawkins
Read’s comments did cause alarm bells for one former employee, who told The Media Leader that they “feel a bit uncomfortable about an ad agency being overtly positive about any partner”, let alone one with a poor track record on brand safety and close ties to a controversial White House.
The comments also came soon before WPP cut references to DEI in its annual report. The section on executives’ non-financial performance was previously entitled “People and DEI” but has now been renamed “People and culture”, much to employees’ concern.
Given all the changes, alongside years of GroupM’s agency brands being arguably undermined by a more centralised approach to organising the holding group, Rowlinson admitted that the debate around the future of GroupM has become charged.
“I think there’s quite a lot of conversation at the moment around, you know, what is GroupM?” Rowlinson acknowledged.
“For me, GroupM is an innovator. We’ve innovated throughout our history and we continue to innovate moving forward.”