Mark Read, CEO of agency holding group WPP, has announced this morning he is stepping down from his position after nearly seven years in the role. Read will remain in the role until the end of this year, and will help WPP’s Board of Directors appoint his successor.
Read took over the top job in 2018, after previous CEO Sir Martin Sorrell resigned from the role amid allegations of personal misconduct and misuse of company assets — claims which Sorrell denies. Prior to that, Read was WPP’s chief operating officer and CEO of WPP-owned agency Wunderman. He’s spent the bulk of his career at WPP, first joining in 1989 and rejoining in 2002 after a seven year break from the company.
During his tenure as CEO, Read has overseen significant change in the company. He’s driven significant simplification of the group’s internal structure, merging or sunsetting some of its major agency brands and selling a majority stake in market research business Kantar. Read has also pushed WPP’s heavy investment in AI, committing the company to spending £300 million annually on AI tools and technologies. This latter strategy has seen significant change within WPP’s media arm, which recently rebranded from GroupM to WPP Media.
His time heading up the company has also coincided with massive change across the industry as a whole, including the continued shift of ad spend towards the tech giants, the growth of CTV and retail media, the impact of the pandemic and the near continuous economic instability which has followed it, and the growth of generative AI.
Commenting on his departure, Read said that he believes the foundations for WPP’s continued success are in place, and that it is “the right time” to hand over leadership of the company. “When I took on this role our mission was to build a simpler, stronger business, and put structure and new energy behind our creativity and performance, powered by world-leading technology,” he said. “I am proud that our teams across the business have delivered that exceptionally well. Our clients today rate us more highly than ever before, we now work with four of the world’s five most valuable companies, and our revenues with our biggest clients have grown consistently.”
While there has been no indication from Read, WPP, or the company’s Board of Directors as to who might replace him, industry insiders who spoke with VideoWeek suggested that Brian Lesser, CEO of WPP Media, could be a strong contender. Lesser has strong experience on the data side of the business, having previously headed up data clean room InfoSum (which WPP acquired earlier this year). And his development of WPP Media’s AI strategy will be very significant for the future course of WPP as a whole.
A legacy in progress
The announcement indicates that Read’s departure is his own decision. Regardless, he’s faced plenty of scrutiny over his leadership of the company, and not all in the industry will agree with Read’s assessment that WPP is positioned for continued success.
WPP has had some visible struggles in recent years, with a number of high profile account losses contributing to a slide in WPP’s market cap. Notable losses over the past few years include Coca-Cola’s North America media account, Starbucks’ US creative account, Volvo and Pfizer. WPP’s share price has fallen by around 45 percent since Read took the reins, while over the same period rival group Publicis has seen its value jump by close to 90 percent.
Read has also faced internal dissent over a return-to-office mandate issued at the start of this year. Over 20,000 people signed an online petition calling for the mandate to be revoked, criticising Read’s decision.
But changing course for a company as large and complex as WPP takes time, and it may be years before Read’s legacy can be accurately judged. Internal simplification of WPP’s structure, which Read has always framed as a client-led change, has been a lengthy process which is still in progress. WPP’s investment in AI has also involved a lot of background work. Just last week, the company unveiled Open Intelligence, a proprietary ‘Large Marketing Model’, which will have taken a lot of time and money to build.
Even once the internal work behind these sorts of major strategic shifts is completed, it takes a while for this to filter through to account wins, and even longer for account wins to translate to revenue growth on the balance sheet. Publicis Groupe’s recent success demonstrates this fact. Publicis’s acquisition of data business Epsilon in April 2019 has been a key part of its strategy, and has been credited for much of the group’s recent success. But it took a while to bear fruit. In October 2019, Publicis issued a profit warning, citing poor performance from the company’s North American media business.
Time will tell, therefore, whether WPP’s bet on AI will pay off, but Read says the signs are positive. “We’ve been working hard to put AI at the heart of WPP’s business for the last two years. The progress our teams have made has been superb and when I ‘demo’ WPP Open to our clients they are always amazed by what it can do,” he said. “Equipping our people with the power of AI is the best way to help them build their careers in a fast-changing world, do even better work and deliver stronger results for our clients.”
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