GroupM Global CEO Brian Lesser
British agency holding group WPP had a tough 2024 overall, with today’s financial results showing that full-year like-for-like revenues minus pass-through costs were down by 1 percent, on the lower end of the company’s previous guidance. WPP expects a similar picture next year, forecasting like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs of flat to -2 percent.
As WPP’s executives look to right the ship, a lot of the focus is on its media arm GroupM. While GroupM continues to grow overall, WPP CEO Mark Read said it needs to do so at a faster rate in order for WPP to close the gap in total growth between itself and its competitors, since media makes up so much of WPP’s business. “If you look at the gap with our peers, it’s really about GroupM,” said Read. “We’re probably about a ten percent delta from where we need to be, and it’s half our business, so [for GroupM specifically] it’s a five percent delta”.
Leading that charge is Brian Lesser, GroupM’s global CEO who returned to the company last summer, following stints at ad tech businesses Xandr and InfoSum. Lesser has generally been seen as a strong pick for the top job. He’s familiar with GroupM, having previously been CEO of GroupM in North America and of its trading desk Xaxis, and has extensive experience working on the data side of the business through Xandr and InfoSum.
Having had half a year to settle back into the business, Lesser this morning joined WPP’s earnings call to lay out his vision for GroupM going forward. One particular point stood out – while some competitors are building their businesses around their owned-and-operated and identity units, GroupM is placing its bets firmly on AI.
From ID to AI
Lesser described five priorities GroupM is focusing on as it evolves its business: data and technology, people, innovation, collaboration, and design. While these are fairly broad headlines which all of the big agency groups would likely claim for themselves, some of the details behind these plans give interesting insight into how GroupM is differing from its competitors.
On data and technology, Lesser said GroupM is pushing for 100 percent adoption of its AI powered platforms WPP Open and Media Studio, which he said “will enable [GroupM’s] shift from ID to AI, that underpins our data strategy”. He added that Group is seeing the market “quickly moving from identity-based solutions to AI driven connectivity”,
“We believe that data connectivity is more important than simply owning a database, and the value of connectivity will only grow over time,” said Lesser. “No matter how many traditional IDs you own, it will never be enough. The real power lies in connecting data across publishers, partners, retailers, platforms, and clients, and thoughtfully using our own first-party data assets in conjunction with the available data in the world.”
“The future is about connecting disparate data sets to extract insights, create predictive models, and drive performance,” Lesser added. “Traditional ID solutions like those grounded in email addresses only learn from overlapping data points, relying on outdated lookalike models that limit insights. Using technologies like federated learning, we can create shared knowledge and predictions across all of our partners without sharing raw data, and activate via a simple connector.”
Connecting up disparate data sources is, of course, advertising identifier’s raison d’être, and agencies which work with these identifiers talk about their ability to pool multiple massive data sources together in service of their clients’ campaigns. But Lesser claims that no identifier, no matter how scaled, can achieve this across total scale of all datasets which advertisers work with. “The only way to harness that scale is by leveraging AI at every step of the process,” he said. “No singular database can manage that scale and complexity.”
WPP’s two biggest competitors, Publicis Groupe and the soon-to-be-merged combination of Omnicom and Interpublic, both own the sorts of identity platforms which Lesser described: Epsilon and Acxiom respectively. And indeed a lot of Publicis’s recent success has been attributed to Epsilon, which Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun has placed at the heart of the agency group’s strategy. Lesser was asked later on the earnings call whether GroupM would be in the market for a similar asset, and he said that although data ownership will still be important to help build and power AI capabilities, GroupM is “not focused on [acquiring] a legacy database at the moment”.
Thus, Lesser’s strategy for GroupM appears significantly different from his rivals. The contrast was also drawn by Publicis’ Sadoun in his company’s earnings earlier this month. Sadoun emphasised that while other agencies are beginning to position themselves as AI businesses, Publicis isn’t going down that path.
Principal media high up the agenda
The other pillars of GroupM’s strategy were talked about in broader terms. The ‘people’ element for example will see GroupM “invest in technical employees and workforce development, ensuring alignment with our clients’ future needs”, according to Lesser. The focus on ‘design’ meanwhile will see GroupM continue to simplify its structure, to become a unified company “with one voice to clients and partners”.
There was one other interesting tidbit in the ‘innovation’ section. Proprietary media (also called principal media), controversial though it is in parts of the industry, continues to be a growth area for the big agency groups — and one which stakeholders want to see them investing in. And Lesser said this will be a focus for GroupM too, stating that the company is “introducing new proprietary trading models and next generation media products,” which will allow GroupM “to offer more performance to our clients at efficient prices using our expertise, scale, and data capabilities to redefine industry standards”.
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