What to make of the WPP hackattack?
One person in London today said that Ogilvy & Mather’s spanking new South Bank HQ had imploded and was last seen floating down the Thames towards Tilbury but I’m not sure I believe them.
It will be worse if creative work, which, presumably, is all held on a cloud somewhere, is lost. It’s even worse for WPP’s media buying behemoth GroupM which may find that zillions of orders have disappeared into the ether.
Programmatic media buying, in particular, will fall under the spotlight again; it’s even possible that WPP found itself on the hackers’ radar because of its big involvement in this somewhat opaque activity.
We’ll keep you posted.
I don’t like WPP, but to suggest that programmatic buying has anything to do with this is absurd. The ransomware attack affected lots of companies and governmental bodies alike, most of which have nothing to do with advertising, let alone programmatic buying. Let’s attack WPP for reasons that make sense.