Buying New Commercial Arts brings obvious benefits: some big accounts, a profitable set-up and experienced management that’s been through all this before.
Ogilvy in the UK, which is merging with NCA under new CEO, NCA founder James Murphy (above with global CEO Devika Bulchandani) hardly looks in need of radical surgery (in fact it’s recovering from just such an intervention a few years ago) but the really interesting element in WPP’s purchase of the four-year old start-up is what impact it may have on the bigger picture, WPP itself.
WPP has been struggling for the past couple of years since a bounce-back from the pandemic, with a series of internal mergers among its creative agencies (not Ogilvy) yet to pay off and trouble at GroupM, its giant media operation and cash cow. It’s forecasting no growth for 2024 unlike soaring French rival Publicis and more sedate, but still progressive, Omnicom.
CEO Mark Read’s overall strategy looks sound enough. Where he seems to struggle is delivery and, usually in advertising, that means people. With a new, and likely more intervention-minded, chairman in Philip Jansen starting next year, he needs to get some forward momentum and soon.
For Ogilvy NCA gives it a British version of David, the Ogilvy spin-off named after its founder, which appears to be doing well despite the high profile breakaway GUT, now owned by consultancy Globant. Globant was itself once a WPP company. NCA will now be able to compete globally with such agencies and other creative offshoots of bigger companies including Accenture Song and Havas’ Uncommon Creative Studio.
But can Murphy and co. help Read with some of his other issues? NCA founders Murphy and CSO David Golding know the WPP of yore very well. When they decided to leave WPP’s RKCR/Y&R to set up adam&eve (now adam&eveDDB after a first mega-buyout) then boss Sir Martin Sorrell sued them for allegedly contacting Lloyds Bank in their period of purdah. The pair hotly deny this (Lloyds rang them they say) but the case was going to court and adam&eve settled for around £1m to avoid even higher legal costs in a protracted case. It looked as though the agency would be still-born (it was subsequently sold to Omnicom for around £110m) but salvation came in the unlikely form of the Phones4U account, shortly followed by John Lewis.
WPP is a different animal now but the two know the ins and outs of big networks and the overriding need to keep people on-side even in vast organisations. Adam&eve may have been known by its staff as adam&evening because of the hours but its senior staff retention rate was admirable and at one point it won 20 pitches on the trot plus, of course, bags of awards. In agencies, media as well as creative, sustained success breeds loyalty and loyalty breeds further momentum. GroupM, now contemplating redundancies after some big account loses, could do with some of that.
Nobody’s suggesting that Murphy and co. are going to be running the whole company but the presence of some experienced hands in or around the building (Ogilvy’s HQ is in WPP’s Sea Containers House) with experience of the coalface of advertising and able to build long-term relations with top notch staff and senior clients should be of wider use to Read. WPP’s PLC board consists mostly of the great and good, not expert practitioners.
