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WPP’s perfect storm: but what about the workers?

Back to the office seems the tip of veritable iceberg at WPP. Unwittingly CEO Mark Read’s (pretty polite and possibly flexible) demand that workers return four says a week has lifted the lid on some other issues at the ad holding company and, just maybe, a way forward.

In an interesting piece in the Sunday Times (subscription required) William Turvill described troubles at design-based agency AKQA, shoehorned into a merger with Grey. Apparently founder Ajaz Ahmed and some senior colleagues tried to buy out the agency last year before Ahmed quit to be followed by other senior resignations.

Among other things, Turvill writes, they felt they weren’t getting due credit for their work and even having access to clients curtailed. Since he left there’s been a deafening silence from Ahmed and co (and WPP.) We suggested a week ago that they were a big new digital agency on waiting to happen.

AKQA and Grey was always a shotgun marriage, part of a process that saw WPP folding JWT (on its uppers after ructions in NYC) Wunderman and Y&R into VML. Read’s judgement looked questionable and an eventual fallout seemed inevitable. This is the last thing you need when you’re trying to create a more modern, collaborative WPP.

Turnvill also writes that T&Pm founder Johnny Hornby (also a WPP global council member) and newly-installed Ogilvy UK CEO James Murphy had contacted the paper in support of Read prior to the article’s publication. On the upside this means that Read has the support of two of the ablest account men and agency builders of recent times, a stronger team than, maybe, he has enjoyed since succeeding founder Sir Martin Sorrell all of seven years.

On the downside these are pretty wealthy people who have accumulated their fortunes partly thanks to WPP (Hornby selling all of what started out as Clemmow Hornby Inge to WPP, the last share sale at the end of last year) and Murphy through the sale of New Commercial Arts (he had previously sold another he agency he co-founded, adam&eve, to Omnicom.)

Nothing wrong in that, of course, But WPP employees, some of whom are complaining about taking a standard of living hit by being forced back to the office (see comments here) are hardly likely to see them as representative of anything but the management.

Perhaps the overriding issue is that WPP, with around 100,000 employees across scores of companies, is just too big. One reason Hornby and Murphy have succeeded is their agencies managed to retain an esprit de corps even as they became big and successful. That’s much harder at a diverse worldwide entity like WPP – as the reported AKQA experience maybe illustrates.

In such companies human resources (HR) is supposed to be the department that grapples with such issues but few employees anywhere these days think these are anything other than redundancy machines – more grim reaper (GR) than HR. Many WPP employees, who only enjoy average salaries, are worried about such a fate. Read’s focus on AI as the way forward (Hornby is another such advocate) is hardly likely to reassure them.

Maybe WPP’s biggest challenge is internal marketing, something the high profile Read supporters might consider.

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