Who’d want to be a chief people officer in one of today’s ad holding companies?
Lindsay Pattison (left) is leaving the role at WPP after 16 years at the holding company, most notably as the boss of media agency Maxus which was merged with MEC to make Wavemaker. While ‘chief people officer’ is clearly an important role in a company employing 100,000 or so people, these days it’s more likely to be viewed as ‘chief redundancy officer’ as holding companies ship jobs wherever they can.
The overall context for such roles has clouded too. DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) is in full retreat in Trump’s America and agency groups have been quick to ditch the executives they hired in a rush after BLM (Black Lives Matter) and the psychological deprivations of lockdown. WPP has its own people problems, of course, with CEO Mark Read’s edict that staff must return to the officer four days a week provoking a strong backlash.
It all invites a number of (so far) unanswered questions. Is staff wellbeing really key to successful ad companies or is it more realistic to accept that it’s a demanding and unforgiving business, depending on long hours and endless pitches to sort the wheat from the chaff? Successful agencies (in particular their owners) can make a lot of money – isn’t that enough?
If the equity in DEI is to really mean anything shouldn’t it be that the rewards are shared around more fairly? As things stand, the reality is that the ad holding companies employ legions of not-that-well-paid youngish people reporting to much older managers who do pretty well for themselves. IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky stands to pocket $40m or so if the merger with Omnicom goes through. Swathes of IPG staff will likely lose their jobs.
