WPP starts GroupM lay-offs as HR hit teams move in

The media agency pogroms have begun: not, as expected a while back, at merging Omnicom/IPG but WPP’s GroupM. Adweek reports that the HR extermination squads have already hit its US agencies, staff leaving the building with no goodbyes and locked out of their email accounts – the modern definition of a non-person. GroupM is becoming a leaner, meaner WPP Media.

Not having been on either end of such a process I can only speculate what it feels like although HR types (and maybe those managers still left standing, maybe) would tell you the grim ritual is a corporate necessity. WPP should come clean about how many it’s axing and where. If the layoffs have started already it clearly knows.

WPP employed around 40,000 people in its EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker agencies (plus other bits of the once-rambling GroupM empire) and it always looked likely that there would be a lot less people as AI and software took over from people and spreadsheets. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, with over 20% of the worldwide ad market, recently let slip that advertisers had no need to go anywhere but Meta, provided it had their bank account details. No need for media agencies there.

So maybe such drastic changes are inevitable although it’s certainly arguable that there’s a better way of doing things. When creative agencies ditch staff there’s usually a corresponding wave of start-ups, Rethink in the US being a notable example of one such. Will it happen in media? We can certainly expect relative newbies like Brainlabs (chaired by MediaCom architect Stephen Allan) and Stagwell to announce some more high profile signings.