Media is still a people business – as WPP is finding out to its cost
When did the rot set in at WPP’s giant GroupM media operation? Some may date it back to 2016 when the US Association of National Advertisers set out its thoughts on principal media buying (media broking on the sly), which it didn’t like. In the same year WPP’s MEC lost the giant AT&T account to Omnicom, which resulted in the merger of MEC and Maxus – the first of many.
Others suggest it was the departure of long-serving Mediacom boss Stephen Allan in 2020, a bridge (as we noted at the time) between the era of buccaneering media independents and the the corporate holding company-owned shops that succeeded them. MediaCom (as it then was) was by far the biggest media agency in the UK and vying for the US top spot. It had an enviable record of winning and retaining business although it, too, suffered reverses: losing $2bn VW global media. Allan is now executive chair of independent media agency Brainlabs.
MediaCom, without Allan’s guiding hand and stature in the overall organisation, fell victim in the increasingly tech-focussed holding company to a merger with much smaller sibling Essence, helmed by Christian Juhl and best-known for its Google media business. But WPP CEO Mark Read decided to plonk Essence on top of MediaCom in the merged EssenceMediacom (the capital ‘C’ also disappeared) and GroupM, which Juhl briefly headed, never recovered. All of a sudden it was defending rather than winning business and momentum, as they say, is all.
The successor to Allan at MediaCom (and then, briefly, the Mediacom part of the merged agency) was Nick Lawson, another useful bridge to a former era, and he left at the end of 2024. Probably still wondering what the hell was going on.
Lawson has now resurfaced as chairman of Jonathan Lewis’ P/E-backed digital Out of Home business iMedia (both above, Lawson left), in which Stephen Allan is also an investor. Lawson says: “The rapidly growing opportunity in programmatic OOH advertising is transforming media like never before – and I am delighted to join a company at the forefront of this change.”
It is, indeed, a growing business and one where there’s clearly money to be made – if such businesses are able to scale (always an issue in the UK.) Brainlabs, too, may grow to rival the ad holding company media shops.
But even with its data and tech obsessions (AI) media, like the rest of advertising, remains (for now) a people business. WPP has singularly failed to keep its best people and the consequences are clear. That WPP has just issued a profit warning including big redundancy costs at GroupM/WPP Media is one of them.
