17480: Examining WPP (Woman’s Payment Plan & Worldwide Persistent Problems).

 

More About Advertising published a perspective examining issues associated with the WPP CEO Cindy Rose pay scheme recently approved by 75% of shareholders—despite rejection recommendations from two advisory groups.

 

For starters, the approval is technically not approved, as WPP is legally obligated to connect with dissenting shareholders and report collected feedback within six months.

 

Six months from now essentially marks Year One of the Roserrection, so her success or failure in meeting the arguably impossible incentives will be reality.

 

It all underscores the messiness of transitioning from a White holding company to a single White operating company—a restructuring never publicly defined with clarity or transparency.

 

If Eviscerate28 has been officially documented, it’s in pencil—or invisible ink—as the vote on Rose’s payment indicates even shareholders aren’t overwhelmingly convinced the flaming dumpster can be transformed.

 

There continues to be sloppiness as the proceedings unfold, displaying a “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach. This is unconscionable, given over 98,000 livelihoods are at risk, and leadership is readily firing aimlessly.

 

For drones and C-suite executives, RIFs must feel like covert military operations, devastating sneak attacks executed with minimal regard for collateral damages.

 

In Rose’s defense, she’s facing a basic challenge: change always changes. At the same time, to change and to change for the better are two different things.

 

Omar Oakes: Why one in four WPP shareholders aren’t convinced

 

The case for giving Cindy Rose a pay raise — rejected by a quarter of WPP shareholders — matters because of the divisions we now see within and between ad agency holding groups.

 

By Omar Oakes

 

What happened to the once mighty ad agencies of Madison Avenue and Soho, whose great creative and strategic minds used to make or break businesses?

 

Are agencies becoming increasingly minor characters because advertising is no longer a game of big ideas and spectacle, but a small, shabby game of following people around the internet with surveillance tactics and popups? Or do they deserve more blame for failing to make the case that the power of creativity has never been more necessary in a world of rising misinformation and automated mediocrity?

 

Whatever your view of agencies in 2026, there is likely a common reflex when reading stories from the past week about WPP and Publicis Groupe CEOs receiving substantial increases in their pay. My eyebrows twitched, but each to their own.

 

But in the case of WPP, not all shareholders did agree. In fact, one in four said no to WPP CEO Cindy Rose’s proposed pay increase, from a maximum package of £8.6m to £11.1m per year. Everything else sailed through the company’s AGM last Friday, including Rose herself being “re-elected” at 99.63%, which is a number that even Vladimir Putin might blanche at.

 

But seriously folks, this story matters a lot more than ‘rich company boss gets richer’. Let me explain.

 

WPP’s CEO pay: what’s really a fair comparison?

 

To understand why one in four matters, you need to know about the 80% rule. Under the UK Corporate Governance Code, if a pay resolution at a public company AGM fails to reach 80% approval, the board is legally required to engage with dissenting shareholders and report back within six months. Both WPP pay resolutions fell below that threshold (Resolution 3, the compensation committee report, at 75.84%; Resolution 4, the forward pay policy, at 74.92%).

 

So let’s see what WPP report back with in six months. But why go through this headache in the first place for company whose share price is so historically low that last year it fell out of the FTSE 100?

 

The first reason is peer comparison. In its latest annual report, WPP felt it necessary to publish the historic pay packages of its rivals to show how frugal it had been. John Wren at Omnicom earned $21.7m (£15.9m) in 2024 and Sadoun was, even before his own pay rise was revealed last week, earning a “theoretical” maximum of £10m. You don’t close the gap, the thinking goes, by having a CEO who only makes a piffling £8.6m!

 

The second reason is even more awkward: WPP’s boss was apparently being paid so pitifully that she was outearned by about a third of WPP’s executive committee! The traditional pyramid of pay, where the CEO is top dog and tranches below get paid progressively less, had broken down.

 

The third reason is perhaps the most difficult to swallow: CEOs like Cindy Rose are not just paid for past performance, their pay is intended to send a signal and an incentive for future improved performance. The ‘shareholder big bet’ was shown in its most extreme form last year by Tesla, which gave Elon Musk a near-$1tn pay package. Musk’s pay was structured entirely around milestones not yet hit, designed to keep the most important person in the building focused and retained.

 

The WPP board is making a smaller version of the same argument: Rose can earn £11.1m if she hits her targets, we believe she will, and here is the structure to make that happen.

 

You can’t imagine there being a similar rebellion over at Publicis Groupe, if it had the same shareholder voting rules. Chairman and CEO Arthur received a 20% salary increase, taking his potential package to €10.5m. But it’s a non-story because Publicis has posted 20 consecutive quarters of growth and, before Omnicom fattened itself by gobbling up IPG, had outmuscled WPP to become the world’s biggest advertising services group. In 2025, Publicis Media won more than $10bn in new business, according to Comvergence data, while WPP Media lost more than $2bn net. Yes, it has since won $1.9bn in Q1 of this year, but these are not comparable businesses at this moment in time.

 

In other words, Sadoun is being retained for performance already delivered, but Rose is being incentivised for performance not yet achieved.

 

Money is fiction. Value is reality

 

In recent years, Publicis built its data, technology and e-commerce capabilities over years of deliberate acquisition. Meanwhile, WPP, under Read, was painstakingly trying to simplify its hodgepodge of agencies, bespoke client teams, and integrated verticals, following years of aggressive acquisitions under Sir Martin Sorrell.

 

As for how WPP turns around under Rose now, last week’s profile interview by the excellent Suzanne Vranjica of the Wall Street Journal had some revealing lines. Such as:

 

“Rose said that once WPP returns to organic revenue growth, which she expects in 2027, it will allocate more funds to dealmaking and bolster such areas as commerce and social-influencer marketing.”

 

2027? Another seven months (at best!) feels like a long time to wait to start catching up. Especially since most new money in this industry is flowing directly to Meta, Google and Amazon via small and medium sized businesses who buy direct without agencies (including on verticals such as ecommerce and social media/influencer!)

 

As for internal “pay compression”, the timing of this argument isn’t great. WPP’s revenue fell 6.7% like-for-like in Q1. As Mark Ritson’s uncharacteristically dry, sober and unsweary Adweek article pointed out, WPP’s headline operating margin compressed 200 basis points in a single year, from 15% to 13%. And the company’s share price is down by about 30% since Rose took over in September.

 

While she received zero financial performance bonus (because she didn’t earn it), she did, however, receive her maximum bonus for non-financial metrics. The board gave her full marks for the softer stuff in a year the numbers went the wrong way. That is, as far as I can tell, the thing that 25% of shareholders were voting against.

 

The forward signal argument is the most interesting to unpick, because it isn’t wrong in principle. But a bet like this requires a credible forward path.

 

The risk of putting more ‘skin in the game’

 

If, as Rose hopes, WPP returns to organic growth next year, the market will be even more consolidated, more expensive to enter, and more densely populated by competitors who moved earlier. That makes it more likely that the board is pricing in a recovery that is, optimistically, a 2028 or 2029 story.

 

Will shareholders continue to have the same level of patience for that long?

 

There is one aspect to this supposed turnaround story that doesn’t give me confidence. For all the talk of transformation and innovation, this is still a business which, you know, needs to bring in more money than it spends. Business experts call this “profit”.

 

The danger is that WPP becomes so desperate to portray a winning turnaround story (to prop up the share price) that it continues to play the same, self-defeating game which has plagued all large agency groups for decades now: race-to-the bottom pricing.

 

Because WPP is winning accounts: the UK government media account, Reckitt, Estée Lauder, Jaguar… but if revenue keeps falling, it’s the signature of a company defending market share by cutting prices. Then every account that is won on those worse terms resets the floor for the next pitch.

 

This was bizarrely framed in the same WSJ interview: during a recent pitch for a healthcare company, Rose cut the agency’s fee, tying compensation to performance targets. Greg Paull of R3 (now part of MediaSense) was quoted describing this as WPP “putting skin in the game,” adding that this had not been a hallmark of the holding group. He meant it as a compliment.

 

Strange. Firstly, because fee-cutting to win business is not a new strategy at WPP, from everything that I’ve heard in over a decade of my covering this industry, no matter the CEO.

 

Secondly, the decline of fees relative to scope of work by big agencies has been a defining characteristic of this industry for decades. You can read Michael Farmer’s books and Substack to understand, with ample evidence and explanation, how the holding company model was always propped up by a cross-subsidy: undercharge on creative, recover the margin on media buying and production markup.

 

But now the same pressure is hitting media, as platforms commoditise buying and clients demand transparency on every pound spent. So the cross-subsidy is collapsing from both ends. Where left is there to claw the margin back from?

 

To quote Ritson: “The only question that matters is whether clients will pay more.”

 

That is the problem the WPP turnaround has to solve, and Rose’s brainchild scheme Elevate28, to make £676m in cost savings, is a margin defence operation that buys time. Meanwhile, ever weaker pricing erodes the top line.

 

Again, how much patience are these shareholders really expected to have?

 

See you in six months

 

If only politics were the same: a winning politician is forced to consult with the people who voted against them. Because they represent all the people, not just their supporters, right?

 

So it’s a very good thing that UK corporate law requires WPP to engage with dissenting shareholders when votes fall below 80% approval and report back in six months. Corporate behaviour might be even better if the actual workers were entitled to representation on boards, as they are in Germany, but that’s for a different column.

 

For now, this story matters because it really will signal whether there is much hope for the holding company model to survive. Is this a board that updates its view of WPP’s position in light of new meaningful evidence or another round of investor relations management that concludes with minor adjustments and a press release about constructive dialogue?

 

I suspect the data will answer that question before the board does.

17479: Heard The Buzz? Byron Allen Buys BuzzFeed.

 

Adweek reported the latest buzz on Byron Allen adding BuzzFeed to his media empire.

 

Under Byron Allen, BuzzFeed Sets Its Sights on the Living Room

 

The pivot mirrors a broader shift afoot in digital media, as audiences and ad budgets gravitate toward streaming

 

By Mark Stenberg

 

When it first launched in 2006, BuzzFeed was a trailblazer, creating from scratch a playbook for sparking virality in the early days of the social internet.

 

Now, following its Monday acquisition by media executive Byron Allen, the brand and its sister property, HuffPost, have trained their focus on the newest battleground in the attention wars: the living room.

 

“As of this moment, BuzzFeed is officially chasing YouTube and the other big tech platforms,” Allen told The New York Times.

 

BuzzFeed is hardly alone in this pivot. Structural forces are threatening the durability of the open internet, with answer engines siphoning traffic away from websites and users increasingly gravitating toward mobile apps and walled gardens.

 

In response, media brands have adopted an increasingly distributed approach, cultivating audiences across channels including newsletters, podcasts, and live events. But one channel in particular appears poised for explosive growth: streaming television.

 

After years of deliberate expansion, streaming surpassed cable in total viewership in 2024, according to Nielsen. Its share of total television ad spend has gone from 15% in 2020 to 38% in 2025, with the crossover projected for 2027-2028, according to Adwave.

 

And while the streaming wars of the early pandemic centered largely on subscription-based products from the likes of Netflix, Disney, and Prime Video, the single largest player in the space for the last three years running is YouTube. The free, ad-supported platform captured 12.7% of all viewing in February—up from 7.9% in February 2023.

 

The platform, which has long been attractive to creators, is now increasingly drawing the attention of major media brands, as its accessibility, powerful algorithm, and simple monetization model make it nearly a video business in a box.

 

For a publisher like BuzzFeed, which has already built a dedicated following on the platform, doubling down on YouTube is a forward-thinking strategy. It can treat the website as the top of its content funnel, attracting viewers there before shepherding them into more direct relationships, such as through newsletters, podcasts, and commerce.

 

In this effort, Allen’s decades of expertise in television and the production infrastructure he has at hand could prove to be valuable tailwinds. The medium might be entirely different, but the content itself is not. 

 

BuzzFeed is not the first media brand of its vintage to adopt this approach. Vice Media, which also encapsulated the froth of digital media in the last decade, has pivoted from a web and text-based business to a producer of video content. The upside of such a strategy might be diminished, but so too are the risks.

 

Of course, embracing such a streaming-centric playbook will naturally entail a substantial restructuring. Allen has already warned that layoffs are on the horizon. 

 

And while BuzzFeed has a long history of launching popular franchises, HuffPost has a less established record on that front. News is a more saturated ecosystem than original programming, and HuffPost might struggle to compete with its blue-chip peers in the space.

 

For Allen, the acquisition is a relatively low-stakes gambit. The deal stipulates that he, through his holding company Allen Family Digital, only has to pay $20 million for his 52% ownership stake today. The rest of the $100 million will be paid over a five-year time horizon. 

 

This means Allen gets the BuzzFeed, Tasty, and HuffPost brands—and, more importantly, their YouTube footprints—for about as much money as Valnet paid for Polygon or Ziff Davis paid for Dwell, Domino, Business of Home, and PopSci. 

 

The bottom lines of these companies have sagged in recent years, but they have name-brand recognition and YouTube followings in the tens of millions. If Allen can successfully reorient these companies into video businesses, expect to see more such acquisitions in the near future.

17478: WPP Open X + Coca-Cola + Premier League = Losing Campaign.

The credits for this Coca-Cola/Premier League campaign state the work was developed by WPP Open X, led by Ogilvy UK, supported by WPP Media and VML.

 

Gee, a lot of White advertising agencies handled a project that looks like it could’ve been executed by a junior creative duo—or AI.

 

WPP should be penalized for having too many players on the field.

 

The scenario seemingly blocks the single White operating company’s goal of simplicity.

17477: Delving Into Droga5’s Diaspora.

 

Advertising Age published a lengthy fluff piece on “Droga5’s diaspora”—spotlighting White advertising agencies whose White principals emerged from the White ranks of the White advertising agency launched by David Droga.

 

Diaspora seems an odd term to use for the perceived phenomenon. Cronyism or Brotopia might be more appropriate.

 

The scenario underscores an Adland reality: White men leverage politics, privileges, and advantages to dominate the field.

 

Don’t forget Droga5 staged the Ted Royer scandal too.

 

Diaspora? For the legacy of this place, the best term might be Broga5.

 

Behind Droga5’s diaspora—and why it’s not a ‘coincidence’

 

By Ewan Larkin

 

Walking around the Ad Age A-List & Creativity Awards gala last month, everywhere David Droga turned, there were familiar faces—including those who had once sat across from him on the couch in his office. This time, however, they were collecting awards for agencies of their own. “The magnitude of it was revealed there,” the Australian expat said in an interview. “That was the first time I was like, ‘Oh wow. It really is pervasive.’”

 

Droga is referring to the diaspora of independent agency founders who have emerged from Droga5’s ranks over the past several years—among them the creators of Isle of Any, American Haiku, Mirimar, Alto and Mojo Supermarket. These new guard leaders learned their trade at Droga5, a creative hothouse founded in 2006 that grew from a Lafayette Street fledgling into a Wall Street heavyweight and Ad Age’s Agency of the Decade.

 

Not all of these founders came up exclusively at Droga5; some also hail from storied creative agencies such as BBDO and Wieden+Kennedy, but for each of them, it was the last stop before hanging their own shingle.

 

“I don’t think it’s coincidence at all,” said John McKelvey, chief creative officer of 6-year-old Mirimar, which now counts Poppi and Rocket Cos. as clients. “Some of the DNA from those moments is alive in our new agencies.”

 

Ad Age spoke with several of the founders, as well as Droga himself, to understand what it was about one agency that produced so many others—the culture that bred independence, the lessons carried forward, the relationships that endured and the occasional tension that comes with building something new in the shadow of something great.

 

Built to leave

 

It’s easy to see this situation as something of a double-edged sword for Droga. Many of the industry’s hottest shops have spawned from under his tutelage, but that also means talent keeps walking out the door.

 

Droga, however, said he “doesn’t begrudge anybody that goes off to do something great.” He’s also quick to make clear the departures haven’t gutted Droga5, with the Accenture Song-owned agency recently nabbing Ad Age’s Global Network of the Year following an overhaul of its leadership team.

 

“There’s no bittersweetness for me at all,” said Droga, who recently stepped out of the Song CEO role and became vice chair of Accenture. He said one of his greatest dilemmas during his time at the helm of Droga5, which he sold to Accenture in 2019 for about $475 million, was having more great talent than he had room for at the top.

 

It’s natural that, at some point, “they are going to have to go off and do their own thing,” Droga said.

 

Droga5 is not the only agency to have seeded a new generation of independents. Over its 43 years in existence, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, the San Francisco-based Omnicom agency, has seen its own employees go on to launch shops including nice&frank, Bandits & Friends, Optimism BH and Argonaut.

 

Like Droga, GS&P’s co-founders Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein understand that talent walking out the door is part of the deal, said Sarah Thompson, GS&P’s CEO and a former longtime executive at Droga5. “They’re all three very confident people,” Thompson said, and they recognize “it’s never just about one person.”

 

The culture inside Droga5, former employees said, encouraged independence and entrepreneurship. Droga’s stories of leaving Publicis Groupe—after turning Saatchi & Saatchi into one of the most talked-about agencies in the world—to build something from scratch was the kind of inspiration you couldn’t readily find at a holding company.

 

“When you have a guy standing up and saying, ‘When I quit my job and did this’ like 900 times a year, it seeps into your head,” said Mo Said, founder of Mojo Supermarket. “And then you’re like, ‘Maybe I should do that.’”

 

Droga deliberately avoided imposing a house style, making room for vastly different creative voices to develop alongside each other. You can see that in the alumni shops: Jonny Bauer’s business transformation consultancy Fundamentalco, for example, bears little resemblance to Mirimar, which operates at the intersection of advertising and entertainment.

 

Droga5 was also intensely competitive, multiple founders made clear, but driven by ambition. “I never worked as hard anywhere as I did at Droga5, and I was never surrounded by the same number of driven people,” said Thom Glover, founder and chief creative officer of American Haiku, Ad Age’s 2026 Newcomer Agency of the Year. Other former executives would go as far as to call the atmosphere cutthroat, a meritocracy where, as Said put it, “if you were really creative and really good and you delivered, you stayed; and if you didn’t, you didn’t.”

 

Droga has never been shy about his determination to always be the best, and that pressure isn’t for everyone, but those who thrived within the agency say it left them well-equipped to go it alone. Felix Richter spent over a decade at Droga5 before leaving in 2022, not to start his own shop, but to join independent agency Mother, where he has risen to global chief creative officer and earned Ad Age’s 2026 Chief Creative Officer of the Year honor.

 

Still, Richter understands why so many of his friends and former colleagues have taken the risk.

 

“When you’re successful at Droga, you leave with the confidence that you’re able to be successful on your own,” he said. Added Laurie Howell, co-founder of startup creative boutique and Ad Age 2026 Creative Agency of the Year Isle of Any: “Being around that, seeing what David was doing with the company, made you think that it was possible.”

 

“There’s an osmosis of that—you go, ‘Oh, okay, cool. I can see how this works,’” said Howell.

 

While most of the indie agencies that have emerged from Droga5 appear to have been founded by men, Karen Land Short, a longtime Droga5 creative leader who went on to Accenture Song, recently founded her own shop, 400 Humans. Droga5 also pointed to a number of female alumni who have gone on to senior leadership roles across the industry, including Tara Lawall, chief creative officer at Rethink New York; Susie Nam, CEO of Publicis Creative U.S.; and Lindsay Cole, president of Uncommon New York.

 

Lessons learned from Droga5

 

For some ex-employees, striking out on their own provided an opportunity to scratch a different itch. Hannes Ciatti, who opened Alto in 2019 after co-founding JohnxHannes alongside Mirimar’s McKelvey, wanted to build a shop that reflected the nature of agency-client relationships, with marketers gravitating towards project-based assignments. His time at Droga5, he said, showed him what to “protect and what to shed” at Alto; he’s betting that a small, senior team armed with the right tech and freelancers can do what once took hundreds of people.

 

“I’m trying to keep the ambition of a place like Droga5, but build it also for the realities of 2026,” Ciatti told Ad Age.

 

Droga, for his part, gets why. He noted that peak Droga5 New York was around 850 people, a scale he doesn’t think a creative agency needs to reach anymore. “Hannes is right,” he said of Ciatti’s approach.

 

Isle of Any founders Howell and Toby Treyer-Evans are leaning into their roots as industrial designers, blending product design and experiential work with advertising. The British-born duo is looking to move away from what they see as the “project” model most shops employ, prototyping early and iterating often. In other agencies, “there’s a process to how you make things,” Howell said. “We’re trying to collapse it all.”

 

Indie founders are, to some degree, going it alone, and the pressure to stay afloat presents the temptation to appease clients at the expense of the work. Droga5, though, taught employees the opposite instinct.

 

McKelvey described weekly Acela rides to Baltimore, and Droga’s work building creative trust with Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, as a crash course in client relationships. Droga “taught me a lot ... about how much nerve it takes to protect an idea before everyone understands it,” Ciatti said.

 

“There’s actually a bigger reward when you do work that might get you fired,” he added. “That was a big learning curve for me—not being afraid to be brave, sometimes needing to say no to lawyers or people that wanted to stop you.”

 

These founders cited Droga’s hands-on approach to the work and willingness to back his teams in client meetings, among other things. Many said he was involved as they prepared to strike out on their own, offering advice on everything from finances to landing first clients. As McKelvey prepared to leave, Droga told him the door would always be open if things didn’t pan out.

 

“Think about the confidence of someone telling you if this thing fails, the worst thing that’s going to happen is you’ll get a great job,” McKelvey said.

 

Bits of camaraderie, bits of tension

 

Some of these agencies, like Isle of Any, are now working with former Droga5 clients. The shop has drawn early raves for campaigns with Coinbase, OpenAI and The New York Times—a client they’d worked with for over six years back at Droga5. Treyer-Evans, however, said Isle of Any is careful to keep a clean break from their former shop, never poaching clients or staff.

 

Droga said he has no issue with the client overlap, noting that he introduced Isle of Any’s founders to Coinbase, the same client Accenture Song worked with on the 2022 Super Bowl QR code spot. “As long as great work is coming out of it, and it moves our industry forward, I’m not that insecure about it, to be honest,” he said.

 

American Haiku has staffed up with several Droga5 alumni, including Jessica Kingsbery, formerly managing director of Droga5 New York, who was named CEO. The agency’s heavy Droga5 representation wasn’t “by design,” Glover said, though it did result in an “awkward conversation” with Droga himself. “Those people all have a way of working and communicating with each other that makes it easy when you’re small and you want to get a lot done,” he explained.

 

Droga understands this part of the business well; he spent years bringing trusted people with him across stints in Singapore, London and beyond. Still, the AAF Hall of Famer is competitive and doesn’t want to see Droga5 hurt.

 

“You can’t come to me for advice one day but then also go around my back and take people the next day,” said Droga.

 

Said, who also hired Droga5 employees heavily early on, eventually came to see it the same way, that the “etiquette of having a mentor and stealing from a mentor” didn’t sit right.

 

As for the founders’ relationships with each other, not everyone talks all the time, but there is a general sense that the line is always open. Many of the former employees said they have a low-fi get-together at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, a slice of camaraderie that serves as a reprieve from the competition. “We’re on pitch lists together, we’re going after the same candidates,” said Glover. “But it’s all generally friendly.”

 

Across Ad Age’s conversations with Droga5 alumni, it’s evident that some are keen to avoid being pigeonholed as just another shop that came out of the agency. Said found himself feeling the same way in the first few years out of the gate, but time has a way of softening that instinct, especially when people start leaving Mojo Supermarket to start agencies of their own.

 

After Mojo Supermarket won Ad Age’s Small Agency of the Year in 2022, Said wanted to send the award straight to Droga. “I was just like, I’m so happy to be the ‘Better Call Saul’ to your ‘Breaking Bad,’” he recalled.

 

“We will never be that good of a show. But there are so many spinoffs that are bad, for one to be kind of good is the greatest compliment to you,” he added.

17476: Dentsu Deploys Duplicative Dumbness.

 

MediaPost reported Dentsu flattened its EMEA org chart, which squashed the EMEA CEO, a 20-year veteran now being squeezed out of the holding company.

 

Gee, that move looks familiar.

 

Dentsu Global CEO Takeshi Sano declared, “Since stepping into the Global CEO role, my focus has been on building a simpler, more agile and an even more client-centric dentsu. Our evolved cluster model in EMEA reflects that commitment. It reduces complexity, brings leadership closer to clients, and improves our ability to collaborate, deploying talent and capabilities with speed.”

 

Gee, that scheme sounds familiar. Oh, right—it’s what every CEO from a holding company or single White operating company is saying.

 

Dentsu Flattens EMEA Org Chart, Regional Heads To Report To Sano

 

By Steve McClellan

 

Dentsu today announced what it called a “simplified model” in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) that will have Dentsu executives Annette Male, Sawomir Stepniewski, and Mariano Di Benedetto managing broader sections of the region and reporting directly to recently appointed global CEO Takeshi Sano. 

 

With the new reorganization, the position of EMEA CEO is eliminated and long-time company veteran and EMEA CEO André Andrade will leave Dentsu after more than 20 years with the firm. Giulio Malegori, executive senior advisor, Dentsu & chairman, Dentsu EMEA, will continue in his post. 

 

Sano stated in a release announcing the move that “Since stepping into the Global CEO role, my focus has been on building a simpler, more agile and an even more client-centric dentsu. Our evolved cluster model in EMEA reflects that commitment. It reduces complexity, brings leadership closer to clients, and improves our ability to collaborate, deploying talent and capabilities with speed.” 

 

Under the new setup, Stepniewski will manage the “core cluster” of Central Europe. Male will lead the Northern Europe cluster, expanding her remit beyond the UK and Ireland to include Nordics, Benelux and the Baltics.  

 

Di Benedetto will lead the Western & Southern Europe and MEA cluster, expanding his remit to take on Spain, Portugal, France and Sub-Saharan Africa, in addition to his current remit of Italy, Greece, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Lebanon, Qatar and Türkiye. 

 

The changes are effective in July.   

 

The EMEA management reorganization is not a template for other regions, a company rep stressed. “Each regional approach is specific to client needs and local market dynamics,” he said, noting the recent promotion of Beth Ann Kaminkow to CEO, Americas and chief global client officer. She was previously North America CEO. 

17475: The WPP Strategy—How To Grow A Flaming Dumpster.

 

MediaPost reported WPP elevated two White men to global presidents of client growth.

 

It must be a confusing time for WPP drones and leaders, as the single White operating company reels via restructuring, redundancies, and RIFs while simultaneously readying for revitalization, reinvention, and growth.

 

Both White men are credited for achieving success with media and advertising pitches at earlier versions of WPP.

 

Seems they’ll now face the challenge of first defining what they’re pitching.

 

Wise people have said it is only through adversity that we experience growth.

 

At least the newly appointed global presidents of client growth have plenty of adversity to leverage.

 

WPP Elevates Jenner, Heimann To Top Growth Roles

 

By Steve McClellan

 

WPP agency veterans Toby Jenner and Philip Heimann have been promoted to global presidents of client growth. The roles are new and designed to drive the company’s “single unified growth strategy” spelled out by CEO Cindy Rose earlier this year.  

 

They both report to WPP chief operating officer Devika Bulchandani.  

 

Jenner, a 20-year company veteran, was previously global chief business officer at WPP Media and before that CEO of company media agency Wavemaker. Most recently he’s credited with shaping WPP Media’s unified go-to-market strategy and leading successful pitches for adidas, PlayStation, Reckitt, Amazon and more. He will continue to oversee WPP Media growth as part of his broader holding company remit.

 

Heimann was previously global chief growth & marketing officer at Ogilvy. He’s credited with boosting the agency’s pitch win rate over six years from 22% to 60% leading the team that won assignments from companies such as Verizon, Audi, Kimberly-Clark and more.   

 

With the promotions, both executives join WPP’s executive committee. Jenner will also serve on the WPP media global leadership team and Heimann will serve on the WPP creative leadership team.