17567: On The Exclusivity Of Outcomes-Based Remuneration.

 

Advertising Age published lengthy, laborious content on outcomes-based remuneration. Hopefully, the reporter is paid by the word—because if compensation is based on views and website engagement (i.e., outcomes), he probably owes money to Ad Age.

Ruminating on remuneration reflects White holding companies’ impact on the industry. Fueling the commoditization of Adland—whereby people, places, and practices are repetitive, redundant, and replaceable—has made most offerings generic. And that’s just one point in a long list of reasons why outcomes-based remuneration won’t work across the advertising and media landscape.

Of course, the discussions have not included non-White advertising agencies. As such shops are relegated to lesser positions in the hierarchy—often forced to deliver translated versions or adaptations of mass market campaign platforms—how might they be identified and rewarded for positive outcomes?

In short, non-White advertising agencies can expect outcomes-based crumbs—or nothing at all.

Agencies want to get paid for outcomes—here’s what’s standing in the way

By Ewan Larkin

As agency leaders scamper to move away from hourly billing, outcomes-based pricing has seemingly become all the rage. In reality, rewriting the industry’s long-standing compensation model is a tricky proposition, complicated by everything from attribution disputes to the real financial risk agencies and marketers face.

A June study from Mediasense found that 85% of agency leaders expect to increase their usage of outcomes-based pricing over the next two years, and WPP has touted a deal with Jaguar Land Rover that ties fees to measurable sales and outcomes rather than hours worked. Dentsu media agency iProspect, meanwhile, is pushing to make outcomes the center of its reworked operating model.

The shift is being driven in part by AI and automation, which are reducing the time needed to plan and execute campaigns, undercutting the logic of a model built around billing by the hour. But as much as agencies long to do away with the time-and-materials model, adoption isn’t moving that quickly. For more than half of agencies, outcome-based arrangements still make up less than 30% of their client relationships, per the Mediasense report.

The reality is, most clients—and their procurement teams—are still defaulting to models they know and understand, dipping their toes in only modestly when they do experiment. For example, while iProspect is “very open” to putting its “entire fee at risk,” the agency has no clients on a fully outcomes-based model, executives said in a June interview.

Below, the core challenges around outcomes-based pricing and how agencies are attempting to navigate them.

A definition problem

There appears to be some confusion around what exactly outcomes-based pricing is, with different agencies defining it their own way.

What WPP and iProspect are referring to is a model in which a portion of agency compensation is tied to pre-agreed media or business outcomes, with clients essentially paying for performance. In general, if agencies exceed their targets, they can earn more than their baseline fee; if they fall short, that portion of the fee is reduced. This isn’t new; agencies have long tied portions of their fees to outcomes, but many are now trying to increase the percentage.

For other agencies, what gets labeled an “outcome” is really an output, a fixed fee tied to a defined scope of deliverables.

“There is absolutely a definition problem,” said Tracey Shirtcliff, CEO of Scope Better, which helps professional services businesses manage pricing. When agencies say “outcomes-based pricing,” what they’re usually landing on, she said, is a hybrid arrangement, meaning an output-based fee with a performance measure layered on top.

“I’ve almost never seen anything that is purely outcomes-based,” Shirtcliff added, describing a pattern the Mediasense report backs up. Pure outcomes-based remuneration, the consultancy found, is “exceedingly rare.”

The sphere of influence

WPP’s contract with JLR, focused on tying fees to measurable sales, appears to be a rarity. Tying compensation to business outcomes is difficult for any agency, given factors outside its control, and it’s especially challenging for agencies that only manage one piece of a client’s marketing, whether that’s creative, media, commerce or social. (WPP’s remit with JLR is comprehensive, spanning creative, media, production, customer experience and strategic counsel.)

As a media-only performance shop, iProspect is focused on outcomes including lead-quality metrics in pilots with e-commerce and business-to-business clients, executives said. Minneapolis independent agency Broadhead has one contract tied to performance, for a direct-to-consumer client, with 15% of fees at risk based on how many people the shop can drive to the client’s website, said CEO Dean Broadhead.

The agency—which is handling the client’s creative and media duties—avoided tying compensation to sales because it didn’t design the site, Broadhead added.

Working with a DTC client helps with measurement, Broadhead said, since “you can track the breadcrumbs a lot easier.” The Mediasense report supports that notion, finding that retail and e-commerce brands are best positioned for outcomes-based models, thanks to a high volume of digital transactions, clear conversion points and few intermediaries between an ad and a sale. Sectors such as healthcare and automotive, meanwhile, are seen as less suited to the model, hampered by regulation and longer purchase cycles.

It’s much easier for media agencies to dabble in outcomes-based pricing, Shirtcliff said, as media performance is seen as more measurable and less subjective than creative work.

One creative agency executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said their shop sometimes forgoes 10% to 20% of its fee for the first few months of a new client relationship, money it doesn’t get back if it misses agreed-upon KPIs, such as lifting brand performance, but which comes back with a bonus if it hits them. The client tracks the metrics and shares them with the agency, this person said.

This executive described taking the risk as more a way to show “skin in the game” against competing agencies in a close pitch, rather than a genuine embrace of outcomes-based pricing.

Data and attribution standoffs

Coming to a mutual agreement on the outcomes is “probably the hardest piece to do,” Shirtcliff said, “because there’s so many things that can be measured.” Sales and revenue are the metrics most tied to business outcomes but hardest for agencies to control, while media metrics are easier to influence but don’t always reflect the results clients want.

It’s especially difficult to isolate an agency’s exact role in achieving a business outcome like sales, which is influenced by factors including pricing. Sixty-nine percent of agencies surveyed for the Mediasense report said difficulty agreeing on an attribution methodology was a critical or strong barrier to adoption, and 68% cited insufficient access to client data.

 

Before signing up for a percentage-of-revenue deal, Jared Belsky, CEO of independent media agency Acadia, asks new clients to share a year’s worth of data to model against—whatever metric the deal is priced on, whether that’s revenue, margin or something else. Some marketers are hesitant to share those insights until a contract is signed, creating a “chicken-or-egg problem,” Belsky said.

“The hard question isn’t what data do you need to model,” he said. “Sometimes it’s just availability; you don’t always get it.”

IProspect leans on its own tools for measurement, including incrementality testing, experimentation and what executives call a “more modern” approach to marketing mix modeling. The agency has also built force majeure clauses into its contracts that extend beyond typical service-delivery provisions to cover compensation, protecting against unforeseen shocks like tariffs, war or a pandemic.

There’s a case for third-party oversight, with a neutral party responsible for measurement, rather than agencies grading their own homework. But an independent process has its own drawbacks, too. Measurement approaches like marketing mix modeling and multi-touch attribution “are too slow,” said Ryan Kangisser, chief strategy officer at Mediasense, which is why agencies often fall back on proxy metrics instead.

Managing risk

In its contract with JLR, the majority of WPP’s fees are at risk based on performance, Ad Age has learned. That’s seemingly a suitable arrangement for JLR, which is looking to rebuild profitability and cut costs, but how can WPP—working through a turnaround—afford such risk?

In a June interview with Campaign, WPP CEO Cindy Rose said the company would not lose money by focusing on outcomes, explaining there are “ceilings and floors” in the JLR deal. WPP is also allowed to buy a share of JLR’s media on a principal basis—a practice in which an agency purchases and resells inventory, often at a markup—according to a person familiar with the matter.

WPP declined to comment and JLR did not return requests for comment, but their contract illustrates a broader reality of outcomes-based pricing models: agencies need predictable compensation to fund their operating costs. By leaning further into principal inventory with JLR, WPP is effectively hedging against the risk it is taking on.

Ultimately, it “has to be a two-way thing,” said Kangisser. “If the agency is taking risk, then the client needs to be comfortable that they are going to do whatever they need to do to deliver against those business outcomes. And so, if it does mean participating in some of those areas to supplement the fee, then I think that’s perfectly reasonable.”

Pushback from marketers and procurement

There are risks for marketers with outcomes-based pricing, too. A company may, for example, have budgeted $1 million, only to find it owes $1.5 million once an agency clears its performance targets.

“It’s a variable cost,” said Broadhead, and clients “don’t love that.”

Procurement teams apparently don’t either, with 69% of agencies surveyed for the Mediasense report calling them a critical or strong barrier to adoption. Procurement’s current approach relies on comparing proposals against legacy full-time equivalent models, making it hard to prove a cost saving when the two aren’t directly comparable.

Even when outcomes-based pricing does make it into the conversation, the report noted, it often gets “diluted until they fundamentally resemble more traditional fee structures.”

Success with outcomes can be a slippery slope, said Wesley ter Haar, chief AI and revenue officer at S4 Capital’s Monks. If an agency performs really well and gets paid more, “a procurement team or new leader will come in and go, ‘Hey, this agency is really expensive. We can get cheaper agencies,’” said ter Haar.

“I had [a client] who was honest with me. They said, ‘You’re just making too much money, and you didn’t spot it in advance and tell me,’” Belsky added, recalling a deal from his time as CEO of Dentsu’s 360i in which 100% of the agency’s fee was tied to a percentage of a car rental client’s revenue.

Acadia’s founders have built in caps on how much the agency can earn on performance-based deals, along with a “reverse tiering” structure, where the shop’s percentage rate declines as performance climbs higher.

What’s next?

Broadhead is candid about his limits with outcomes-based pricing and tying compensation to performance. “For any agency to go much over 20 to 30% would be crazy,” he said. Of course, agencies’ appetite for risk will depend on various factors, including how much control they are given over an account, but Broadhead seems to be onto something.

A hybrid approach, with inch-by-inch gains rather than a full shift, appears to be the most likely path forward. WPP’s Rose acknowledged as much while speaking to press last week following the company’s latest earnings report, saying that widespread adoption of outcomes-based pricing will “take a few years.”

Mediasense’s forecast is even less rosy. A full transformation, the report concluded, “still seems to be in the distant future, if it is to happen at all.”

17561: Shifting Geer At VML & WPP.

   

Advertising Age reported VML North America Chief Creative Officer of Innovation Walter Geer III is shifting gear, leaving the White advertising agency and single White operating company after six years of service.

Geer claimed his resignation is not a result of the redundancies, restructurings, and RIFs at WPP.

Yet given VML boasts dynamic DEIBA+ dedication and WPP hypes alleged technological advantages, Geer’s exit is bad optics.

Walter Geer III exits VML after six years

By Brian Bonilla

Walter T. Geer III is leaving VML after six years at the agency, departing his role as chief creative officer of innovation for North America as he considers a next chapter spanning creativity, technology, culture and business.

Geer joined WPP’s VML in 2020 as executive creative director of experience design and later held senior leadership positions across health, consumer marketing, experience design and innovation. Most recently, he led a team of nearly 20 people spanning New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco, he said.

Geer said his decision to leave was not connected to WPP’s ongoing restructuring or recent layoffs and had been under consideration for some time. The move is effective immediately.

VML wasn’t immediately available for comment.

During his tenure, Geer worked with brands including Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Advil, Covered California, Progressive and Pfizer. Some of his most notable work at VML includes Advil’s “Believe My Pain,” which addressed racial disparities in how pain is recognized and treated and won a Gold Effie in 2025, as well as Covered California’s “For the Love of Californians” brand platform.

“I had an incredible six years at VML,” Geer said. “At the same time, I think I reached a point where I wanted to give myself the space to really kind of think bigger about what my next chapter could be.”

He said that he is not committed to a particular kind of company or role.

“I made the decision to leave because I wanted to be really thoughtful about what happens next … that could mean transforming an existing organization, creating a new model, absolutely joining an independent company or agency, working directly with a brand or building something entrepreneurial.”

Geer has been outspoken on industry issues either through social media or films such as Black Madison Ave, an open discussion among the few black creative leaders at the holding company level that was released in 2022. He is also a co-founder of Blackweek. VML will remain a strategic partner and primary sponsor of the conference moving forward, Geer confirmed.

Geer said the industry’s wave of holding company consolidation is understandable, describing it as “a necessary evil” as agencies look to combine resources and capabilities.

Discussing the broader agency market, Geer praised the scale, talent and client relationships that large networks offer; he argued the biggest opportunity lies in marrying those advantages with the speed and entrepreneurial mindset of independents.

“That combination could be incredibly powerful if organizations are truly willing and able to make that type of change,” he said.

Geer said that he plans to continue growing Blackweek while advising organizations and exploring opportunities across creativity, technology, entrepreneurship and business transformation.

“There is so much more to build, so much more to challenge and so much more impact to make,” he said. “I’m proud of what we accomplished at VML, grateful for the people who were part of that journey and genuinely excited about what comes next.”

17556: On Creating And Influencing DEIBA+ Change In Adland.

 

The previous post about Equinox and its White advertising agency perpetuating racist Asian stereotypes warrants additional commentary.

Advertising Age spotlighted creators who criticized Equinox via Instagram and TikTok, including Eunnuri Lee and Ed Choi.

Lee—who boasts 108K Instagram followers and 237K TikTok followers—skewered Equinox and the responsible advertising team, ultimately vowing to boycott the fitness brand.

Choi—who boasts 322K Instagram followers and 680K TikTok followers—went directly after the Equinox Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Digital Officer, calling her out by name and blasting her professional credentials.

Creators and influencers have infiltrated Adland, delivering content, promoting brands, and wielding considerable power.

Yet can they impact progressive change, succeeding where trade organizations, clients, protesting insiders, legal advocates, and politicians have failed? That is, can they bring DEIBA+ to Adland?

17554: Adland Hospitality Is A Nauseating Notion.

Advertising Age published a perspective opining Adland could enhance its value to clients by embracing restaurant-style hospitality.

It’s an odd notion, as most restaurants—especially in the QSR category—struggle mightily to survive.

The holding companies complicate matters by presenting similar menus and serving bland offerings.

What’s more, White advertising agencies are unhospitable to anyone who isn’t a White man or White woman.

And non-White advertising agencies must cook with crumbs.

Why hospitality is advertising’s most human competitive advantage

By Heather Freiser

Coming out of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, one message was impossible to ignore: in the age of AI, human connection matters more than ever.

Across stages and conversations, industry leaders debated how artificial intelligence will reshape creativity, productivity, and the future of agency work. That question has only grown louder as industry leaders debate AI’s impact on agencies.

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that AI could eventually reduce brands’ need for agencies, it sparked plenty of debate. Regardless of whether you agree with him, it raises an important question: what value can’t be commoditized?

I think we’ve been overlooking one answer: hospitality.

In advertising, we celebrate strategic thinking, creative excellence, and operational rigor. We rarely celebrate hospitality.

We should.

Hospitality is one of the most overlooked strategic capabilities an agency can develop. It’s not soft. It’s not a personality trait. It’s the ability to make people feel seen, supported, and genuinely cared for while you’re doing the work. And in an industry built on relationships, that capability compounds over time.

I didn’t learn that in advertising. I learned it in restaurants.

Before joining the agency world, I spent years working in—and eventually owning—restaurants. The restaurant business teaches you something agencies often forget: people don’t just remember what you delivered. They remember how you made them feel.

Restaurateur Will Guidara captures this perfectly in Unreasonable Hospitality: “Service is black and white. Hospitality is color.”

Service is delivering what’s promised. Hospitality is how you make someone feel while you deliver it.

Agencies have become incredibly good at service. We deliver on time, on budget, and on brief. We optimize workflows, build airtight processes, and obsess over execution. Those things matter. They’re the cost of entry.

But they’re rarely what people remember.

A few years ago, I was in New York during a production shoot with my kids. After a long day, they desperately wanted to visit the M&M’s store in Times Square. I kept saying, “Maybe tomorrow.”

While we were eating dinner at the hotel, the front desk manager walked over carrying a giant bowl of M&M’s.

“I heard someone was hoping to make it to the M&M’s store tonight,” he said. “Here’s your amuse-bouche.”

My kids were ecstatic. My stress disappeared. In one thoughtful gesture, he solved a problem I hadn’t even realized I was carrying.

Years later, I still remember his name.

That’s hospitality.

Guidara encourages restaurants to reserve a small portion of their time and budget for creating moments guests never expect. He calls it “the 5%.”

The 5% isn’t where the margin is. It’s where the memory is.

What would happen if agencies adopted the same philosophy?

Maybe it’s remembering something a client mentioned months ago. Making an introduction without expecting anything in return. Anticipating a problem before it becomes an email chain. Creating meetings that leave people energized instead of exhausted. Finding small ways to reduce someone else’s stress simply because you can.

None of those gestures appear in a statement of work.

All of them build trust. And trust builds loyalty.

As AI makes execution faster and more accessible, agencies will increasingly compete with firms using the same tools, the same models, and many of the same strategic frameworks. The gap between capabilities is shrinking.

The experience of working together isn’t.

AI can generate ideas. It can build decks. It can accelerate production.

It can’t notice that your client hasn’t eaten all day. It can’t remember the story they shared six months ago about their daughter’s graduation. It can’t create the small, thoughtful moments that transform a transactional relationship into a lasting one.

That’s hospitality.

If Cannes reminded us of anything this year, it’s that our industry’s future won’t be determined solely by the technology we adopt. It will also be shaped by the humanity we choose to preserve.

Great work will always matter.

But in a business where AI is rapidly commoditizing execution, hospitality may become the most valuable competitive advantage agencies have left.

17553: Equinox And Its White Advertising Agency Are Sweating Over Racist Workout.

Advertising Age reported on an Equinox campaign featuring imagery publicly condemned as racist Asian stereotypes.

Based on the corporate response, Equinox apparently agrees with the protestors, as the ads are being fully pulled and official apologies have been formally posted.

The responsible White advertising agency—Angry Gods—also admitted to cultural cluelessness. Plus, Angry Gods pledged charitable donations to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum. Expect scholarships to follow in performative style.

Ironically, the campaign theme reads, “Question Everything But Yourself.”

Equinox and Angry Gods failed to question everything while executing the work. And the co-conspirators will probably not question themselves for being insular, insensitive, ignorant racists.

Equinox pulls AI ad after creators call out racist Asian stereotypes

By Gillian Follet

Equinox, the luxury fitness company, has pulled an AI-generated out-of-home ad and apologized after dozens of Asian content creators accused it of perpetuating racist stereotypes.

The ad, part of a campaign that broke in January, featured an AI-generated image of an Asian woman’s head mounted on a metal rod, with a hand pressing a thumb between her lips; the image was juxtaposed with a real photo of a different woman, including her exposed torso. Over the past two weeks, creators across Instagram and TikTok have condemned the ad as dehumanizing and fetishistic.

“Asian women have already been treated as dolls, submissive sex machines, anime girls, robots, decorative objects [and] mail-order fantasies for decades now,” said artist and content creator Eunnuri Lee in a video posted Friday. “We are constantly positioned as hypersexual beings and also not fully human.”

Lifestyle creator @relishwithreese called the ad “so disturbing” in a video uploaded earlier this month, questioning what message Equinox was attempting to convey. Soogia, a food creator with nearly 3 million total followers who uses only her first name online, called the ad a “literal embodiment” of the sexualization and objectification of Asian women. And Ed Choi, a creator and podcaster, went further, directly calling out Equinox’s chief marketing and digital officer, Bindu Shah, in a video criticizing the ad for “overly sexualiz[ing] Asian women.”

Though conversation around the ad spiked over the past two weeks, it originated as part of the company’s “Question Everything But Yourself” campaign, launched in January. Made with Los Angeles-based design and strategy agency Angry Gods, the ads addressed the proliferation of AI imagery online by pairing absurd AI creations—Pope Francis in a puffer jacket, a high-heel-wearing Justin Trudeau wrapped around a stripper pole—with images of real people. The idea was to position human strength as a counterpoint to digital fakery.

The ads ran across social, digital and out-of-home placements.

Equinox told creators in comments and DMs last week that it was “in the process” of “fully remov[ing]” the ad from OOH placements. The ad has been taken down from 10 Equinox club locations across New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco where it was still on display, an Equinox spokesperson confirmed today.

“This campaign was designed to explore the false realities created by AI and social media, including fake leaders, fake bodies, fake food and fake robots,” another spokesperson for the company said in an email. “While that was the creative goal, we recognize there was an unintended impact, and we apologize for that. We made the decision more than a week ago to fully remove the image—a choice guided by our core values of inclusivity, mutual respect and empathy, which ensure the Equinox community is a place where everyone is welcome.”

The agency, Angry Gods, also apologized for the offending image in an Instagram post shared Friday, then edited the statement the same day after facing criticism for initially referring to the backlash as a “discussion.” 

      

“Whatever we intended, an artificial, eroticized Asian woman’s face is not a neutral symbol of ‘fake,’” the agency stated. “It carries a history, and we should have seen that before the work ever shipped.” The agency will be donating $5,000 to the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, with agency founder and CEO Krish Menon contributing an additional $5,000 to the organization, Angry Gods stated.

Some OOH displays from the campaign, including the ad at the center of the backlash, had remained up for months in cities such as New York before Equinox removed them. While some creators had occasionally discussed the ad since it went up in January, Equinox earlier this month posted a video of its gym on New York’s Bond Street, where the ad was prominently displayed in one of the windows. The video has since been deleted.

Several of the creators who criticized the ad, including Choi, pointed out that the unsettling image of an Asian woman’s disembodied head didn’t match the surreal yet playful tone of the rest of the campaign.

“Hey, Equinox, if you want me to ‘question everything,’ I’m gonna ask: why the f*ck did you … think [this] was a good idea?” Lee said in her video. “Why did you need to use an Asian woman’s body? And I’ll also ask this: who the f*ck was in that marketing room?”

The controversy around the ad echoes the backlash American Eagle faced almost a year ago, when its Sydney Sweeney campaign was criticized as racist and overly sexual. American Eagle stood by the campaign, with Craig Brommers, the retailer’s chief marketing officer, later telling Ad Age that the polarizing campaign actually boosted the brand’s business.

17551: Popeyes Adds More White Meat To Its Marketing Menu.

 

Advertising Age reported Popeyes shook up its roster of White marketing firms, appointing White non-advertising-agency Anomaly to handle US creative duties.

In recent years, Popeyes experienced declining sales, prompting a revised strategy to improve its execution, simplify its menu, and better communicate its value proposition.

Gee, seems like things were fine when Annie the Chicken Queen ruled the Louisiana Kitchen.

Popeyes names Anomaly its US creative agency as part of a broader roster overhaul

By Brian Bonilla

Popeyes has appointed Anomaly as its new U.S. creative agency of record as the chicken chain looks to sharpen its marketing around its core menu and value positioning following a prolonged stretch of sales declines.

As part of the broad overhaul of its roster, Popeyes also named LaForce as its U.S. communications agency, Angry Butterfly as its creative agency of record in Canada and Massive Rocket to lead its CRM and customer lifecycle marketing. Angry Butterfly had already started working on the business earlier this year. The agencies join existing media agency PHD and shopper marketing partner 500 Degrees.

The U.S. review was managed by Jeffries Consulting, while Graphic Content Consulting oversaw the Canadian search. Stagwell’s Anomaly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The appointments mark the end of Popeyes’ relationship with McKinney, which had led the brand’s creative business in the U.S. and Canada since 2023. “Popeyes has been an incredible partner and we’re proud of the work we created together,” a McKinney spokesperson previously told Ad Age. “While we chose not to participate in the review, we wish the Popeyes team continued success.”

Popeyes framed the agency shifts as a move to further its focus on food quality, its Cajun and Creole roots and its affordability. “Popeyes is built on bold Louisiana flavor and a deep connection to our guests,” Matt Rubin, chief marketing officer of Popeyes U.S. and Canada, said in a statement. “These partners were chosen to help us do what we do best, better: bringing our food quality and brand character to life consistently for every guest, every visit.”

Rubin took over the chain’s marketing in January, following the departure of Bart LaCount, who is now CMO of Driven Brands. Jeff Klein, who oversaw Popeyes’ 2023 appointment of McKinney during his tenure as CMO and later served as president of Popeyes U.S. and Canada, earlier this year joined Subway, where he currently serves as its U.S. CMO. (Subway is currently in the midst of its own agency review process.)

The agency shakeup comes as Popeyes, the nation’s 14th-largest restaurant chain according to Technomic data, works to reverse declining sales. Popeyes’ U.S. comparable sales fell 2.9% in 2025, followed by a 6.5% decline in the first quarter of 2026, parent company Restaurant Brands International reported in May. By comparison, sibling chain Burger King posted a 5.8% increase in U.S. comparable sales during the first quarter.

Josh Kobza, the CEO of RBI, told investors in May that the company had identified the underlying issues at Popeyes and was focused on improving its execution, simplifying the menu around core offerings and better communicating the brand’s value proposition. Some of the changes, he said, include more field support to ensure more consistent training on brand standards, as well as refocusing the company’s menu on bone-in chicken, tenders and sandwiches.

“A tighter focus makes it easier to execute well in the restaurant and ensures our marketing is working harder behind fewer, stronger bets,” Kobza said in May.

The changes follow a modest increase in advertising investment. Popeyes’ U.S. measured media spending rose to approximately $182 million in 2025 from $169 million in 2024, according to MediaRadar.

RBI is set to report its second-quarter results on Aug. 6. 

17550: On Ogilvy US CEO CUL8R TTFN.

 

Advertising Age reported on the Ogilvy US CEO, who is bailing out of the White advertising agency after roughly nine months in the role.

Maybe winning Network of the Year at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity signaled mission accomplished.

David Ogilvy articulated his core philosophy on hiring as follows: If you hire people smaller than you, the company becomes a company of dwarfs; hire people bigger than you, and it becomes a company of giants.

Wonder what the iconic adman would think about his company being in giant flaming dumpster WPP, where hiring creates a revolving door of dwarfs.

Ogilvy US CEO to depart after less than a year in the post

By Ewan Larkin

Ogilvy U.S. CEO Lyndsey Corona is set to leave her post after less than a year at the WPP agency and is expected to pursue a new opportunity adjacent to the ad industry, Ad Age has learned.

Laurent Ezekiel, Ogilvy’s global CEO, will serve as interim CEO for North America, an agency spokesperson said. However, the agency does not plan to name a permanent replacement, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Ogilvy thanks Lyndsey for her leadership and contributions to our clients and teams, and wishes her the very best in her next chapter,” the Ogilvy spokesperson said in a statement.

Corona’s late 2025 appointment followed an executive reshuffle in Ogilvy’s top ranks. In September, Devika Bulchandani, then Ogilvy’s global CEO, moved upstairs to WPP as chief operating officer. Ezekiel succeeded her at Ogilvy and subsequently installed Corona in November, giving her oversight of the storied creative agency’s largest region.

Corona joined amid a turbulent stretch for Ogilvy, which cut roughly 5% of its workforce last year as part of a restructuring. One of her core focuses was to simplify complexity for marketers and better integrate the agency’s various disciplines. WPP itself is working through a multiyear turnaround, including layoffs and the formation of WPP Creative, a unit designed to house Ogilvy and VML, among other shops.

Before Ogilvy, Corona served as WPP’s global growth lead on Verizon. Earlier in her career, Corona worked as president and partner at independent creative boutique Slap Global. Her experience also spans agencies including Stagwell’s Forsman & Bodenfors and Omnicom’s McCann.