Why has GroupM lost its way for so long? The buck stops with WPP

Campaign revealed earlier this month that Group M is set to rebrand to WPP Media. The company confirmed in a staff memo, which leaked almost immediately, that it plans to move to a single P&L, centralise most functions and downgrade the agency brands, including EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, to little more than client-handling. The global agency CEO roles had already been dropped in January.

The WPP media operation, which employs in the region of 40,000 people globally, will be “sunsetting” many agency-specific job titles and turning them into group roles, and there will be some staff departures, the memo said.

The shake-up, under Brian Lesser, the global chief executive of Group M since September, has sent shockwaves through the agency sector for multiple reasons.

Most obviously, the scale of this restructuring appears to be a tacit acknowledgement that previous efforts to simplify, including the merger of Essence and MediaCom, have failed to deliver.

Group M made its name in the early 2000s as the world’s biggest media buyer and still holds the crown, but it has been on the back foot for years.

Group M’s revenue growth was 4.9% in 2023, when Publicis Groupe’s media operation was growing double-digit, and halved to 2.7% in 2024, before turning negative with a 0.9% decline in Q1 2025.

WPP’s media unit has lost major clients in the US and, more recently, in the UK – particularly to Publicis – and suffered a bribery and fraud scandal in China.

Wider issues at WPP, which has carried out endless internal mergers and restructurings – most recently moving Grey out of AKQA and into Ogilvy – and is facing its third year of little or no growth, add to the impression that the British holding company lacks a winning strategy.

Consolidating and sunsetting brands is part of agency life and the move to focus on Group M has been on the cards for a long time, as part of a plan by Christian Juhl, Lesser’s predecessor from 2019 to 2024.

But the visceral response to the latest media shake-up has been partly a lament for the way that Group M and WPP have treated its agency brands since before the pandemic. 

Group M, which WPP created in 2003 to aggregate its media-buying scale, used to have a fearsome and admired array of brands a decade ago: MediaCom, Mindshare, MEC, Maxus and the then newly acquired Essence. Many of the agency leaders had a pioneer spirit, entrepreneurial drive, trading nous and British roots. 

There was practically nowhere in the world where Group M was stronger than in WPP’s home market – certainly not in the US, the world’s biggest ad market, where it has never been number one by billings.

But the signs that the media operation was starting to lose its way were evident from the middle of the 2010s, as Google and Facebook started to dominate on the sales side and allow advertisers to buy directly on a self-serve basis. 

What went wrong at Group M

It was in 2016 that I first argued in Campaign that Group M needed a reboot to be a leader again under its newly promoted global CEO, Kelly Clark, after losing business, especially in the US, where the Association of National Advertisers carried out an investigation into what it called “non-transparent” practices, such as media rebates, across the sector.

Group M merged Maxus and MEC globally to form Wavemaker at the end of 2017 during the final days of Martin Sorrell’s reign as CEO of WPP. But making Group M fit for the platform age – where digital brains and access to data matter as much as trading brawn – continued to be a struggle.

I wrote another column in 2019 about the need for a further reboot when Clark in New York handed over to Juhl in San Francisco – a symbolic, geographical shift, given the rise of Silicon Valley.

Arguably the rollercoaster of the pandemic and remote working masked some of the ongoing challenges, even as Juhl and Mark Read, the chief executive of WPP, worked to improve its data offer, moving some of Wunderman Thompson’s assets into Group M to build data unit Choreograph in 2021. 

The repeated refrain was that Group M and its agencies needed to be simpler but, much like elsewhere in WPP, the answer too often seemed to be internal M&A such as the creation of EssenceMediacom, rather than greater collaboration and fewer silos. One former executive says there was something of a “stacked blame game” between WPP, Group M and the agencies, all of which had frustrations with each other.

Group M was not alone among its media agency holdco peers in struggling to adapt, but expectations are higher for a company that is meant to be the market leader. There were some leadership appointments that didn’t work out on both sides of the Atlantic. Some talented and long-serving leaders also departed, not only during the pandemic but also in the last year when a number of big names exited amid a WPP cost-cutting drive.

Importantly, there were times when Group M and WPP were not close enough to some key media clients that subsequently departed, according to a number of current and past executives.

The US continued to be a problem and there is an argument for saying the company’s senior leadership has not spent enough time in-person, on the ground, in New York and other key US cities – both to inspire their teams and to win clients.

Lesser has signalled his intent by leading from New York. Group M is set to become a more American organisation, which might be necessary to drive the US operation forward but is also likely to mean the UK will carry less influence. Lesser has been coming regularly to London, an ally points out.

Not moving fast enough 

Group M has yet to reveal what’s coming next, although a number of executives within the media operation are privately upbeat about what Lesser, who previously ran Group M in North America from 2015 to 2017 before leaving for the adtech sector, might do. Becoming a single, more “connected” organisation will be a big opportunity for both staff and clients, one person maintains.

Some former executives who used to work at Group M agencies express anguish about what they feel is the demise of once-great agency brands. “Group M should have been a service platform but it wanted control and power and Group M won,” one observer says.

Others who are still inside Group M and WPP say the shift to one media operating company reflects how the marketplace has moved and what many clients want. The organisation also got bloated over time, with too many CEOs across markets and regions, and not enough focus on clients and growth, these people say.

Juhl talked about having one common set of tools and how Group M should become more like a software company, and some of Group M’s newer recruits, who have joined from rivals, talk favourably about WPP Open, an internal technology and AI platform, and the smart talent within the media operation.

The downgrading of the media agency brands was not inevitable. Rivals such as Publicis Media and Omnicom Media Group have kept alive their agency brands, despite moving to one investment team, one data platform and one back office. 

Things might have played out very differently if Stephen Allan, who was the long-serving global CEO of MediaCom, had taken charge at Group M, instead of Juhl, who previously ran Essence, several people said to me.

But if the direction of travel for a long time was for Group M to be pre-eminent, the question is, why didn’t the organisation move much faster, especially when it was clear it was falling behind competitors who see media as a key battleground? 

The answer is the buck stops at the top with WPP and its board, which have ultimate oversight of the holding company and its most valuable and profitable asset, Group M.

One source familiar with WPP’s thinking pushes back in response to the suggestion that it might have held back Group M from making changes sooner, while conceding WPP would always have the final say.

All is not lost. Group M won Amazon’s mega-account outside the Americas and retained its relationship with Unilever, with an expanded remit in the US, last year. WPP’s media operation remains number one globally, until the Omnicom takeover of IPG completes later this year, and, even then, will not be far behind.

Some company challenges can be cyclical. When Publicis was having a tough time in media a decade ago and combined its agency operations to form Publicis Media, Steve King, the founding CEO, talked about how they had “last-mover advantage”. He was proved right, but it took a long time.

The immediate road ahead for WPP’s media operation is going to be hard.

Gideon Spanier is UK editor-in-chief of Campaign