GroupM's new CEO faces hurdles in reviving the WPP agency—insiders react to the hire

GroupM took the industry by surprise when—amid two massive media pitches for Amazon and Unilever—it announced that Global CEO Christian Juhl would exit and be replaced by former GroupM North America CEO Brian Lesser. Juhl will take a new position within WPP as president, corporate development. The appointment of Lesser, most recently chairman-CEO of InfoSum, is effective in September. But to people on the inside, the announcement did not come as a total shock, according to 10 executives close to the business, including former employees. As Ad Age earlier reported, WPP’s media investment arm is struggling to maintain relevance. Clients are favoring integrated, data-powered solutions, an area in which former and current executives, as well as other industry experts, said GroupM has lagged behind competitors. GroupM has also seen several years of account losses, leadership departures and layoffs. Under Juhl, the company is finalizing a massive restructuring in North America to address some of its challenges and simplify its offering for clients. Some said many of GroupM’s issues predate Juhl, who took up the global CEO role five years ago. “Was I surprised by the headline? No,” one former WPP executive said. “In an age where Publicis [Groupe] is just eating everyone’s lunch, it’s very hard to compete … I think [Juhl is] the fall man.” Agency Review Tracker Stay up to date with the latest account reviews Click here Some people praised GroupM’s decision to get Lesser into the role, seeing him as the tech-savvy executive the company needs right now. Lesser led all of GroupM’s North American business from 2015 to 2017 and founded Xaxis, WPP’s global trading desk. Others questioned why the company didn’t wait to make the change until after the Amazon and Unilever reviews, both of which are set to wrap in the coming months, according to people close to the situation. “Perhaps they heard or thought that Lesser gave them a better chance in those reviews,” said one former GroupM agency executive. “Or maybe they think those reviews aren’t going their way anyway, and decided to move on to get their house in order sooner than later.” Either way, Lesser has an uphill battle ahead of him in effecting the necessary changes GroupM needs to stay competitive in the current marketplace, some people said. GroupM, and the larger WPP, are massive behemoths mired in internal politics that have historically prevented executives from making major changes, according to executives and former employees interviewed by Ad Age. WPP, Lesser and Juhl declined to comment for this story. Also read: Everything to know about Brian Lesser The Publicis threat Most of the executives interviewed expressed optimism in Lesser’s ability to make changes within GroupM, pointing to his success in doing so previously within telecom titan AT&T, where he was CEO of Xandr, its advertising and analytics business. (Xandr has since been sold to Microsoft.) “To operate within a behemoth like AT&T is no small feat,” said Brian Wieser, principal and founder of media and ad consultancy Madison and Wall and former global president of business intelligence at GroupM. “[Lesser has] built businesses from the ground up.” As Chairman-CEO of customer data infrastructure provider InfoSum in 2020, Lesser told Ad Age that his goal was to grow the startup to a “midsize fast-growing company.” InfoSum was one of the earliest providers of data clean rooms, which now service 100 global companies including DirecTV, Samsung Ads and News Corp., according to the company. And during his 10 years at GroupM, Lesser founded the media network’s audience data and tech platform Xaxis, now part of GroupM’s larger tech spine Nexus. Wieser said he has “a lot of confidence in Brian Lesser to be able to navigate” all of the complexities in the market and continue carrying out GroupM’s restructuring to make it successful. In a response to Ad Age’s article on GroupM’s restructuring efforts, he wrote that the company will need to invest more resources in global new business teams to be able to compete with rivals such as Publicis Groupe, which has done a good job operating across borders and has been a significant threat to GroupM. In a note yesterday, Wieser wrote that Publicis Media is starting to close in on GroupM globally to edge the WPP company out of its No. 1 media buying powerhouse slot. “In terms of net revenue, GroupM had approximately $5.7 billion last year vs. Publicis Media’s $4.9 billion,” he wrote. “If current trends persist, the gap between the two might only be around 10% of size by the end of this year. As recently as 2015, GroupM was twice the size of Publicis Media on our estimates.” Still, in global billings, GroupM is significantly larger. GroupM’s total client billings of $62.6 billion in 2023 were about $14 billion higher than Publicis Media’s $48.5 billion, according to COMvergence rankings. What Lesser brings—and doesn’t Lesser has a unique ability to “lead the industry forward during times of transformation,” said Lauren Wetzel, former InfoSum chief operating officer who replaced Lesser as CEO last week. She noted that he led InfoSum into the data clean room space before competitors including Snowflake and Liveramp showed up. At AT&T, where she first met Lesser while working as a consultant for him on building Xandr, Wetzel said Lesser turned the ad business into “an incredible success,” despite it being sold off to Microsoft in late 2021. As for his leadership style, she said Lesser is modest, someone who took the NJ Transit Path Train into the New York office every day at Xandr despite having likely a large enough salary to avoid public transportation. He’s also a consensus builder, she said. Lesser created a “unique culture in Xandr which I think lives on today, even within Microsoft,” Wetzel said, noting that the innovation and independence Xandr seemed to hold within AT&T made it feel “like a standalone company … He walks the walk. He cares about people; the careers of the folks who surround him. He always wanted me to be a CEO and pushed me and gave me every opportunity to do that,” she said. Lesser’s background at GroupM, and therefore his knowledge of the business, as well as his “entrepreneurial spirit” will help him lead the company effectively, Wieser said. On the other hand, while many said Lesser’s tech background is critical to GroupM right now, some said he doesn’t necessarily have all the qualities they’d like to see in a media agency executive. Some questioned if he will have as many close client relationships as a more traditional agency exec might. “Brian is a data guy, not a media executive,” another former GroupM executive said. “That always made me a bit anxious, as media is responsible not just for data [and] tech, but also for many kinds of creative, such as sponsorship, experiential, influencer, social … and [media] obviously works hand in glove with each client’s ad agencies.” That said, and the rising power of the platforms, trading desks, the need for cross-media measurement and, of course, AI, “the perception and the facts are that a grasp on the data side of the house is primary,” this person said. But someone close to Lesser said that given the fact he helped run GroupM in the past, pegging him solely as a data guy isn't necessarily fair. And to be sure, some people lodged the same critique against Juhl. Several other people added that Lesser does have close relationships with clients including Amazon and Unilever, which is critical given GroupM is currently vying for those accounts. There are still a lot of differences between Juhl and Lesser. The person close to Lesser said the incoming CEO is more of a product person than Juhl and that’s critical because GroupM has not been able to figure out how to make its products fit the market. Two people also said Lesser has stayed close to WPP CEO Mark Read in the years after he left the company, which could give him a leg up in being able to make changes. How Juhl rose up at GroupM In a lot of ways, Lesser’s appointment paints a similar story to Juhl’s when he took the reins of GroupM. Juhl, the former global CEO of GroupM agency Essence (now EssenceMediacom), was seen as the fresh digital thinker the company needed to take it into its next phase of growth. He also had a critical, tight-knit relationship with client and tech giant Google from his time at Essence. Juhl joined Essence in 2013 as the CEO of North America and was promoted to global chief executive a year later. He led Essence's acquisition by WPP in 2015 and is a veteran of Publicis Groupe’s Razorfish. Juhl spent nearly 10 years leading Razorfish’s West Coast operations in San Francisco before leaving for Essence. Juhl was also characterized by some people interviewed as “aloof” and lacking the schmoozy personality that most ad execs have, and as such didn’t necessarily maintain great relationships with GroupM clients outside of Google. One person close to the business said Juhl did maintain close relationships with many, if not all the company’s clients. Some people, including former executives, said the fact that Juhl resided in San Francisco—even though he had a residence in New York and often traveled there—made him seem isolated at times. “He intimidated me at first,” one former EssenceMediacom executive said. “But he’s cool. He’s more frank than some of these people. He’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of person, and a lot of these GroupM executives are ruthlessly political. He’s not like that. He speaks casually.” This person suspected that could have contributed to Juhl being pushed out at GroupM, again pointing to the issue of internal politics. Leaders before him, including his predecessor Kelly Clark, tried implementing radical changes, but ran up against a risk-adverse WPP leadership team and board that wouldn’t approve them, the former exec said. “The dysfunction is top down,” another former GroupM executive said. Juhl himself had told Ad Age that the transformation the company just underwent was something he wanted to do five years ago when he was first appointed to the role. “I said we’re going to look more like a software company in the future,” Juhl previously said. “We’re going to have to think about single ways of working, single ways of deploying and single technology stacks underneath us. And I think we’ve taken a very measured approach to delivering that and [we were] very cautious—our competitors caught up pretty quick. I think we announced it before anybody else did, but they executed it pretty rigorously, pretty quickly.” Now Juhl is moving into a role that many people interviewed questioned. It seems like a “saving face thing,” the former EssenceMediacom executive said. It’s unclear exactly what Juhl will do as WPP’s president of corporate development. He said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday that he will be focused on strategic growth and corporate development “more broadly” for the holding company. The person close to the business said Juhl’s role right now is helping transition Lesser and the rest will be solidified in September. The former EssenceMediacom executive and one other person close to the matter said that Juhl was once considered in a pool of potential successors to Read, and even had succession planning conversations with WPP’s board. The EssenceMediacom executive said Juhl may still be in the running for that position. More leadership changes coming? When Juhl came on, he initiated a changing of the guard at GroupM, packing the company with his own digital-forward people. For example, the former EssenceMediacom executive pointed to Evan Hanlon, the former chief product officer for Essence who Juhl made CEO of Choreograph in June 2023. Tim Castree, a media agency executive veteran who held positions in the company such as global CEO of Wavemaker, left months after Juhl took charge. He was CEO of North America for GroupM at the time of his exit and now has resurfaced at Amazon as VP of global content and media, where he is said to be overseeing the high-stakes media agency review in which GroupM is a finalist. On the movers front, more recently, Jill Kelly left her post as U.S. CEO of EssenceMediacom in February, with sources close to the matter citing recent account losses like Uber, Walgreens and Signet Jewelers as a reason for the decision. Kelly was originally appointed to the role in 2022 to oversee the merger of GroupM’s Essence and Mediacom, and was said to be remaining at GroupM in an unnamed role, but Kelly recently departed GroupM, according to a source familiar with the matter, as Ad Age previously reported. Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In another shift, GroupM North America made Sharb Farjami its new CEO in January, following the departure of Kirk McDonald, who had held that role since 2020. Now, with Lesser coming in, GroupM could see yet another leadership shakeup. Wieser said it’s “pretty natural” for eight or nine executives to turn over in the 18 months following the appointment of a new CEO. But, in the case of Lesser, he said there could be less turnover because, being a former employee, he has “worked with a lot of these people in one way or another." Is this a good time for a shakeup? There’s often a debate over whether an agency should announce a major shift in leadership while undergoing a big review, let alone two, the former WPP executive said. This person said every comms team has a different point of view on this: “Does it show strength early on?” “There’s never a great time to announce a leadership change of this nature,” Wieser said, adding that, ultimately, the new CEO should add more value to the agency than any one client could, no matter how big. These are indeed big account reviews. Online retail giant Amazon initiated a media review in late 2023, putting in play the account for the largest ad spender in both the U.S. and worldwide. Interpublic Group of Cos.’ Initiative is the incumbent. In 2022, Amazon boosted worldwide advertising and promotion spending by 22% to $20.6 billion, breaking a record for annual spending by any marketer. GroupM, meanwhile, is defending Unilever; the incumbent is Mindshare. The owner of Dove, Axe, Vaseline, Hellmann’s and other brands ranks as the globe’s ninth-largest ad spender, according to the Ad Age Datacenter. Many people interviewed said it did seem like the right time to name Juhl’s successor and commended GroupM for the decision. “When big agencies pitch big clients, they tend to know a lot about where they stand, what the client wants and what might help swing the pitch in their direction,” the former GroupM agency executive said. “Relationships at those levels tend to be deep and built over years.” Another person close to the WPP business said: “Guess they’re doing what they feel they need to do." Contributing: E.J. Schultz and Parker Herren ~ ~ ~ CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Christian Juhl's global CEO predecessor and misspelled Choreograph CEO Evan Hanlon's name.

GroupM's new CEO faces hurdles in reviving the WPP agency—insiders react to the hire

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