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WPP chief government Mark Learn is standing down from the UK’s largest promoting group because it struggles with a close to five-year low in its share value and industry-wide upheaval brought on by synthetic intelligence.
Learn’s exit will finish a greater than 30-year profession at WPP and leaves it in search of a brand new chief government throughout one of many most turbulent durations ever for the {industry}. He’ll proceed as chief government till the top of the yr whereas the board begins the seek for a successor.
Former BT boss Philip Jansen grew to become chair of the group initially of the yr, sparking hypothesis about the way forward for Learn. In an inside observe to workers seen by the Monetary Instances, Learn mentioned “there’s by no means an ideal time to maneuver on as CEO . . . however this seems like the suitable time for me”.
In an announcement to the inventory trade on Monday morning, Jansen mentioned Learn had “performed a central position in remodeling the corporate right into a world chief in trendy advertising providers”.
Throughout Learn’s tenure as chief government, WPP’s share value has halved, taking its market capitalisation to about £6bn, whereas he sought to restructure and streamline the group’s world operations and make investments extra in know-how.
WPP final yr misplaced its place because the world’s largest advert company by revenues to French rival Publicis, whereas its two largest US rivals — Omnicom and IPG — have introduced plans to merge to create a single, North American promoting heavyweight. WPP continues to be Britain’s greatest promoting group, with revenues of near £15bn and greater than 100,000 staff world wide.
Learn took over in 2018 from Sir Martin Sorrell — who resigned after an inquiry into his office conduct — and has overseen the corporate because it has tried to reorientate its enterprise to deal with the dominance of the promoting market by tech giants Meta and Alphabet.
Social media and influencer content material have turn out to be key advertising channels, whereas conventional promoting media similar to TV have shrunk in significance.
Extra just lately, Learn has pushed WPP to speculate a whole bunch of tens of millions of kilos in AI, which has threatened to upend the promoting company mannequin by providing a lot faster and cheaper methods to do labour-intensive artistic and media planning work. Greater than 50,000 individuals now use WPP Open, its AI platform, to help them with their work.
Learn instructed the FT in January that WPP wanted to transfer on from a troublesome interval of restructuring and rebuild its community of companies with AI on the centre.
Within the inside observe to workers, Learn mentioned the corporate “wanted to make many troublesome choices that had been essential to serve our purchasers higher, simplify the corporate, construct our tradition and put WPP on a extra strong monetary footing”.
He added: “We now have additionally lived by way of a few of the most difficult exterior occasions of recent instances, from the pandemic to the warfare in Ukraine, and navigated an more and more polarised and troublesome world . . . Nevertheless, I strongly imagine that the longer term for WPP is a really constructive one.”