Mark Read, chief executive of WPP, describes growth as something a holding company earns by defining its market widely enough to grow inside it, and creative transformation as the part of that work a spreadsheet cannot reach. His test for a good idea is whether anybody else could have arrived at it.
The conversation is unusually concrete about the limits of the frameworks marketing leaders are handed. Read is a former management consultant and says there are only two ways to make an argument inside a consultancy, neither of which produces an idea.
Key findings
- Read’s own growth metric is the top line, on the reasoning that the rest follows from it. He splits his time roughly in thirds between his people, his clients, and the wider set of stakeholders, and says that third is growing for most chief executives.
- He is direct about where corporate responsibility work goes wrong. Separating it into a department is the failure mode, because it leaves the rest of the company unchanged.
- His diagnosis of marketing is that the discipline collapsed into advertising and is only now recovering the rest of its job. He points out that a CMO today spends about five percent of the day on advertising, against roughly half of it twenty years ago.
- Asked whether empathy belongs alongside art and science in a leader’s profile, Read declines to agree in full. He argues that innovation often tells people about things they did not know they wanted, and that empathy has a limit. Where he does concede the point is transformation, which requires taking people with you.
The High Line as a definition of creative transformation
Read’s example of the difference between analysis and an idea is the High Line in New York. Presented with a run-down district and a disused railway, he says, a consultant would have proposed an investment board, tax subsidies, schools, and transport. Nobody would have proposed a garden on the railway.
The point is not that the idea was charming. It is that the idea created value at a scale the analysis was not reaching for, and that this is what he wants his agencies to do for clients.
What the pandemic accelerated, and what it ended
Read reads the period as an acceleration of trends already running rather than a new direction. He cites American e-commerce moving several years’ worth of share in weeks.
He does not expect the changes to reverse. His estimates at the time were that one shop in five on the high street would not reopen and that a fifth of office space would stand empty.
He is careful not to celebrate any of it, and says the privileged in society have had an easier time of it than the rest.
Publishing the diversity numbers before they are good
On the response to the killing of George Floyd, Read describes writing to WPP’s hundred thousand people and receiving more replies than to any other communication, over half of them from outside the United States. His conclusion is that this is not an American issue.
His decision was to publish WPP’s diversity data while it was still poor, on the argument that publishing it is what forces the company to improve it.
Synthetic diversity, and the answer he will not take
Asked about generated people in advertising, Read rejects the shortcut. His preference is to fix the representation problem with real people on both sides of the camera rather than invent them.
His concern with the technology is the training data rather than the output, and he gives lending as the case that worries him: a model can reconstruct a prohibited distinction from signals nobody chose. He expects the industry to need an ethics role alongside the work.
Fewer brands, fewer handovers
Read’s restructuring argument is that the fragmentation of the industry into separate disciplines diminished it, and that most clients need one strong creative partner and one strong media partner rather than a scramble across five suppliers.
He puts a number on where that ends: ten to twelve global brands, plus specialists. The problem he describes is not the large agency names but the small ones that exist because their people did not want to belong to something else.
Take the riskiest decision first
The three decisions Read names as significant are the merger of VML and Y&R, the merger of Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson, and the sale of Kantar. Together they addressed roughly half of WPP’s revenue.
His rule for sequencing them is that the riskiest goes first, because a decision only gets harder to take the longer it waits, and because the first one either works or does not and either way you learn.
Why the CMO’s job is the harder one
Read’s closing argument compares the two roles directly. A chief financial officer delivers profit improvement and an accurate budget, and both are measurable and the same everywhere. A CMO’s job description is different in every company, as are the metrics.
His advice follows from that: define the role as broadly as you can, and hold it as the customer’s voice inside the company.
Scope and limitations
This is a conversation recorded in mid 2020, and the numbers in it are the speaker’s estimates at the time rather than measurements. The claims about WPP’s own position are the chief executive’s account of his own company.
Source
This page summarises HGS #4: Mark Read (CEO, WPP), by Frank van den Driest, 2020-10-15.