Grey is here to stay: Conrad Persons on leading the London agency’s new era under Ogilvy

Just two years later, in 2007, she was gone and David Patton was put into the job. Within 18 months, Patton had been promoted to an EMEA role and Christ Hirst took control.

After five years running the shop, he left and Lucy Jameson (alongside MD Natalie Graham and CCO Nils Leonard) led the agency through what, at the time, looked like a creative rebirth. But the now famously named ‘Grexit’ of the trio a year later in 2016 meant Leo Rayman stepped up, alongside Vicki Maguire and Adrian Rossi in the top creative roles, before they too left.

In 2020, there was the remarkably short-lived tenure of Anna Panczyk. Then, its chief creative officer, Laura Jordan Bambach, added president to her role and steered the Grey ship until she quit in 2023.

Which brings us to today – the Conrad Persons era. The American-born CEO began his career in journalism but found his way to advertising with the founding of Mash Strategy Studios, a consultancy that “helped brands take a more entrepreneurial approach to growth.” It was snapped up by WPP in 2018, which propelled Persons into the global strategist role where he advised the holding company’s biggest clients, including Mondelez, EY and Amazon.

He joined Grey London as president 18 months ago. In April, he was promoted to CEO. The leadership team flanking him today includes Helen Rhodes, a multi-award-winning creative director whom Persons hired earlier this year, as well as strategy chief Tarek Sioufi and managing director Jonny Tennant-Price. This team will support him in the challenge of getting Grey London back to its heyday.

Only, Persons’s ambition isn’t necessarily a return to the highs of the past, but rather to carve out a future that focuses on what he calls “the beauty of unconventional work.”

Sitting down with The Drum at the Cannes Lions Festival, he says the agency he walked into “was one that had an incredibly proud history and some wonderfully talented people, but also one that needed to get more excited about its future than nostalgic about its past.

“One of the interesting things that I asked myself was what the business was famous for when I joined, versus what it wanted to be famous for in the future. There’s a lot of respect for Grey London on a creative level and there’s a lot of respect for Grey in terms of some of the brands that it has worked on,” he says.

That work includes the likes of ‘Time Sculpture,’ which it created for Toshiba in 2008, or the Volvo ‘Life Paint’ campaign.

“But I also think that the business is probably more famous for its traditional work than its non-traditional work. And I inherited, but have also built, a team thinking much more around the ideas that influence people in a variety of ways, shapes or form, whether that’s changing their behavior, changing reputation or engaging in provocative conversations, versus, you know, the monolog that is some traditional advertising.”

There has been something of a distraction, though. As Grey’s struggles intensified post-Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP chief Mark Read merged Grey into the AKQA network. To most, the alignment never made total sense. A deeply digital and data-led organization with its own set of complex issues, it was never quite clear where Grey’s culture and approach to creativity fit alongside it.

As Persons’s CEO tenure began, Grey was moved out of AKQA and into Ogilvy. It was framed simply as a way to “realign financials.” Grey will remain independent and retain the brand, but global CEO Laura Maness will report to Ogilvy CEO Devika Bulchandani.

Amid the restructuring of the restructuring, outsiders openly pondered if this was the beginning of the end for the Grey legacy. The Drum’s columnist Jon Williams mused that it would ‘eventually be taken out of the back of the WPP cowshed and buried next to JWT and the others.’

“Let’s talk about what the arrangement actually is,” says Persons, keen to dispel the suggestion that Grey is under some existential threat. “We are in conversations now to continue to think about how we make any alignment work most effectively for us and all of the opportunities that we can unlock therein. At its heart, it’s a commercial alignment in terms of financial reporting structure. It’s not a deep operational integration. It is not about changing the Grey name. It is not about changing the Grey mission. It’s not about changing Grey’s embrace of ‘Famously Effective’ ideas. It’s really important for me to emphasize that to our people and our new partners.”

This isn’t the first agency to be brought into the Ogilvy fold. New Commercial Arts, David and Ingo have all been merged, but retained their “full-throated voices in the marketplace,” as Persons puts it. “That proof of concept really matters as we think about how to be independent and autonomous, but also reap the rewards of being in a network,” he explains.

“It’s important [to retain the Grey brand], not for any totemic, symbolic reasons, but because there’s some genuine momentum. There’s a new crop of talent rallying around the brand and there’s some real success,” he says. “What might have been a big strategic distraction is something that moves Grey in a different direction.”

More importantly, he says it has barely registered with clients that there’s been a structural change. “Sometimes we sit within our own echo chambers and we probably overstate the importance of these internal organizational changes,” he says. “The clients I’m talking to want to know about what great work I’ve seen, what great work we could do next year. How am I retaining the talent that’s on their teams? How we’re going to help them grow and how we help them in this wildly competitive marketplace.”

The momentum he talks about comes in the form of new client wins, including Etihad, Tourism Ireland and Circle K. It won every pitch it participated in during 2024. It has also attracted some impressive talent in recent hires like CCO Rhodes, group creative director Monty Verdi and its head of data, the ex-Google exec Eric Shapiro.

The Circle K win, in particular, was “really significant,” says Persons, as it symbolizes the kind of work he wants Grey London to become famous for under his stewardship.

“It’s not just a piece of campaign, it’s about transformation, which is more my background and an area I’m really interested in, answering questions that maybe sit at a higher altitude than some traditional, more transactional questions.”

Persons describes himself as “an entrepreneur and a startup guy, someone who’s very opportunistic about what’s out there.” He made his name doing big strategy pieces for clients and that will ultimately be reflected in the projects he goes for. That’s not to say he’s not interested in a brief that comes down to a creative execution. He was fresh from celebrating a win for the Stella Artois Claustrobars campaign at Cannes Lions, a brief “that had creativity at its heart” and “moved the needle from a brand equity perspective.” This year, the agency won two Gold Lions and two Bronze Lions, which was its best performance in a decade.

“But we also want different types of longer-term relationships where a business is fundamentally changing its model, or wants to radically alter the way that people experience the brand, or maybe wants to just change its business from the inside out. And I want to make sure that we have a seat at the table for those kinds of conversations,” he says. “It’s not about yes to this, no to that, but it is really making a conscious effort to ensure that we’ve got a much wider bandwidth of business problems that we’re addressing versus those that this industry has been famous for solving historically. Otherwise, I find it very hard to understand how we grow.”