The understated CEO spoke out in The Sunday Times at the weekend. The Drum’s editor-in-chief reads between the lines.
WPP’s CEO – a man not known for chasing headlines – has broken cover in The Sunday Times, offering up a rare and revealing portrait of a leader who feels both underestimated by the City and misunderstood by some of his own people.
“I do look at the share price, obviously,” he admits. “But I need to focus on setting the company up for the next five years.”
It’s a frank assessment. Since taking the top job at WPP in 2018 following the dramatic exit of Sir Martin Sorrell, Read has quietly gone about dismantling and rebuilding the world’s largest advertising group – streamlining its tangled empire, cutting net debt, merging agencies and betting big on artificial intelligence. But despite all that, the share price has halved since his appointment and WPP is being leapfrogged by nimble US rivals like Omnicom and Interpublic.
Read believes the market is missing something. “If I look at the work that we do, and if I look at the people that we’ve hired, and I think about the strengths of WPP, you know, maybe they are underappreciated.”
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Investors aren’t the only ones proving hard to please. His insistence on a four-day-a-week return to the office has made him a target for internal criticism. He shrugs it off with calm resolve. “We have got big personalities inside the business,” he says. “I think that’s a good thing. Maybe, you know, I don’t need to be the biggest personality, if you know what I mean.”
What he does want to be known for is transforming WPP into what he now calls “both a creative company and a technology company.” Under his leadership, WPP has snapped up AI firms such as Satalia (“our DeepMind,” he says) and launched WPP Open – its in-house AI platform that helps generate campaign ideas, conduct research and produce content across text, image and video.
“I don’t think in any way it’s over-exaggerated,” he says of AI’s potential. “It’s not going to replace people’s creativity; it’s going to help them get to better ideas more quickly.”
The clients seem to agree. Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian credits WPP with setting “the pace for the industry.” Nestlé CMO Aude Gandon praises its tech. Verizon’s CEO, Hans Vestberg, says Read is a “well-prepared” and “customer-oriented” leader.
So where next? Read repeatedly references a five-year plan for WPP – and when asked directly whether he intends to stick around to see it through, he doesn’t say no.
“I think people don’t always understand how far we’ve come,” he says, perhaps summing up the tone of the interview best.
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In fairness to Mark Read, he’s got a point.
WPP has quietly built one of the most advanced AI capabilities in the marketing industry – yet the headlines seem more obsessed with its return-to-work policies. WPP Open isn’t just a flashy demo tool; it’s a serious platform that positions WPP as much a tech company as it is a communications one.
And the return-to-office backlash? That does feel overblown. One WPP insider told The Drum that much of the noise is coming from markets like the US, where people didn’t just move upstate during Covid – they moved out of state. So yes, being asked to come in more is disruptive. But it’s also not unreasonable to expect people to be in the office more, particularly as trading conditions deteriorate.
Let’s face it: if you employ over 100,000 people – and most of them work in communications – it is inevitable that some will use these skills to push their agenda. But maybe it’s time for Read to start fighting fire with fire. He runs the global communications powerhouse. He should use it. And with this rare Sunday Times interview, it looks like he’s finally starting to do just that.
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