WPP boss: Life at the top of advertising is unrelenting – The Times

After some cajoling, he consents. It’s difficult to know whether he is being coy, and knew this was coming, or just polite.

His favourite part of the job is working with his staff and his clients. His second answer is more revealing. “The least favourite thing is, you talk to any FTSE CEO: these jobs are unrelenting. You sit at the top of a big organisation, you never know what’s going to happen from one day to the next … they’re not easy jobs.”

And, for the record: “My dog is called Potato.” Why? “I don’t know,” says Read, a man who values discretion above much else. “My children named him.”

London-born Read, 58, is probably Britain’s most significant media man. He rubs shoulders with the global business elite, the likes of Elon Musk, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan. The world’s largest companies — Apple, Ford, Coca-Cola and more — entrust WPP’s companies with buying their ad slots, crafting their marketing campaigns and managing their public relations.

And yet the understated man at the top of WPP has largely shied away from building a public profile for himself or spending too much time with journalists like me. That was fine when WPP, an employer of 110,000 people across the world, was bobbing along. Now, things have changed.

The share price is down 35 per cent this year, and it has halved since Read was appointed to the top job in September 2018. Meanwhile, two smaller rivals, New York’s Omnicom and Interpublic, are merging to overtake WPP. And Read has earned bogeyman status among a vocal cadre of staff affronted by the suggestion that they should work from their offices at least four days a week.

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On the sidelines, Sir Martin Sorrell, Read’s embittered former boss and mentor, seems to call for his sacking on a weekly basis. And, with WPP having just appointed former BT boss Philip Jansen as chairman, the received wisdom among ad industry gossips is that Read, who has already surpassed the FTSE 100 average by serving six and a half years, is on his way out.

This interview in WPP’s London headquarters, in a meeting room near Read’s desk overlooking the River Thames from the South Bank, feels like an attempt — critics might argue a belated one — to reclaim the narrative: to talk up WPP’s early adoption of artificial intelligence; to argue that his achievements have been “underappreciated”; and, to some extent, to shrug his shoulders and point to the chaotic economy in which he is operating.

“We can’t escape the macro,” says Read. Given its global clientele, WPP is extremely vulnerable to economic turbulence, especially in its largest market, Donald Trump’s tariff-happy America. “Our largest clients in the automotive sector — they face challenges,” says Read. “We’ve got a number of clients in the luxury sector. We’ve got clients making chocolate who have built factories in Mexico. And we work with technology companies that are importing stuff from China. Business hates uncertainty, and marketing inevitably is impacted by that.”

Read’s father was a property entrepreneur and his mother worked as an orthodontist. He boarded at King’s School in Canterbury, Kent, established himself as a maths whizz and went on to study economics at Cambridge. Read found a graduate job at WPP and, after working his way through a few divisions, he left — going on to profit from the dotcom boom by co-founding a digital coupons business called WebRewards, which was acquired by Bertelsmann of Germany in 2001.

He rejoined WPP in 2002, when he was identified in the trade press as a “favoured fledgling” of Sorrell, and worked his way up the business to become chief executive of the marketing agency Wunderman in 2015. Then, in 2018, when Sorrell was ousted from the chief executive’s seat (as a “good leaver”) after WPP investigated claims (denied) that he used company funds to pay a prostitute, Read found himself in pole position to take the helm.

The business that Sorrell left behind was, by Read’s account, troubled. “Ford, our largest client, was up for review. We had £5 billion of debt and this massive, complex, sprawling organisation.”

Sorrell had bought dozens of companies from across the world to build WPP into the largest ad holding group in the world, with revenues of £14 billion. By early 2017, its share price had topped £18, giving it a value of £24 billion. By the time Read took over in the following year, the shares had fallen to £14.

Read has since merged several agencies, sold off divisions and simplified the “back end” of WPP by, for example, standardising IT systems. The net debt has fallen to below £2 billion.

Ford remains a major client. And while there have been client losses, there have also been wins. Among them is the US telecoms giant Verizon Wireless. Read is “not a pushy salesman”, says Verizon chief executive Hans Vestberg, who describes the WPP boss as a “customer oriented” and “well prepared” business partner who is willing to muck in. Vestberg says that Read was personally involved in Verizon’s last Super Bowl advert, which was made by WPP’s Ogilvy agency and starred Beyoncé — who reportedly made $30 million dollars for the gig.

Read has also sought to establish his company as a market leader in AI. He bought Satalia, a marketing AI toolmaker, in 2021 and today describes it as “our DeepMind”. In 2023, WPP agency VML grabbed headlines by creating a digital twin of Jennifer Lopez, dubbed Jen AI, for a Virgin Voyages campaign. And last week, WPP announced a “major strategic step forward” by investing in InfoSum, a tool that helps clients gather and share data safely with advertisers..

Read now thinks WPP should be considered “both a creative company and a technology company”. And so begins my virtual tour of WPP Open, his pride-and-joy AI software, which can be used by employees to brainstorm marketing ideas, conduct market research and generate text, pictures and videos. “I think people sometimes say the impact on business and society is over-exaggerated,” says Read of artificial intelligence. “I don’t think in any way it’s over-exaggerated.”

He takes me down a few experimental rabbit holes, and we end up building the basis for a marketing and PR campaign to increase Yorkshire Tea sales in the US. The pick of WPP Open’s slogans: “The Yorkshire Tea Rebellion.”

Is this market-leading? To my untrained eye, who knows? But clients such as Aude Gandon, Nestlé’s chief marketing officer, rave about WPP’s technology. And Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud, says: “WPP’s significant investment in AI has set the pace for the industry and they are a key partner.”

How will AI affect job numbers in the advertising sector? Read is not sure, but he says: “It’s not going to replace people’s creativity; it’s going to help them get to better ideas more quickly.” And he places some faith in the “Jevons Paradox”, a Silicon Valley favourite — named after a 19th-century English economist — which dictates: “When the cost of things come down, people consume a lot more of them.”

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Read also says he is hopeful that AI will be able to help solve the UK’s “productivity crisis”. Ever cautious, he immediately looks panicked after saying this, and tells me: “Actually, let’s call it a productivity challenge, not a crisis.”

When Read is not travelling to WPP offices across the world, he bases himself on an open-plan executive floor. On my way past his desk to our meeting room, I noticed a name plate that read: “Mark Read: Get on with it”. He seems slightly perturbed when I bring it up and ask him to explain the quote. “I don’t know,” he says with an awkward chuckle. “Apparently I’ve said it in the past.”

One of the challenges of running a business like WPP, say those who know the company well, is the duty to manage several cocksure company founders and creative leaders. Legend has it that Sorrell handled this by asserting his alpha credentials on a regular basis, sometimes through phone calls and emails at anti-social hours.

Read has, by most accounts, taken a different approach. Clearly, he has a ruthless streak, attested to by numerous high-profile departures, company mergers and sales. But, recent return-to-office protests aside, he has built a reputation as a good, modern boss who respects the work-life balance. “We have got big personalities inside the business,” he says when I ask about his approach. “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.”

Despite Read’s best efforts — his mergers, his AI investments, his IT systems — the share price has continued to slide. He can, of course, point to external factors and the global economy. WPP has suffered in the context of a wider London stock market malaise and Read says it will “continue to review” moving its primary listing to New York, although this is currently “not on the cards”.

But I wonder whether he feels his efforts have not been recognised. “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,” he says. “I do look at the share price, obviously,” he adds. “But I need to focus on setting the company up for the next five years.”

Read, on a few occasions, refers to a five-year plan for WPP. I have to ask: is he still planning to be there in five years? “I mean, no one is immortal,” he says. “Not even me.”