—GroupM’s global CEO chats with Campaign US about the network’s strategy to further simplify as part of parent WPP’s $160 million cost-cutting drive—
By Alison Weissbrot
It’s been four years since Christian Juhl took on the global CEO role at GroupM, the world’s largest media buyer managing nearly $64 billion in ad spend, according to Comvergence.
In that time, GroupM—which houses agencies Mindshare, EssenceMediacom and Wavemaker—has increased annual net sales by $1 billion and notched 25% growth, Juhl shares in an interview with Campaign US at GroupM’s headquarters at 3 World Trade Center in New York City.
GroupM grew 5% in 2023 despite losing large accounts including Shell, Uber, Walgreens, L’Oréal, General Mills and Kimberly-Clark, costing it hundreds of millions of dollars in business. It is the market leader by size but growth has lagged some peers, such as Publicis Media, which grew double-digits last year.
GroupM’s position comes in the context of a difficult year for its parent, WPP, which suffered a surprise revenue dip in Q3, including a slowdown at GroupM, after lowering its forecast earlier in the year. WPP’s stock price has been in steady decline since 2017 and is currently down nearly 16% year over year.
Under pressure to simplify and grow, WPP CEO Mark Read on Tuesday announced a £125 million ($160 million) cost-savings drive over the next two years, in which, in addition to merging VMLY&R with Wunderman Thompson and BCW with Hill & Knowlton, GroupM will be a central player.
Employing 44,000 people, GroupM has been on its own consolidation journey under Juhl. In 2022 it merged Essence with MediaCom, bringing together 10,000 employees. In September, it restructured performance marketing group Nexus by sunsetting Xaxis, Finecast and Sightline, and moved its product and engineering teams under data business Choreograph.
In November, GroupM shifted to a country-level P&L structure to eliminate a dual-reporting line for agency leadership. The change means only GroupM’s country leaders have control over budgets rather than each agency leader, and centralizes new business and marketing efforts at GroupM.
In the U.S., that job goes to newly appointed North America CEO Sharb Farjami, who stepped in to lead GroupM’s largest and most challenged market earlier this month, filling a vacancy that was open since Kirk McDonald stepped down in October.
Now, after WPP revealed more specifics about its cost savings drive at a Capital Markets Day on Tuesday in London, more centralization and cost cutting is on the horizon at GroupM, as the holding company looks to drive £60 million ($76 million) in savings from its media group, according to chief financial officer Joanne Wilson.
In addition to a £250 million ($317 million) investment in AI, WPP said it will slim down to six global networks—AKQA, Ogilvy, VML, Hogarth, GroupM and Burson—representing 90% of its revenue.
Juhl spoke to Campaign US ahead of Capital Markets Day to provide more detail on what it means for GroupM.
‘More like a software company’
Juhl’s North Star is to transform GroupM—a sprawling behemoth of independent companies—to operate more like a software company, with standardized, scalable tools and processes.
To do this, he has moved all of GroupM’s media activation processes, tools and delivery teams under Nexus, bolstering the 11,000-person organization with more specialized talent—a move that has impacted roughly 40% of GroupM’s staff.
In addition to all deals being negotiated by GroupM, all digital buys will be placed by activation teams at Nexus, while strategy will be shaped by the agencies. Media buyers will remain at the agencies with a dotted line to Nexus. Talent across the world will buy addressable media based on a playbook that GroupM has co-built with Google.
With activation, technology and data strategy now centralized, work across GroupM’s agencies will be “largely codified,” Juhl says. “It's going to be systemized, it’s going to be technology-driven. We’re going to do it one way.”
He disagrees that centralization will commoditize media buying across the agencies, but rather ensure they are all using the best tools, technology and expertise that GroupM has access to, while being able to work through a common operating system.
While size and clout still matter, analyzing data at scale and leveraging negotiating weight with tech platforms are becoming more important than securing the best TV rates, Juhl believes.
“How do we actually match scale with intelligence?” Juhl says. “[It’s the] idea of all the different parts coming together and making something better than their components.”
‘We’ve gotten in our own way’
As more budgets, control and operations shift into GroupM, Juhl still believes in the importance of agencies. Unlike some of its peers which have moved to more centralized models, GroupM has maintained what Juhl calls “three global, multi-billion dollar brands.”
“Agencies have different personalities, and different clients get drawn to that,” he says.
“It’s to our advantage that we have multiple types of people from different types of agencies that a client can choose from. We need to protect that and continue to invest in it.”
But agencies should not be “competing on pricing or go-to-market strategies or how they deliver value to their clients.”
While each agency will retain its personality, so to speak, it’s crucial that GroupM, which has historically been seen as complex to navigate, has “a single narrative in each market.”
“When we’ve gotten, sort of, crossed up in the past, is because we’ve told inconsistent stories, shown our complexity to clients and have kind of gotten in our own way,” he says.
Strong agency brands also help attract and retain talent; despite the turbulence at GroupM, employee attrition is down by 30% in the last two years, Juhl claims.
He is not worried that agency CEOs will feel disempowered by the loss of their P&Ls, despite recent senior leadership departures in Asia. Rather, they are thankful for the clarity and the ability to move faster.
While the changes are not primarily cost-cutting exercises, Juhl contends, there are opportunities to trim—and layoffs are on the table. With 16% of Nexus’ headcount and 5% of Choreograph’s now in offshore hubs, with the latter supported by outsourced teams in some markets, WPP is looking to bank an additional £175 million ($221 million) in gross savings on back-office consolidations.
Juhl says he expects the reporting line change to deliver “a significant portion” of savings.
“[Agencies] have their own talent organizations, finance organizations, operations, teams,” he says. “You can get rid of the duplications there.”
While the new structure means that GroupM is “much more systemized and codified” today than it was when he joined four years ago, Juhl says there is still work to be done to operate more like a software company.
“We’re pushing toward that, but we’re still a people-based organization, and that’s just the nature of it,” he says.
If he pulls it off, he may have an opportunity to bring the same thinking to WPP, as sources float him as a potential successor to Read. GroupM declined to comment.
‘It's up to us to reintroduce our capabilities’
Juhl admits that last year posed a “challenging marketplace” for GroupM, particularly in North America. It kicks off 2024 defending a major client—Unilever—but opportunity is also in the air with big accounts including Volkswagen and Amazon up for grabs.
At WPP’s Capital Markets Day, he told investors in London that GroupM is the No. 1 media buyer in EMEA and APAC and the No. 2 in North America. His priority this year is to get back to the top spot in advertising’s largest market.
“We failed to get as simple as we needed to be [in the U.S.],” Juhl told investors. “It’s not a capability problem … we just failed to tell the right story.”
But he tells Campaign US that the business is cyclical and GroupM’s recent restructures have not played into clients’ decisions to review.
“Some of the brands that chose to go in a different direction have been with us a very, very long time,” he says. “It’s up to us to always make sure that we reintroduce ourselves and our capabilities to clients before they go into review.”
He adds GroupM has made a “real, concerted effort” in the U.S. to “make sure that every client knows what our current capabilities are and how [they] can take advantage of them.”
This is especially important as marketers grapple with transformation and are under pressure to justify “pretty large marketing expenses when you’re working with us,” he says.
Despite the challenges, GroupM is still outperforming WPP’s creative agencies, and Juhl calls it the “growth engine” for WPP. According to CFO Wilson, WPP is forecasting 5% average growth in the medium term for GroupM, compared to 2% growth at the creative agencies.
In this context, Juhl expects more large, global client consolidations, both at the media group and holding company level.
“Some of the bigger reviews are really focusing in around creative and media,” he says. “I think this year, you'll see more of that coming together apace.”
‘We need to be every bit as easy to work with as our competitors’
As its peers made splashy acquisitions or built high-profile data platforms, GroupM launched data consultancy Choreograph in April 2021. It has since built an operating system offering an “end-to-end workstream” for everything “from the RFP all the way through to post-campaign analysis, reporting and optimization,” Juhl says.
Choreograph’s leadership has taken time to solidify. Evan Hanlon joined as global CEO in June, taking over from Brendan Moorcroft. Krystal Olivieri was briefly CEO in North America before exiting abruptly in December. Rich Astley joined as chief product officer in August.
Juhl said he is comfortable with Choreograph’s strategy and leadership but admits that GroupM has not articulated that strategy as well as its peers, adding that Omnicom’s positioning of Omni “might have been skinned a little better than ours was to begin with.”
“We need to do a better job of making sure that we’re every bit as easy to work with as competitors,” he says.
He maintains that GroupM’s agnostic approach to data ownership is still the right strategy—particularly as third-party cookies phase out. “Clients want flexibility,” he says. “Both Epsilon and Acxiom are pretty heavily cookie-based.”
Agnosticity, along with clout, allow GroupM to ink first-mover partnerships, such as one with Google to conduct live tests of its Privacy Sandbox APIs.
Juhl does not think marketers are ready for the deprecation of third-party cookies despite Google having “delayed and delayed and delayed” the deadline.
“There’s a real challenge around, ‘What does the open web look like without something to monitor performance?’” he says, adding that it will lead to “more closed environments, more people marking their own homework, more consolidation within the big platforms.”
Meanwhile, as holding companies race to invest in AI, Juhl pointed to Copilot, GroupM’s AI-powered tool that optimizes media buys across DSPs. He says he doesn’t see AI as an efficiency play but rather “a way of getting to faster decision making and faster performance for clients.”
‘Brands have become more risk-averse’
As steward of the world’s largest media buying organization, Juhl takes GroupM’s role in pushing for responsible media investment seriously. GroupM cofounded the Global Alliance for Responsible Media under his tenure, and has made various pushes for standards and tools around sustainable media buying, diverse investment and investment in journalism.
As media agencies have come under increased scrutiny in the past year for funneling spend into problematic channels, GroupM has devised products aiming to address issues such as circumventing “made for advertising” websites.
He acknowledges that ahead of a contentious election year, brands “have been a little more risk-averse,” adding, “I don’t think many clients are going to want to participate in the election conversation.”
In the past there have been “multiple examples of marketers sticking their necks out, only to be severely reprimanded by their own companies or boards. That has created an environment that, maybe, is more fearful than it’s been in the past.”
But he says most platforms have strong brand safety tools and that he is satisfied with progress made recently at X. “They’ve actually done a lot under Elon [Musk] to try and provide more visibility into the advertiser side.”
Juhl says advertisers are generally willing to pay the price for higher-quality inventory.
That inventory is sometimes still on linear TV, particularly during key moments such as the Super Bowl, during which GroupM has bought 19 ad spots.
Juhl says the linear marketplace is “still super important” and the upfronts “still play a major role,” but clients are frustrated by negotiating increasingly higher rates as reach falls.
“What’s changing is how
package those things,” Juhl says. “Marketers are now saying, ‘We’ll take some of the major flagship events but we’re not going to package up all the other stuff that doesn’t provide as much value as we would like.’”This article originally appeared at Campaign US.
