WPP will spend $382 million over three years and cut 2,500 jobs as new boss Mark Read seeks to return the world’s biggest advertising group to growth.
According to Reuters, The British company, owner of the JWT and Ogilvy agencies, lost its founder Martin Sorrell and 40 percent of its value in the last year. It has been forced to cut sales and profit forecasts after it lost some major clients and others cut their spending.
On Tuesday it set out its plan to respond, with a strategy to maintain its dividend and remove costs of 275 million pounds a year by 2021 by closing offices and removing job roles that overlap across its multiple agencies.
“We need a simpler WPP, we need to invest in the future and this is the next stage in that journey,” Read told Reuters.
Sorrell, the world’s most famous advertising boss, built WPP from a two-man office in central London into the world’s most powerful advertising company offering creative work, media buying, public relations, consultancy and data analytics.
It outperformed rivals Omnicom, Publicis and IPG for years, but growth evaporated in 2017 due to competition from consultancies and tech groups Facebook and Google, which enable clients to cut out the middle men and place ads directly.
Clients have also complained that WPP, in 112 countries, is too complex, forcing them to deal with multiple agencies within the group to get one service.
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