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WPP chief govt Mark Learn is standing down from the UK’s largest promoting group because it struggles with a close to five-year low in its share worth and industry-wide upheaval attributable to synthetic intelligence.
Learn’s exit will finish a greater than 30-year profession at WPP and leaves it searching for a brand new chief govt throughout one of many most turbulent intervals ever for the {industry}. He’ll proceed as chief govt till the tip of the yr whereas the board begins the seek for a successor.
Former BT boss Philip Jansen grew to become chair of the group at first of the yr, sparking hypothesis about the way forward for Learn. In an inner observe to workers seen by the Monetary Instances, Learn mentioned “there’s by no means an ideal time to maneuver on as CEO . . . however this seems like the best time for me”.
In an announcement on Monday, Jansen mentioned Learn had “performed a central position in reworking the corporate right into a world chief in trendy advertising providers”.
Throughout Learn’s tenure as chief govt, WPP’s share worth has halved, taking its market capitalisation to about £6bn, whereas he sought to restructure and streamline the group’s world operations and make investments extra in know-how.
Shares in WPP fell 1.3 per cent in early buying and selling on Monday.
WPP final yr misplaced its place because the world’s largest advert company by revenues to French rival Publicis, whereas its two largest US rivals — Omnicom and IPG — have introduced plans to merge to create a single, North American promoting heavyweight. WPP remains to be Britain’s greatest promoting group, with revenues of near £15bn and greater than 100,000 workers all over the world.
Learn took over in 2018 from Sir Martin Sorrell — who resigned after an inquiry into his office conduct — and has overseen the corporate because it has tried to reorientate its enterprise to deal with the dominance of the promoting market by tech giants Meta and Alphabet.
Social media and influencer content material have grow to be key advertising channels, whereas conventional promoting media resembling TV have shrunk in significance.
Extra lately, Learn has pushed WPP to speculate tons of of hundreds of thousands of kilos in AI, which has threatened to upend the promoting company mannequin by providing a lot faster and cheaper methods to do labour-intensive inventive and media planning work. Greater than 50,000 individuals now use WPP Open, its AI platform, to help them with their work.
Learn advised the FT in January that WPP wanted to transfer on from a tough interval of restructuring and rebuild its community of companies with AI on the centre.
Within the inner observe to workers, Learn mentioned the corporate “wanted to make many tough selections that had been essential to serve our shoppers higher, simplify the corporate, construct our tradition and put WPP on a extra strong monetary footing”.
He added: “We have now additionally lived by means of among the most difficult exterior occasions of recent occasions, from the pandemic to the warfare in Ukraine, and navigated an more and more polarised and tough world . . . Nevertheless, I strongly consider that the longer term for WPP is a really constructive one.”
