Services: Green Square

In all, Accenture Interactive has acquired more than 30 agencies over the past four years. Interestingly, these have been in every conceivable discipline – full-creative, design, web build, search, SEO, branded content, CRM, production, data, media…on every continent apart from Africa. It looks, then, that Accenture is extremely serious about being a big player in marcomms as well as professional services and consulting. But what of its own rivals? Well, most of them have been busy too, if not in the same high-profile way as Accenture Interactive. As yet, they’re not spending anything like as much. Last year marketing consultancy R3 found that Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, KPMG and McKinsey had between them spent more than $1.2bn hoovering up marcomms agencies in 2017. By contrast, the big five marcomms holding groups (Publicis, WPP, IPG, Ominicom and Dentsu) spent $1.8bn on M&A over the same period – just half what they’d spent in 2016. It’s fair to say that as the holding companies have struggled with the disruption wreaked on the marcomms industry over the past five years, it’s been the consultants who’ve kept M&A activity buoyant since 2015. But while KMPG spent $14m in 2017, IBM, $28m and Deloitte $144m, Accenture Interactive eclipsed all of them by spending just over $1bn on M&A throughout 2017 (that’s twice as much as either WPP or Dentsu). In fact, that same year, the firm announced a $1.8bn war chest for M&A in the marcomms space, signalling an aggressive intent to steal a march on its competitors. The others will need to act quickly, and spend heavily, if they are to catch up. There is, however, a structural reason why Accenture can be far more prolific than its peers. That is due to the fact it is listed and can therefore issue shares to raise cash. Many of its contemporaries are partnerships, which means partners of the firm effectively pay for the acquisition between them. So, if a target agency has multiple geographic locations – eg London, New York, Singapore – then the partners in each of those jurisdictions will have to stump up their share of the acquisition cost. This gets particularly tricky if it’s the UK consultancy that wants to make the purchase as it fulfils a specific need for the UK arm and not for the others. Deloitte Digital’s acquisition this week of online marketing agency Pervorm offers us the ideal opportunity to re-examine the state of play with the other consulting giants. Pervorm, founded in 2010, is an online agency with offices in Amsterdam and Vietnam, whose specialisms include digital marketing, in-house consultancy and analytics. This latest acquisition gives Deloitte a foothold in the media space and strengthens its search, social and programmatic advertising offer. Although the sum that changed hands has not thus far been disclosed, it’s reasonable to assume that the founders would have been happy with the money they received, since the consulting giants see the value of digitally and creatively-focussed marketing shops (one of the reasons for this we’ll examine later). After Accenture, Deloitte has been the most acquisitive, buying up agencies like San Francisco’s Heat, the Swedish creative shop Acne (whose clients include Ikea), Market Gravity (a ‘proposition design’ business based in south London), the cloud services firm CloudinIT (clients include Amazon and Salesforce) and design agency Brandfirst. But in the last year or so, Deloitte has been quiet, and the Pervorm acquisition may signal a renewed interest in catching up with Accenture. We’re also seeing lesser known, but seriously sizable consultancies move into the space, such as ICF. This is a 5,500 staff, $1.4bn market cap consultancy that own the marcomms outfit formerly known as Olson. We at Green Square advised We Are Vista on its sale to ICF last year and the whole ICF marketing services side has subsequently been rebranded ICF Next, boasting specific capabilities in creative engagement, insight and analytics, loyalty, communications and technology. This gives it fleet of foot to face clients in the way that suits the clients best. So, why are the consultants – big and small – moving into marcomms? The answer is simple – all businesses need to grow, and extending the range of services they can offer clients (including advertising, marketing, strategy and ancilliaries) gives them access to new service lines into which they can utilise their expertise and footprint. They have a great deal in their favour, such as existing client relationships in many cases; experience of operating at both global and local levels; understanding of both strategic disciplines and their importance; big budgets, currently much larger than the under-pressure holding groups can provide and large headcounts. Accenture has over 400,000 employees globally which, supplemented by creative talent from the agencies they acquire, means it can offer clients quick and effective end-to-end service. Consultancies also have a reputation as cost-savers and problem solvers, whereas traditional marketing agencies are seen as cost drivers, which is a huge structural problem they need to solve (although agency chiefs quite rightly like to point out that they charge clients a lot less for their services than the consultancies do). This is where it can get tricky for the consultancies: their traditional business relies on known and proven methods and models into which they can plug staff to collect data, provide reports, implement systems etc, which can be highly profitable as it is replicable. While some marcomms services such as digital transformation, programmatic, performance marketing can also be mechanised to a degree, creative services by their very nature rely on people to come up with new ideas for campaigns. They need a lot more human interaction and the charge out rates for marcomms staff are likely to be a lot lower than those of the consultancies. That said, consultancies usually have direct access to “C-suite” personnel client-side, which agencies often don’t. And since the turn of the century, CMOs have increasingly moved into the boardroom as marketing becomes a business-critical component of most large businesses or brands. Marketing is no longer just about TV ads; it’s about interacting with customers and their journeys, protecting brand reputations and values. When you are selling consultancy services at C-suite, it’s not such a stretch to provide marketing and creative strategy as well, and the opportunity could be there to do this at a premium. It’s often said that the success of disruptive, fast-growing businesses like Uber or Airbnb is down to sound strategic thinking and brilliantly user-friendly customer interfaces, rather than high-impact advertising. Rather than pushing messages at people, marketing has increasingly become a way of solving complex business problems and realising a brand’s strategic thinking. Quite reasonably, the consultants who’ve always prided themselves on helping clients to solve complex business-critical problems believe they can play a role in shaping these kinds of brands. Does this mean that the traditional creative ad agency will be a thing of the past? Unlikely, but there will, as Adrian Mills, partner of creative, brand and media at Deloitte Digital told The Drum last year, be a shift in power. As Mills pointed out, consultancies can’t operate on the low margins that many agencies do these days, but what they are good at is bringing in or outsourcing the stuff they are unable, for whatever reason, to do themselves. How do the traditional agencies react to this shifting landscape? The big problem that Deloitte, Accenture and the others face is reputational. They have few creative credentials. Which is why the consultancies have shifted from buying agencies purely with expertise in web, mobile development and UX design to full-service creative shops like Heat, Karmarama and Resource/Ammirati (bought by IBM in 2017). Also, Karmarama aside, the consultancies have been snaffling up young businesses or startups – consultancies tend not to be famed for their entrepreneurial spirit, and hotshops possess these qualities by the bucketload. The challenges for the consulting firms is to keep these acquisitions separate, to nurture that entrepreneurial spirit, rather than subsuming them into the wider acquirer culture. One thing the ad agencies can do is focus on their creative heritage. Most aspects of marcomms – production, execution, web build, account management, etc – can be commodified to a greater or lesser degree. But creative thinking cannot. And creative talent will always be drawn to an agency environment rather than a management consultancy, even if the latter pays better. If the established agencies can continue to attract the most talented creatives, and trumpet these credentials to existing and prospective clients, they’ll have a future in this newly-competitive environment. And of course the other thing the WPPs, IPGs and Dentsus of this world can do is set up their own consultancies. This has been tried before (back in 2006, OgilvyOne in the UK set up a short-lived consulting unit called Ogilvy Engage) but it’s more difficult than it sounds – and probably requires bringing in outside talent. But this, perhaps, is a story for another day…

Arrizabalaga stayed on the pitch, while Sarri blew his top, and was held back from confronting him. Later, they both said that the situation was a misunderstanding. Whether this was true, or a face-saving exercise is not really the point. But it got me thinking …. how could it have ever come to this? Would this farcical situation have ever happened at Chelsea’s opponents that afternoon, Manchester City? As soon as full-time came I watched the City players, coaches, manager, other support staff all get into a tight huddle near the centre spot. They were tight. Chelsea meanwhile seemed to be in a dispersed daze. As anyone who’s seen Amazon’s documentary on Man City, All Or Nothing, will tell you, their manager Pep Guardiola is a man with a plan, and an eye for detail to match. He would have ensured that every player knew exactly where they had to be and what they had to do – including in the event of extra time or a penalty shootout. Pep, you see, is a fellow who has his house well in order, and that’s part of the secret of his success. The same applies to any business that’s looking to leap from the lower leagues into the big time, or perhaps seeking a partner or acquirer to take them there. When we begin our journey with a new client it normally begins with an Ascension Day – this covers the whole spectrum from the very basic house-keeping to the grand plan and road map to get there. So the first rule is, know what it is you’re supposed to be doing, who you’re doing it for, how you’re going to do it and why – what’s your proposition and why will someone want to buy that just from you. This is way more important than the Shoreditch offices, the flat whites, beanbags, pool table and shiny new Macs – all things too many businesses concentrate on too much, often to cover up the un-exciting offer that sits behind it all. Then you have to make sure everyone you’re working with – creative, suits, strategists, data bods, CRM experts, production people – knows and understands this too. And that they buy into it, are genuinely excited about it and will do whatever it takes. This is what Pep has done so successfully with his team. Everyone has bought into his vision, method and strategy, from the boot boys to the groundsmen and the catering team to the players and fans and crucially those above him. They have bought into it and understand where they fit in and what is expected of them to achieve success. This is why City – and I’m not a supporter as you know – are so good, and why defeats or dips in form do not faze them. They’re prepared. If you are, losing an account, a pitch, a key member of staff, a particularly tricky brief won’t faze you either. So plan ahead, be ready for any eventuality that you can think of and make sure everyone understands what they’re supposed to be doing, when they’re supposed to be doing it, how and why; a winning mentality. Another crucial part of putting your house in order is understanding your place in the world. Smaller or startup businesses have traditionally – notions of nimbleness and hipness aside – been at a disadvantage to their bigger matured cousins, because they’re seen to lack the scale that big global brands demand; they certainly lack the resources, human or otherwise, to compete on a level playing field. If your analysis of your competitive landscape reveals that you won’t for the moment be competing with the giants, then all well and good. So, who do you compete with? And can you co-exist, or will it be a competitive fight to the death? And what can you do with the resources you have? Over-promising, not meeting deadlines and the like can be fatal. Will you have to hire in extra talent? The so-called “Hollywood model” – having a small core team and drawing on a wider pool of outside or freelance talent – is becoming increasingly popular. It’s interesting to note that one of the smartest and most successful agencies of recent times, R/GA, came out of the film industry before being snapped up by IPG. Despite having 2,000 employees on its books, it still draws on outside help, whether that’s collaborating with other experts or ‘hiring in’ individual talent. Next, and a related point, decide whether you’re a generalist or a specialist. Five hundred years ago, a very good scientist might, over a lifetime, be able to understand the entire sum of human scientific knowledge up to that point. Nowadays, it’s impossible for a theoretical physicist, geneticist or cosmologist to know everything in their own chosen discipline – so they have to specialise. Similarly, nowadays, it is very hard for all but the biggest businesses to do everything for a client. Far better to do one or a few things, even if it’s looking quite niche, extraordinarily well rather than overstretch yourself. And if you want to do more, you will have to invest. You can’t do this on the fly, put up a facade and hope no one looks behind it. Guardiola will have a transfer budget, and will work out how he wants to spend it long before the contract is signed. His bosses will be aware of what he wants to do, and he’ll have convinced them of his targets’ merits, how they will improve the team. You’ll need to do something similar, perhaps just within your own existing resources as opposed to investors or banks, but it needs to be done well. You’ll also need to constantly evaluate your methods and processes, and be hard on yourself. In an industry being ripped apart by disruption, you’ll need to be a disruptor of yourself in order to survive and thrive. What intellectual property do you hold – this could be software and systems based, it could be processes, methodologies, data, freelance resource databases. Even when his team have won, Pep looks constantly at the performance: what could have been better executed? Where are our weak spots? What dangers and opportunities await us in the next match? Just as Pep and co continually evaluate players’ fitness, performances and attitudes, and endlessly re-watch past matches, you’ll need to do the same – constantly review your creds (with outside help if need be), carry out pitch post-mortems or reviews and revisit your positioning in the competitive set. This last point is incredibly important – a positioning within a disrupted market or industry is never static as the environment is itself in a state of flux. And again, this involves being aware of one’s surroundings at all times. After all, if you can’t create your positioning for yourself, how can you expect clients to trust you to be able to do it for them? To return again to the football analogy, every player in a good team knows where they must be at any given time. This has all manner of implications, particularly when you’re after new business. I remember back in the late noughties, there was an agency that kept winning new business pitch after new business pitch. Their sister agency, which was housed in the same building, kept losing the pitches it went after. Why was this, I wondered? The boss of the successful shop told me: pitches were rigorously researched, practised, rewritten and rehearsed again – as were presentations. She made sure her team knew more about the client than the client did. And other agencies in the process (if known) were studied for strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, every single person in the room with the client on the big day knew what they had to do and say, and when. Crucially, she also always ensured that there was talent in reserve to keep the rest of the agency running smoothly and to ensure that existing clients enjoyed high levels of service and creative. The other agency’s pitches and presentations were by all accounts sometimes chaotic and unfocused, even though the creative ideas may often have been spot on – it was excused as being ‘dynamic’, ‘free-willed’, ‘highly innovative’, ‘not prescriptive’. All things that the successful shop’s chief executive almost certainly created the environment for. The successful agency had a continual run of success… because they had their house in order. Finally, it’s worth remembering that for all the glories of their 2017/18 season, Manchester City didn’t appear out of nowhere. Despite his stellar record at other clubs, Guardiola was forced to learn lessons from a transitional first season (2016/17) that many felt was a relative disappointment given the expectations that accompanied his arrival. But learn from that first season he did, and it has been pretty much all upward from there. City won’t always have everything their own way of course, but for the time being they look like a team that has its house well in order – and as a result they look like champions – this season and moving forward. That was a hard thing to say from a Chelsea fan, but credit where it’s due… Read More

However, the expected rash of similar ‘big four’ ad group takeovers never really happened. The reasons for this are complex and we’ve written about them before, so I won’t go into depth on those here. But suffice to say that there are few big entities left to acquire. Accenture’s big rival, Deloitte Digital, acquired no fewer than nine marketing services agencies last year, but the likes of Market Gravity and Acne can hardly be said to be McCann or O&M-size operations, whatever other qualities they may have. And there is undoubted resistance among creative types to being gobbled up by a management consultancy. I don’t think the consultancies’ interest in advertising is over, or that a big move or takeover won’t happen, I just don’t think the world is quite ready just yet, but there is an increasing number of brand owners showing a greater interest in the consultants’ approaches. Instead of going over that old ground, I’d like to put a different spin on things. What if the next generation of hot shops to be circled by the M&A world were not traditional funky London, Amsterdam or Portland startups, but mini management consultancies? It’s not as outlandish an idea as it might first seem. Just recently my Green Square colleagues and I have been working with an impressive disruptor operation called ORCA, and the way in which they work got me thinking about what the hotter than hot, eminently M&A’able startup of the near future might look like. ORCA describes itself not as a marketing services agency… but a “brand growth agency”. It doesn’t fixate on making old-fashioned ads, but instead begins with a set of fundamental and challenging questions around brand and business, operating to five key ORCA principles, all designed to deliver clients growth and help them manage change in a fast-changing world. It specialises in a number of areas, not all of which one would associate with the more old-school advertising agency: identifying growth areas and potential; business planning; brand strategy; “course correction” (helping a brand or client change its direction or strategy, if necessary); branded content, activation and “brand guardianship”; identifying future opportunities; tracking performance and planning/executing responses as necessary. The ORCA founders – Craig Wills (an agency strategy leader and startup entrepreneur) and Simon Pont (a former agency group chief strategy officer and best-selling author) – say they don’t focus on creative output as such, but on “brand growth and competitive advantage” – which sounds like the sort of thing a consultancy would say it does. Wills is singularly direct when he says, “The way brands can and should be built has changed. There are smarter ways of working, thinking that doesn’t follow the tramlines of past convention, and new ways of activating brand strategies with an urgency and impact that is commercially quantifiable and culturally profound.” ORCA takes a very “scientific” approach, using all the technological goodies – AI, predictive mapping, data science – at its disposal. So, in a four-step process, the agency gathers intelligence and analysis on the brand, its customers and the wide landscape; it then uses the intel to identify opportunities (or threats); creates a programme to deliver the opportunity; and monitors its progress, adapting if appropriate. Of course, many of the skills it brings to the table – such as copywriting or design – would be part of any traditional agency’s remit; but others (road-mapping, packaging, trendspotting, cultural change programmes) wouldn’t necessarily be. As Pont candidly challenges: “It’s 2018, meaning clients want an evolved set of agency skillsets – and they want partnership on a different set of terms. As opposed to paying punchy monthly retainers, agency resources are something a client should be able to dial-up and down, based on commercial targets, budget and funding rounds. A true partner business needs to be smart, strategic and simpatico.” Interestingly it can offer both a “consultancy model” (a fixed-term contract) or the more familiar “agency retainer”, with a licensing model for the tools. How this is put together depends on the client, its needs, the task and the budget. It’s a flexible approach that will win you friends in an era of huge disruption. The Orca approach seems to be working as it is experiencing positive traction with new clients operating in a broad range of categories from financial services to B2B, tech to education and global luxury consumer brands. Why is this? I think it’s for a number of reasons. It will use – or seek out – everything (not just creative or strategy but market data, business intelligence, legal requirements) to shape the vision of all the stakeholders – and then put it into action. The big management consultancies have been doing something like this for decades. They attempt to solve problems and manage change or transition. Where they don’t possess the internal skills to manage this, they’ll bring in external contractors or partners. Some forward-thinking agencies do this as well. In some quarters this approach is known as the ‘Hollywood model’. The ‘agency’ acts as a kind of movie producer or director, assembling the right team of talents to bring the project to fruition – it’s the way Hollywood has largely worked since the collapse of the old studio system in the 1960s, when most of the big stars started to sign up for individual projects rather than being tied into long-term projects with a particular studio. Movie makers realised it was much more profitable to draw on a vast pool of freelance talent than rely on a large in-house workshop. And so it is with smaller agencies, especially startups. Marcomms outfits like Orca are morphing into miniature consultancies. They will be more (relatively) profitable than a big shop with fat payrolls and infrastructures, and they can be much more nimble, which, in a fast-moving digital world, clients like. The clients also like the greater transparency offered by the “consultancy” model – they can see who’s being paid how much and for what. But Orca and shops like them also bring something to the table that the big consultancies usually don’t – an understanding of consumer or customer behaviour. There was an interesting piece in the FT recently about the long and largely ignoble history of rebranding and corporate makeovers (Post Office to Consignia, Dunkin’ Donuts to Dunkin’ et al). These expensive makeovers are usually well-intentioned and often done at the urging of consultants; what one ends up with is usually something meaningless, and or long-winded (it actually takes longer to say “WW” than the pre-makeover “Weight Watchers”) and unpopular with the most important of a brand’s stakeholders – its customers. A decent ad shop would look at the strength of a brand, understand the customer’s feelings about it, and act accordingly. Consultancies tend to look at other metrics and stakeholders, such as investors – a rebrand might lead to a short-term stock price hike, but overall, it has little effect; for consumers, the effect is often negative and usually results in much mockery from the media. Earlier this month, researcher Forrester shared its CMO predictions for 2019. One of the interesting things Forrester found was that 2019 “will be the year CMOs prioritise strategies that harness their customers’ energy and then use that collective vivacity to reinvigorate their brand”. The other thing Forrester predicts is that CMOs will be looking at “old school” marcomms – in other words, after years of focussing on tech and data, the way to cut through clutter is to concentrate on brands and their promises and essences again. Customer experience, not piles of data or split-second programmatic ad placement, will be what counts. This is something the very best “old school” agencies do very well, and it’s something consultancies couldn’t. To do it, they are having to learn, or buy in. Buying in (or up) is easier. There was another move in this direction last month (31 October) when PA Consulting acquired Essential Design for an undisclosed sum. PA Consulting describes itself as a “global innovation and transformation consultancy” (with offices in the UK, Europe and the Americas) specialising in strategy, innovation, product design and engineering and manufacturing process improvement. PA’s clients include Virgin Hyperloop One (transport) Skipping Rocks Lab (sustainability) and Monica Healthcare (pregnancy monitoring). As such, Essential is a perfect fit. Based in Boston, USA and formed in 2001, Essential has clients in the consumer (Shure, Altec Lansing, Dell), life science (Robot Futures) and healthcare (Philips) sectors. Its team of researchers, designers and engineers “inform and translate innovation strategy, to create breakthrough physical and digital products”. Essential’s work has won international recognition and received numerous industry awards for excellence in design research, design strategy and design development. As a visit to its website will confirm, Essential does much more than just “design” products. It offers research, strategic consulting, quality and project management, engineering and, of course, industrial and service design. Pretty much a consultancy-style “end-to-end” solution. But with a healthy focus on customer experience and brand promise. How, you might ask, are outfits like Orca and Essential marcomms agencies? The answer at its heart is simple. Advertising and marketing isn’t that complicated – it aims to do two things: solve problems (for the client and end user) and change behaviour. For the end user, this might, for example, manifest itself as providing information or entertainment (or some other ‘reward’) so that they buy Product A, or buy more of Product B; or getting them to recycle more, or stop smoking or eating too much fatty food. For the client, this might mean changing internal or cultural practices so that identified problems can be solved, or that end users can be better engaged. This is essentially what the consulting firms do (if they’re doing things right, of course), but there are crucial bits of the jigsaw missing, which is where the convergence we’ve been exploring comes in. This morphing of startups into consultancies is an interesting development – but it’s just one of many mutations happening right now. Read More

Not in their traditional guise, at least. Instead, the recently installed chief executive is betting WPP’s turnaround on a handful of new hybrid agencies that combine creative clout with digital and data dexterity. That was the logic behind his decision to merge 95-year-old advertising stalwart Y&R with VML this autumn, and it’s what he’s now seeking to repeat on a grander scale with the formation of Wunderman Thompson. “A change like this is probably helpful,” says Pivotal analyst Brian Wieser. “Traditional creative agency networks have struggled to provide comprehensively integrated offerings that balance creative ideation and production for brands with digital experiences, and I don’t think JWT has been any exception in this regard.” For JWT, consolidation has been on the cards ever since Read’s first week in the job when he put WPP’s creative agencies on notice over their sluggish sales. “They are the part of our business that is most under pressure as clients shift their budgets away from the traditional towards the new,” Read said in his debut shareholder address in September. “We need to have stronger creative agencies with stronger reputations that do better work and win share.” In practice, that means WPP’s most traditional agencies are no longer being sent in to bat for clients on their own. Teaming them up with a digital player, Read explained, had already proven to be the difference-maker in some of the group’s most important recent pitches. Y&R was named Office Depot’s agency of record account with the help of VML before the two had officially merged, he said. On the challenging Shell review, “JWT was the incumbent and we went back with a slightly different offer going through the Wunderman door”. Even on the Mars media pitch, led and won by Mediacom, “important resources from Wunderman and Possible were a fundamental part of the review,” Read later revealed. Since WPP is already seeing success from cross-selling agency services, there is a logic to formally merging talent and dispensing with the rigid structures that thwart collaboration within holding companies at present. What’s telling, however, is that the digital parties are getting top billing in the subsequently formed entities. Y&R’s amalgamation with VML prompted an exodus of its senior staff as the latter’s took most of the top roles in the VMLY&R hierarchy. And it is not Wunderman, the agency Read ran for almost four years before stepping up at WPP, that is losing its historic moniker. “JWT is a great name, but it’s an old one, one that comes with baggage as well as history,” says Tony Walford, managing partner at mergers and acquisitions advisory Green Square. “If WPP is to reinvent itself as a lean 21st century entity rather than as a 20th century holding group, then it may have to ditch some of the old brand names, no matter how painful that might be. “A more streamlined agency, which combines the data, digital and direct marketing skills of Wunderman with the creative reputation of JWT may appeal to global clients. It also sends out a message internally, that the culture is changing and that the old silo walls are being dismantled.” That message will have been heard loud and clear within WPP’s other august creative networks. “One wonders if WPP’s other great legacy agency, Ogilvy, might be next in line for similar treatment,” Walford posits. Industry insiders, however, tell The Drum a merger of Grey and AKQA is more likely to happen next and could even be announced as early as next month. WPP declined to comment on the speculation. What no one doubts is that WPP needs to change. Read has admitted that the company has grown “too complicated” and “been too slow to adapt” to the changing nature of the marketing business. The analyst Forrester, meanwhile, insisted WPP must “dissolve” its hundreds of agencies brands into just dozens in a bombshell recent report. “[WPP] will either consolidate itself or be forcibly taken over by someone who will,” wrote co-authors Ted Schadler and Jay Pattisall. Merging JWT and Wunderman is a step in the right direction, Pattisall tells The Drum. “There’s a lot more work for them to do but this starts to help CMOs find a more straightforward partner,” he says. “It’s a bold step for Mark and he seems to be not afraid to make these decisions.” But is it bold enough to rescue a WPP juggernaut that saw almost £3bn wiped off its market value after a dismal trading update last month? Pattisall’s view is that Read’s wave of consolidation should not stop at creative agencies. “It becomes radical when they start to integrate media into the proposition,” he says. “There’s a very definitive trend of media and creative coming back together. A radical move for WPP would be to embrace that trend and start to create ways for GroupM to be better integrated into the creative and digital agencies.” We’ll find out more about whether that’s part of Read’s blueprint for WPP in his much-vaunted strategy update on 11 December. Between now and then, he has some crucial decisions to make about what kind of WPP he’ll be presenting to a market baying for an upturn in its fortunes. “What Read and team need to be very careful of is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” says Green Square’s Walford. “Simplification is good, data-driven insights and creativity are good, lean is good, but so is history. In the rush to adapt to the new world, one must always keep one eye on history, and what made you great in the first place.” Read More