Greenblatt: Google, Apollo, and J. Crew Joined ADL Workplace Pledge
“We created something called the Workplace Pledge Against Anti-Semitism. Google, WPP, Apollo, J. Crew, a bunch of gigantic companies and firms have joined that.”
Mark Read: Personal productivity metrics do not equal true business success
“Personal productivity is not the only measure of business success, right? How many emails you answer in a day or how many Zoom calls you do is not really what business is about. Business is about how you solve client problems and how you help Clients succeed, …”
Read: WPP US Office Occupancy Lags Global Hubs at 15–25%
“Shanghai, we're running at 75%. Mumbai, 64% average occupancy. Here in London, 52%. Milan, 45. And New York, 24. And in the US, I'd say we vary between 15 to 25% occupancy.”
Mark Read: Midweek-Only Office Attendance Creates Massive Real Estate Inefficiency
“If you staff your offices to be busy three days a week, and it seems everyone wants to come in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, actually is massively inefficient. You know, we have these buildings empty four days a week”
Mark Read: Remote Work's Long-Term Impact on Culture and Learning Is Debilitating
“We see the short term productivity benefits of an extra hour off the commute. We don't see the longer term sort of more debilitating impact on learning, culture, creativity that come from having a workforce that's far too separate.”
Mark Read predicts computers could eventually fully automate ad campaign creation
“And then if you think further out in the future, you can see the potential for computers to totally automate the process. You're sitting in a client office and you want to launch a new ad for Dove, you know, reaching this audience over this period of time at t…”
Mark Read: WPP deployed generative AI campaigns for Cadbury and Virgin
“You know, a great example is this work we did in India for Cadbury's, a Mondelez brand, where we took Shah Rukh Khan, you know, probably Bollywood's most famous actor. It enabled hundreds of thousands of small Indian businesses to use him in their commercials …”
Mark Read: WPP built Imagine platform to summarize 30-page briefs
“We've built a creative platform called Imagine. We get quite long briefs from clients that take a 30 page brief, and it will summarize the five key points of the brief.”
Read: WPP uses AI workshops to build client brands in one hour
“We have a way of working with clients where in an hour we ask clients to develop a new product and come up with a campaign for its launch. And they can really see what AI can do. By the way, you're creating a brand for client in an hour.”
Mark Read: AI Generates Ideas but Cannot Distinguish Good from Bad
“It's really good at coming up with ideas, but it doesn't really know what's a good idea and what's a bad idea, right?”
Mark Read: Effective Advertising Requires Questioning the Client's Brief
“Often in our business, the trick isn't answering the brief. The trick is, is that the right brief or the wrong brief? Because clients come to you with one thing, but actually something else is better.”
Mark Read: Probably half of WPP's jobs did not exist 20 years ago
“If I look at WPP, probably half the jobs inside the company didn't exist 20 years ago. We didn't have social media managers. We didn't have programmatic media managers. We didn't have search engine optimizers. You know, I could go on e-commerce people.”
Mark Read: WPP Only Takes Stances Directly Relevant to Business or Staff
“We're asked, as you could imagine, to weigh in on many of the topics facing society every day, and we try to only do so when it's directly relevant to our business or to our people.”
Mark Read: Dropping fossil fuel clients risks free speech criticism
“I also think though that if we were to resign those clients, we might be criticized for, you know, a violation of free speech and not enabling them to talk.”
Mark Read: WPP handles up to 25 percent of global commercial messages
“You know, we are responsible for one in four, one in five of the world's commercial messages, either creatively or through our media business.”
WPP launches Every Mile to compete directly against Shopify
“WPP, which is one of the world's biggest advertising networks, has just launched basically a managed Shopify competitor. Which they call Every Mile, and which has a bunch of people with tech industry backgrounds involved.”
Prusz: WPP bids through Rubicon Project for Wall Street Journal, Spotify, and eBay
“So you have WPP, which is the world's largest agency holding company bidding on behalf of thousands of advertisers. They'll bid through our platform on publishers such as Wall Street Journal, eBay, Spotify, NBC even the most premium brands in the business.”
Bridge Worldwide grew revenue from $10M to $45M during WPP earnout
“I mean, and during that time, we grew revenue from ten million to forty five million.”
Straz: Mid-sized WPP businesses had abysmal or non-existent HR software
“I had been working in a holding company called WPP, which is an ad agency holding company, and I was working with hundreds and hundreds of small to mid-sized companies, and they all had one thing in common, which is they were people-driven businesses and had e…”
Eyal: Advertising holding companies value acquisitions purely on revenue and profit
“When you're selling to certain types of companies, to certain type of companies, especially if you're going to be exiting to an advertising company or an ad tech company you are going to be judged on your profitability and your and your multiples on profitabil…”
AppNexus acquired WPP's tech assets and powers its digital media buying
“We acquired their technology assets, they made an investment in our company, and today our technology powers the digital buying of the largest ad agency on earth.”