Most of WPP CEO Mark Learn’s inventive company mergers appear to have gone moderately properly though VMLY&R, apparently performing properly within the US, nonetheless sounds lumpy.
Folding Gray (not so way back fairly a jewel within the WPP crown on each side of the Atlantic) into AKQA Group (versus creating AKQA/Gray) appears to be hitting choppier waters.
Now Justine Armour, CCO at Gray New York, is leaving exhausting on the heels of worldwide inventive chairman and president John Patroulis (each beneath.)
In June WPP introduced that Gray CEO Michael Houston (he wasn’t CEO of AKQA Group although, that’s Ajaz Ahmed’s job) was changing into president of WPP’s (substantial) North America enterprise though it was cautious to say that he would “help AKQA Group CEO, Ajaz Ahmed, with the transition to new management at Gray and can proceed as a member of the WPP Government Committee. As a part of his new position, Michael will even function WPP’s Government Sponsor for P&G.”
One doubts, by some means, that such help was supposed to place Patroulis and Armour on their bikes.
P&G is Gray’s greatest shopper and the rationale that Sir Martin Sorrell purchased it within the first place, a neat method of dealing with competing P&G and Unilever (a cornerstone Ogilvy shopper) within the the identical holding firm empire
Gray has had its travails in London too: dropping bosses David Patton, Nils Leonard, Chris Hirst and Vicki Maguire amongst a number of others for numerous causes and in pretty brief order.
Holding firm inventive companies are present process a fairly painful transformation as they’re hit by lowering margins and a expertise drain in addition to the machinations of their house owners, desperately making an attempt to make them do extra with much less.
Is a rebrand to AKQA/Gray a primary step in restoring Gray to one thing of its former eminence?
