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GroupM CEO Brian Lesser Lays Out His Plan for the Agency Giant’s Future

GroupM CEO Brian Lesser is “in an absolute rush” to grow the agency’s business.

He’d returned to head the international media buying powerhouse in September, after he had been its North America CEO between 2015 and 2017. Lesser answered questions from ADWEEK executive editor Alison Weissbrot about his new role and GroupM’s CES 2019 priorities in his first public interview since joining last year, during ADWEEK House at CES.

Lesser first worked at GroupM, then turned around and founded a bold new ad agency at AT&T, and later took the CEO job at the data company InfoSum.

As someone who just grew up in adtech, Lesser wants to buy into tech. He’d also like to spend on staff and streamline the agency as well as make agencies work together more.

“What GroupM and the wider WPP are doing is, we’re trying to help our advertisers deal with change,” he said. “The only thing that’s the same about the media industry is change and in the next five years there’s going to be more change than we have seen in 25 years.”

What Omnicom’s buyout of IPG means for GroupM

As Omnicom is set to take over IPG, Lesser noted it is an advantage for GroupM but the scale implications “are still unknown”.

“When I read the rationale behind doing that deal, I hear all this talk of data but the data solution is a 20-year-old CRM and ID based database,” he said. “I [also] hear a lot about scale but not scale that matters to those clients,” he said.

Lesser doesn’t mind getting relegated to #2 media buyer anyhow because it will save the agency some time, he said.

‘We’ll see if we’re two, and how long we’re two,’ Lesser said.

Investing in its network and its people.

The other thing Lesser has planned is to put money into GroupM’s tech infrastructure.

“We’ve got some small things we need to get right at GroupM to be super competitive,” he said.

WPP has invested more than $300 million a year in its WPP Open platform for the last three years, Lesser said. Those investments will persist as GroupM tries to reduce the complexity of the business so it can better service its customers, he added.

“The aim is to keep on investing in those elements such as data, technology, and AI so that we can actually be the engine that’s going to make our clients’ business grow,” he said.

Simplifying its organization through streamlining

GroupM has also created, merged and acquired companies such as Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom to evolve with the evolution of the ad space in the last two decades.

GroupM must transform from “a bunch of companies to a handful of companies,” Lesser told me, by centralizing planning, activation and measurement processes with data and technology at the center.

GroupM doesn’t merge, it creates agencies for its customers, he added.

The agency will have to restructure and buy-in resources to refocus but not merely for size.

‘We don’t think scale for scale’ is relevant anymore for our customers,’ Lesser said. “It [must] be big for the sake of getting more and knowing more and having more and more consumers.”

How scale is evolving

Ad buyers favoured agencies of that size for decades. But Lesser added that scale doesn’t matter in the same way it did 20 years ago. Back then, agencies stacked scale to get better rates from members of the press.

But that is still important, scale has more to do now with the available data and markets, and also the employees, he added.

Scale isn’t dead, it’s just retooled,” Lesser said. It’s so much more of our intelligence, all of us.”

AI-powered media buying future.

And when it comes to AI, Lesser thinks in five years ‘no human touches a media plan’.

AI is not going to do anyone’s job – the guy who knows about AI is going to do people’s job,” he told me.

“Businesses need to jump on the tech that’s coming up, and know what it’s going to do for the business,” said the exec. GroupM is going to invest $30 million training and instructing its staff on how to work with AI: 70% of its hires have worked with the technology, it said.

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