The corporate reorganization memo is a peculiar literary genre. Somewhere between poetry and obfuscation, it tends to say a lot without saying anything at all — unless you know what to look for. In the case of GroupM, the world’s largest media buyer, the message was clear if you read it in the key of quiet panic.

Midday, New York time, employees received what can only be described as a professionally engineered sigh from CEO Brian Lesser: GroupM, as they knew it, was being folded into a new “single operating model.” Agency brands would remain — but not as functioning businesses. P&Ls gone. Leadership layers trimmed. Titles, sunset. Departments, “integrated.” Some employees, “impacted.” In other words: thanks for your service, here’s a link to your COBRA paperwork.

There was no all-hands Zoom with a rousing speech. No campaign to rally the troops. Just a memo and a town hall that followed like a formality. A polite decoupling of thousands of careers from a system that no longer requires so many humans to keep it going.

It was not a collapse. It was a controlled demolition.

Let’s be fair: Brian Lesser isn’t twirling a metaphorical mustache while pulling levers. He’s no caricature of a corporate reaper. What he’s doing is what any competent executive would be expected to do when sitting atop an outdated operating structure in a market where efficiency now eats scale for breakfast.

WPP, the holding company that owns GroupM, has seen its competitors — Publicis and Omnicom in particular — outmaneuver it in recent quarters. Organic growth has slowed. Costs are high. Clients are restive. What used to be a selling point — a vast, intricate web of agencies — now feels like an albatross when CMOs want “agility,” “streamlined ops,” and most of all, cheaper media activation.

So Lesser is streamlining. And like all streamlining in modern corporate life, it’s dressed up in euphemism. Integration. Innovation. Evolution. Words that soften the blow but don’t change the outcome: a lot of people will no longer have jobs by the time this is over, and the ones that remain will be asked to work in structures that look more like product management than advertising.

Gone are the days of agency individuality. Of Mindshare versus MediaCom turf battles. Of separate philosophies. Of “culture.” Instead, we’re getting Media Management and Delivery — a name that sounds like it was pulled from an SAP implementation manual, not a creative industry.

The vision is unmistakably modern. Lesser says the new unified GroupM (or WPP Media, if the rumored rebrand is real) will run on the WPP Open platform — a gleaming tech stack promising real-time insights, AI-optimized planning, and centralized command over what used to be scattered across multiple agency teams.

This sounds logical. It probably is. But it’s also the end of an era where media buying was an ecosystem of ideas, personalities, and—let’s admit it—egos. It replaces institutional nuance with institutional sameness. The result may be faster, more responsive, and easier to measure. But it will also be thinner in character, less flexible in practice, and emotionally hollow for the people who once defined these brands.

Loyalty will become a function of access, not tenure. Institutional knowledge? If it’s not in the dashboard, it didn’t happen.

The rumors are that U.S. staffers were told that 40–45% of roles are being "impacted.” Officially, that means people are being “reassigned” or “restructured.” But in corporate-speak, “impacted” is often just a euphemism for a layoff with a less dramatic exit.

Some were walked out quietly.

Others found themselves locked out of Slack mid-sentence. Promotions approved last quarter are now indefinitely paused. Some internal job functions, like Nexus and Investment, are being swallowed whole into MMD — with little clarity about what that means for day-to-day workflow.

In private, many employees are numb. There’s the standard rush of résumés to LinkedIn, the obligatory “thank you for the ride” posts, and the subtle silence from leadership who are, understandably, focused on “reimagining the operating model.” For those who survive, the question becomes: how long until the next round?

For clients, the impact will be more measured — at first. But the erosion of dedicated agency teams may make some uneasy. After all, clients sign with people. People who know their business, who carry institutional knowledge that no CRM tool can replicate. When those people vanish, so does a level of trust that can't be rebuilt with slide decks and optimistic memos.

This isn’t just about WPP or GroupM. It’s about what happens when the holding company model — once advertising’s proudest construct — reaches the natural end of its usefulness in its current form. You can’t run a 1990s agency stack in a 2025 market. At least, not profitably. And certainly not at the speed modern clients demand.

But in tearing it down, something intangible is lost. Agency brands used to be more than labels. They were philosophies. Talent magnets. Cultural hubs. Today, they’re becoming UX wrappers for operational systems built to chase efficiency and optimize toward volume. They’re not dead — but their soul is being carefully extracted and archived in a shared drive called “Legacy Materials.”

WPP didn’t make this choice in a vacuum. It’s responding to economic pressure, client behavior, and technological inevitability. And maybe, just maybe, we’ll look back on this moment not as a failure, but as the necessary molting of an old skin. But we shouldn’t pretend it’s painless.

For those who lived inside the GroupM universe — who built careers, teams, and friendships within those walls — this feels like loss. Not just professional, but personal. And that deserves acknowledgment, even if it doesn’t make the slide deck.

Lesser promises more agility. More connection. More future-proofing. He may well deliver on that. But it’s fair to ask: at what cost? When the dust settles, and the structure is leaner and faster and more digitally native, will it still feel like an agency network? Or will it feel like a tech vendor with a service layer?

That’s the question the industry now faces. Because if GroupM — the gold standard of global media scale — is being hollowed and rebuilt, every agency in the ecosystem should assume they’re next.

Let’s be blunt: the dust hasn’t even settled yet, and already the scavenger hunt has begun.

You can hear it in the whispered Slack DMs, in the side-eye LinkedIn updates, in the quiet recruiter pings with subject lines like, “Just checking in.” Because when an empire like GroupM is disassembled — not destroyed, mind you, just… restructured into an unrecognizable husk of its former self — there are consequences. Power vacuums. Talent migrations. Nervous clients. And yes, competitors lining up like kids outside a bakery the morning after a fire sale.

This isn’t just about job loss. It’s about a whole operating philosophy getting flushed down the procurement drain. And now, the market’s trying to figure out who picks up the pieces — and whether any of them are still worth anything.

Let’s start here. No, we don’t have a verified list of names yet (though ADOTAT+ readers will get that very soon). But what’s already clear is that the exits aren’t just happening at the bottom. Some managing directors. Some department heads. High-level investment folks. And not all of them were “impacted.” Some are just… done. Tired. Burned. Or finally seeing the writing on the beautifully-letterheaded reorg memo.

The layoffs that did happen weren’t uniformly applied — some teams were gutted, others left untouched, at least for now.

But across the U.S., internal memos suggest 40–45% of staff are being moved, reshuffled, or phased out. Most of the exits, according to insiders, are clustered in roles that overlap with new centralized functions inside MMD (Media Management and Delivery).

The core idea: kill redundancy by killing structure.

If your job involved campaign reporting, analytics, investment planning, or “growth enablement” (a title no one ever fully understood), you’re either already packing your ergonomic chair or you’re waiting for a follow-up call with HR and a Google Doc full of “next steps.”

Here’s the twist: the agency brands aren’t gone. They’re just… ornamental now.

Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom still exist — as client service wrappers. Which is a fancy way of saying they're nameplates on the front door, while all the internal wiring now flows through WPP Media's central nervous system. The people left in those brands? Mostly client-facing. Account directors, relationship managers, maybe some planners — the folks whose faces matter more than the org chart.

They’ll keep the pitch decks purple or teal or orange, but behind the scenes, it’s all one monochrome dashboard now.

As one insider described it: “It’s like wearing a Gucci blazer to a Costco board meeting. Looks great, but we’re all just running on the same bulk system now.”

Clients, for the most part, are staying calm on the surface. But make no mistake: they’re concerned.

Why? Because the team they bought isn’t the team they still have.

Some are being told their trusted contacts are “transitioning roles” or “on a different pod now.” Others are getting emails from people they’ve never heard of, suddenly owning “cross-functional media delivery.” That’s not a phrase that inspires trust — it sounds like something an airline would say after losing your luggage.

One Fortune 100 CMO reportedly asked their procurement lead: “If all the agencies are one team now, why are we still paying multiple scopes of work?” And that’s the question that could blow this whole thing wide open.

The risk? Clients may start asking if they're overpaying for redundancy that no longer exists. And when procurement wakes up, legal scopes follow. Expect renegotiations.

PMG is watching.

Brainlabs, who’ve made a business out of scooping up disaffected media vets with something to prove, is already sniffing around LinkedIn. (We got their interview soon!)

Some execs from rival holding companies are discreetly posting that their DMs are open — with just enough vagueness to avoid getting slapped by HR.

And then there’s the platforms.

Amazon. Google. Meta. They love a good agency talent shake-up. It makes it easier to pull planning and media buying in-house, one CTV deal at a time. Fewer layers, more control, better margins. You know — the exact opposite of what WPP used to sell.

Meanwhile, independent consultancies are preparing "transition packages" for brands looking to re-evaluate their media strategy in the wake of this chaos. A few of them, we’re told, have already landed exploratory RFPs from GroupM clients.

This is the pause between earthquakes. Everything looks calm, but it’s only because everyone’s waiting to see who moves first.