Some exits come with applause. Others with a box of donuts and a resignation typed in Calibri. And then there’s Mark Read’s slow fade from WPP—a polite bow-out wrapped in corporate euphemism and punctuated by the loudest silence you’ve ever heard from 100,000 employees pretending not to refresh LinkedIn.

Let’s not sugarcoat this: Mark Read didn’t just “step down.” He was the final sandbag holding back a flood of legacy deadweight, Excel-wrapped optimism, and agency middle-management bloat masquerading as innovation. And now? The dam has cracks. Big ones.

This isn’t the next chapter. This is the emergency rewrite.

To understand how we got here, you have to go back—way back—to the imperial phase of advertising when WPP was less a company and more a high-functioning, Excel-fueled drinking club with an M&A problem.

Sir Martin Sorrell built WPP like a man playing Monopoly with a credit card and no emotional support animal. He turned an unsexy maker of shopping baskets—yes, actual wire baskets—into the largest ad empire in the world, stitched together from every semi-reputable agency brand, overpriced data vendor, and buzzword-riddled consultancy he could buy.

It worked, until it didn’t.

Behind the scenes? A hurricane of lawsuits, gossip, expense reports written like screenplays, and enough internal politics to make Game of Thrones look like couples therapy. Sorrell didn’t step down—he was ejected under investigation, still clutching a glass of something aged and smoky, mumbling something about billables and loyalty.

And then... came the cleanup crew.

Mark Read was the corporate equivalent of arriving at a Vegas hotel suite after the bachelor party ended. The coffee table’s upside-down. Someone defecated in the minibar. There’s a goat on the roof, and everyone’s pretending that’s normal.

To his credit, Read did the hard, unglamorous work. He didn’t reimagine WPP—he sanitized it.

He:

And through it all? Not a single scandal. No arrests. No yachts bought with "productivity bonuses." A blessedly uneventful reign.

But also?

No fire. No invention. No real momentum.

Read was the guy you hire to prevent further damage, not to lead a revolution. He made WPP look better on the outside while its insides quietly turned into marketing's version of RadioShack—familiar, slow-moving, and increasingly irrelevant in a world that wants Amazon.

Let’s cut through the PR:

While WPP was busy consolidating PowerPoint templates, Publicis was building Marcel, an actual AI operating system that talks back and occasionally reminds you of your KPIs. Omnicom and IPG just announced a U.S. media merger that could Frankenstein into a $30B beast while WPP is still debating whether to rename Mindshare for the fifth time this decade.

Clients don’t want “seamless integration” anymore—they want one login, one team, and one throat to choke when ROAS tanks. The age of bundling agency services like a sad cable package is over. Welcome to the Netflix era of advertising. You’d better stream results.

So here’s the part where WPP tried to spin the story.

Mark left “on his own terms,” they say. He’ll help “with the transition,” they say. He has “no new role lined up,” they say—which is the PR version of “please don’t ask us what really happened.”

Here’s what really happened: new chairman Philip Jansen showed up, and Mark Read’s clock started ticking faster than a media buyer on a Friday afternoon.

The reality is this: Mark was never going to lead WPP 2.0 because WPP 2.0 doesn’t exist yet. What does exist is a lopsided, global structure full of talented people stuck inside a machine that still runs on spreadsheets, territorial battles, and the hope that clients won’t notice their “integrated solution” is really just five P&L owners pretending to get along.

This isn’t a changing of the guard. This is a changing of the locks.

Let’s talk about that goat.

You know the one. It’s still there. Right on top of WPP’s crumbling house.

That goat represents every legacy problem they never solved:

Mark Read didn’t kill the goat. But he kept it from headbutting the servers. That’s something.

Unfortunately, the next CEO doesn’t get the luxury of just containing chaos. They need to saddle the goat, strap it to a rocket, and launch WPP out of the legacy orbit it’s been trapped in for a decade.

Let’s be uncomfortably honest: the next CEO isn’t inheriting a company—they’re inheriting a rehab project held together by Cannes Lions, polite jargon, and quarterly optimism.

This isn’t the moment for another “strategic refresh” or a glossy investor deck full of action verbs.

WPP needs a wartime CEO who knows:

This is WPP’s last shot to matter again. Not just survive, but lead. Not just iterate, but leap.

If they want relevance, they need someone willing to break the machine—and build something clients actually want.

Because right now? That goat on the roof is starting to look like the most strategic thinker in the building.

Stay bold. Stay curious. And for the love of marketing—get the goat down.

The Clock Is Ticking, and WPP Can’t Survive Another Round of PowerPoint Therapy

The search for WPP’s next CEO isn’t a search at all. It’s a staring contest with reality. Because if the board is still pretending they need to “explore all options,” let’s call it what it is: corporate theater. Brian Lesser is already holding the steering wheel. The only thing missing is the title—and maybe a chainsaw.

Let’s walk through it, shall we? This isn’t a pitch for a promotion. It’s a plea for corporate survival.

In a world full of ad execs who still think “digital transformation” means buying more LinkedIn ads, Brian Lesser is the one guy at WPP who didn’t just read the AI playbook—he rewrote it.

After years running Xaxis and leading AT&T’s ad business (read: navigating a telecom bureaucracy and fixing WarnerMedia’s ad mess without spontaneously combusting), Lesser parachuted into GroupM. But instead of polishing the furniture, he blew out the walls.

He:

Think of it this way: while everyone else was still labeling spreadsheets, Lesser was building a platform. While other execs were hoarding turf and pitching synergies, he was killing off the sacred cows and launching a performance engine at scale.

It wasn’t a reorg. It was a reconstruction.

Let’s get something out of the way: WPP has a lot of smart people. But most of them still treat “AI” like it’s a decorative throw pillow—nice to have, looks good in a deck, but doesn’t actually hold weight.

Lesser speaks AI fluently. He’s not just jamming buzzwords into slide decks like a panicked consultant. He’s built real systems around it. He understands the dirty work required to make AI useful: federated data, scalable compute, real-time optimization.

And let’s be honest—most holding company execs still think “large language model” is something HR needs to approve. Meanwhile, Lesser’s team is building predictive tools that optimize media spend before the campaign even starts.

He’s not just keeping up. He’s six quarters ahead.

That matters in a landscape where Publicis is dropping half a billion dollars a year into Marcel, and Omnicom’s trying to rebrand an Excel sheet as an AI lab.

Lesser’s the one exec who isn’t afraid to say the quiet part out loud:

Here’s the big shift: WPP under Lesser is starting to behave like a product company.

Not an agency. Not a bloated consortium of heritage shops. A platform.

WPP Open isn’t just another internal tool—it’s the spine of a real tech stack. Lesser’s treating data infrastructure like infrastructure, not an afterthought tucked behind the copywriters and Cannes entries.

While most holding companies are still rearranging deck chairs and debating the color palette of their mission statements, Lesser is:

If most agencies are still selling “partnerships,” Lesser is selling results. That’s the difference between a holding company in decline and one that still has a pulse.

Let’s be blunt: if WPP doesn’t make Brian Lesser CEO, Amazon or Accenture will.

He is exactly the kind of operator these companies salivate over—someone who gets tech, talent, and transformation without needing 19 consultants and a brand archetype workshop.

Publicis has Arthur Sadoun, the charming French bulldozer. Omnicom has Voltron-in-the-making with the IPG merger. Accenture is out here buying creative shops like it’s Black Friday.

And WPP?

If it waits too long, it’s going to be the guy at the airport still looking for a taxi while everyone else is already in an Uber AI drone.

Here’s the bottom line: WPP doesn’t need another safe pair of hands. It doesn’t need a “culture steward” or someone who understands “legacy agency DNA.”

It needs a wartime CEO. A trench-fighting, politically fearless operator who’s not afraid to:

Brian Lesser is already doing this. The only difference is that right now he’s doing it without the CEO title—and without the power to rewrite the whole script.

The question isn’t should he be CEO. It’s whether WPP is smart enough to give him the match before the house finishes burning down.

Because let’s be honest:
This isn’t a succession plan. This is a rescue mission.
And Brian Lesser is the only one already on the rope.

Stay bold. Stay curious. And maybe stop waiting for another “global search”—you already know who the hell should get the job.

👀 Liked what you just read? That was just the appetizer.
The full meal is waiting behind the curtain — and yes, the steak is medium-rare and bleeding AI.

👉 Upgrade to ADOTAT+ for the next two parts of this series:

You’ve heard the buzzwords. Now see how Brian Lesser plans to turn WPP’s AI rhetoric into real revenue.

💡 If you want to know how ad holding companies can survive the AI wave without becoming glorified middleware — this is the blueprint.

The nuclear option: build or buy a DSP and SSP.

💣 If you're still outsourcing the pipes, you're handing your future to your competitors.

What you’re missing?
The business case.
The numbers.
The real playbook Lesser might be holding — and no one else is talking about.