This really isn’t what WPP wanted to hear. Publicis has won Coca-Cola’s North American media, worth $785m blast year, from WPP’s GroupM in a closed pitch. Coca-Cola is arguably WPP’s flagship account, appointed by Coke to handle just about everything, including most global media, in 2021 via bespoke agency Open X. Publicis lost out to WPP in the 2021 media review.
Coke, which spends around $4bn on advertising last year, remains a major WPP client but this is a big dent in the wall. Nobody is saying anything on the record yet but it will be interesting to discover if Publicis’ expensively assembled first party data operation, headed by $4bn purchase Epsilon, played a part.
WPP seems to have opted out of this game, selling a majority stake in research operation Kantar to Bain and now contemplating disposing of its remaining stake in an IPO or trade sale valuing most of Kantar at $6.5bn. When Mark Read took over as CEO six years ago WPP’s debt was worryingly high and still remains a burden as WPP pays shareholders a relatively high dividend.
As to Open X, winning all a major global client’s business seems like manna from heaven for holding companies but it’s the devil’s own job to hang on to it all. Even the best-equipped service companies are not as good at everything as they’d like to be. Publicis itself pursues this route, it recently won all Santander’s global marketing business.
For WPP’s media operation GroupM, now undergoing yet another change of leadership, it’s another big challenge. Once all-conquering, it’s now on the back foot and momentum, in terms of winning and retaining big global accounts, is all.
