“There’s some staple items we have to do at GroupM to be very aggressive,” he mentioned.
WPP has invested greater than $300 million per 12 months into its WPP Open platform for the previous three years, Lesser shared. He mentioned these investments will proceed as GroupM seems to be to simplify the group to raised handle its purchasers.
“The imaginative and prescient is to proceed investing in these parts together with information, know-how, and AI such that we are able to drive our purchasers’ enterprise ahead,” he mentioned.
Simplifying its group by way of streamlining
Over the previous 20 years, GroupM has created, merged, and purchased firms like Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom to maintain up with the advert trade’s evolution.
Lesser mentioned that GroupM should go from “a group of firms to 1 firm” by streamlining its planning, activation, and measurement methodologies with information and know-how at its core.
Relatively than consolidating, GroupM builds companies to satisfy the demand of its purchasers, he mentioned.
The company might want to reorganize and purchase belongings to streamline its methods however not merely for scale.
“Scale for the sake of scale isn’t actually necessary to our purchasers anymore,” mentioned Lesser. “It [has to] be scale for the sake of studying extra, figuring out extra, and interesting shoppers higher.
How scale is evolving
For years, advertisers favored advert companies with that huge scale. However Lesser mentioned that scale isn’t necessary in the best way that it was 20 years in the past. Again then, companies aggregated scale as leverage to acquire higher pricing from media members.
Whereas that also issues, scale is extra necessary now for the information and markets that may be accessed in addition to the individuals inside the group, he mentioned.
“Scale nonetheless issues, it’s simply been redefined,” mentioned Lesser. “It’s way more about our collective knowledge and intelligence.”
The way forward for media shopping for with AI
With regards to AI, Lesser believes that within the subsequent 5 years, “there isn’t a human that touches a media plan.”
“AI isn’t going to take anybody’s job—the person who understands AI goes to take individuals’s jobs,” he mentioned.
The exec mentioned that firms should lean into rising know-how and perceive the way it will have an effect on the trade. GroupM plans to spend $30 million educating and coaching its workers to work with AI, saying that 70% of the individuals it hires have already got expertise with the know-how.
