Jon Cook on Becoming Global CEO of WPP Creative

As WPP introduces its 'Elevate28' strategic plan, with a simplified structure across four operating units, its creative agencies will unite within the newly-created umbrella entity WPP Creative, under CEO Jon Cook.

Alongside WPP Creative there will be a new enterprise-focused group named WPP Enterprise Solutions; WPP Production; and WPP Media. These will also work across the company’s AI-powered platform WPP Open.

Within WPP Creative, Cook will retain his leadership for VML for the time being; the group will comprise creative agencies Ogilvy, VML, T&P, and AKQA — all of which brands are retained despite rumours to the contrary.

Cook has held various roles within VML for more than 30 years. He became global CEO for the agency in 2024, with the merging of VMLY&R and Wunderman, but will now be operating on a far bigger platform.

He discusses the formation of WPP Creative and his plans for the business working alongside Cindy Rose, global CEO of WPP.

Creative Salon: Why is it crucial for WPP to simplify under this structure while retaining the agency brands?

Jon Cook: Cindy has been fantastic about a couple things. One is that simplification of the structure and then empowering us to design it. She said today that everything we're designing comes from people who are together with her, and personally, I've really appreciated that.

The way things are now organised is very simple - you've got these four organising groups, and I love the point that WPP is not a holding company, but a company. If, like me, you’ve been here a long time you take real heart in what that means. But when we were designing it, we were looking at what really is powerful and differentiating about WPP if we can change lots of things about it. We have fantastic agencies, and we have spent - and I know this very first hand - the last five years really building great agencies, and that's taken a lot of work. What some of our competition are just now doing in terms of merging agencies, I know what they're in for the next couple years. We're through that. We've got great agencies, so let's build around them, and that's the reason WPP Creative is not the name of an agency, but rather a group that empowers its agencies.

In the design we heard two things from clients as it relates to creative agencies:  one is, ‘We love the agencies, you guys have the best. We love the choice, we love the personality, love the talent that gravitates toward agencies. But you make it too complicated’. And secondly they told us that it's hard to work between the agencies. So, we can build around what people like, which is having great agencies. These are successful agencies, but we can't stand still – we have to find ways to connect them more, empower them more. And that's the whole strategy behind WPP Creative.

What difference does the formation of WPP Creative make and how does is it designed to meet emerging client needs?

There are lots of things - one is unifying that and finding ways for those agencies to team up and be more powerful together. And that's not just saying it - we've always had the ability to do that because they had good leadership. But that's going to be based on good relationships - we have got to base it on a system that allows that. So, the biggest pivot we're making is we're going to move to a regional structure for our P&L for creative agencies to mirror the four regional structure of WPP Media, a major cultural and operational thing that would make it possible to share incentives, to share resources, and to share operations of those agencies.

So, what makes it different than just a collection of agencies with a name above a group? There are enough holding companies that have sets of agencies with the name of the group. What we're doing is building one that has them united systematically that will make them even more powerful together. You take the most powerful agencies and you unite them even more - you've got something.

Secondly, traditionally in WPP, and not by the fault of anyone, but every one of those agencies might be chasing their own vision of the future from a capability standpoint. And you might have agency C and agency B, saying, ‘Hey, we've got this fantastic commerce opportunity. We need to invest in a commerce company and hire people from a commerce perspective’, when all along that may have sat in VML’s, Enterprise Solutions capability. And so, what we're trying to do is unite them better.

The other thing is to empower them better, and so that we're taking the Enterprise Solutions capability that is hosted in VML and making that for everybody, not just out of niceness, but systematically making sure that things like commerce, CRM, CX, tech consulting is all embedded into those agencies more democratically. When you do that and create that at scale, then you can pop that forward as one of the organising groups of WPP as well. So that enterprise solutions will help it be the most modern set of agencies instantly.

What does WPP Enterprise mean for VML’s enterprise offering?
VML stays 100 per cent whole in terms of a connected capability. VML stays whole. That’s a very unique capability and it’s been successful for years. We're not changing anything about VML, but we're scaling it, and we're pairing some other things along with that to then scale it for everybody to make that aspect of VML even more accessible, all under the brand of WPP Enterprise Solutions. So, I'm definitely heavily involved. But we've also named Jeff Geheb [formerly Global CEO of VML Enterprise Solutions] as CEO of WPP Enterprise Solutions, and so it doesn't change anything about the capability of VML. It just makes it more accessible, more WPP unified.

Can you talk about what we can expect to see from the leadership structure of WPP Creative? You'll be the global CEO but what does a supporting team look like?

I won't get deep into org charts, because we haven't done all that, but also because it's very thin. We're not meaning to be an agency. I don't mean to say ‘I do everything’, but we have a very light layer of leadership infrastructure designed to help unite it and to help empower it. So that will involve us having in each of four regions, just like WPP Media does, a CEO that would not form a new agency, but unite those agencies in the region and unite them across the globe. There’s going to be very simple infrastructure and very light. We won't have a chief creative officer. We won't have a chief strategy officer, we won't have a all that stuff that sits in the agencies, and that's where our talent will sit.

And from a VML perspective, what do you need to do to make sure that you can balance both jobs?

This is possible because of VML where we are blessed with having a very talented, very long-term set of leaders. It would be different and it would be harder for me if VML was a turbulent place in terms of leadership. It's a very stable, very accomplished, very successful, very tenured, very seamless leadership team. So, it makes it very possible for me to expand things.

We'll do some things that make it even more possible and it's also important to note that Cindy's put a premium on having very few leaders floating over things. I think the agency world has been loaded with that through the years, so it's very important that to be a leader of that group. It's very helpful to also be one of the biggest practitioners in that group of understanding what is an agency, because that keeps me so grounded in what makes it easier for agencies to connect, and what agencies need to be special. I think that keeping my hands on and practitioning as an agency helps me be a leader and a uniter of that overall group.

We've been talking and hearing about the return of creativity and media being closer together. Do you think that's going to continue to be the case, and how will that be achieved through these units?

That's happening in WPP under Cindy's leadership which is building around having great leadership, and while everything we're doing from an organisational standpoint makes sense, we have got a great leader of media - Brian Lesser. He's somebody who knew WPP before and he knew what he was coming back into. He knew what he needed to fix. He's a great human being, and one of the biggest, most important things to him, which I don't think is the case in every holding company, is his belief in the power of creativity.

There will rarely be a media pitch where creative agencies at WPP don't fully support Brian. Most pitches you'd see us show up together in a really seamless way. But I do believe that, and I think Brian would say the same thing - having an organisation around the creative agencies means that every agency doesn't independently need to figure out how to connect to media in a seamless way. It's one of the advantages of having a group. It's part of my responsibility to have one seamless way that our set of creative agencies can connect to the media solution. And I think you're starting to see that in the form of how we won a lot of business lately.

What role will AI play in developing WPP Creative?

That is one of the things that will allow us to be efficient in the way that we unite the agencies. WPP Open is one of the biggest unifiers of the agencies, because it is a common platform for very agencies having a commonality. Besides leadership and besides strategic intent, one of the ways we can operationally connect is WPP Open. That said, it's also the unifier of all WPP. So that's not limited. That's also the unifier to how we connect to media and how we connect to production.

A year and a half ago, we were probably focused on quantity and usage statistics of WPP Open. And it was all fine. I like that. The premium on how we're measuring WPP Open is now client impact on quality of usage, on results. I think every holding company at some point was probably measuring on how many people are logged in and for how long this is. We're way past that. This is into how is it empowering your business. That's the KPI and so it's a huge part of the way we're able to run WPP Creative.

Now WPP Creative has been revealed, where do you begin?

Cindy said it. We started behaving this way long before today and what we'll do tomorrow, is just keep doing it for our clients, and demonstrate it. We can't just say that we have great agencies and hope they work better together. It's about demonstrating that for our clients. They have to see something different in terms of the level of agency power they get. And we'll do that.