“There’s some basic things we need to do at GroupM to be very competitive,” he said.
WPP has invested more than $300 million per year into its WPP Open platform for the past three years, Lesser shared. He said those investments will continue as GroupM looks to simplify the organization to better manage its clients.
“The vision is to continue investing in those components including data, technology, and AI such that we can drive our clients’ business forward,” he said.
Simplifying its organization through streamlining
Over the past 20 years, GroupM has created, merged, and acquired companies like Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom to keep up with the ad industry’s evolution.
Lesser said that GroupM must go from “a collection of companies to one company” by streamlining its planning, activation, and measurement methodologies with data and technology at its core.
Rather than consolidating, GroupM builds agencies to meet the demand of its clients, he said.
The agency will need to reorganize and acquire assets to streamline its strategies but not simply for scale.
“Scale for the sake of scale is not really important to our clients anymore,” said Lesser. “It [has to] be scale for the sake of learning more, knowing more, and engaging consumers better.
How scale is evolving
For years, advertisers favored ad agencies with that massive scale. But Lesser said that scale isn’t important in the way that it was 20 years ago. Back then, agencies aggregated scale as leverage to obtain better pricing from media members.
While that still matters, scale is more important now for the data and markets that can be accessed as well as the people within the organization, he said.
“Scale still matters, it’s just been redefined,” said Lesser. “It’s much more about our collective wisdom and intelligence.”
The future of media buying with AI
When it comes to AI, Lesser believes that in the next five years, “there is no human that touches a media plan.”
“AI is not going to take anyone’s job—the person that understands AI is going to take people’s jobs,” he said.
The exec said that companies must lean into emerging technology and understand how it will affect the industry. GroupM plans to spend $30 million educating and training its employees to work with AI, saying that 70% of the people it hires already have experience with the technology.
