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WPP Turnaround Plan Promises Cuts, and Bird Makes Its First Brand Pitch |
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Today’s newsletter was written by CMO Today Editor Nat Ives.
Hello CMOs. Scooter-rental company Bird has released its first brand film, an animated video that depicts car traffic as annoying and, more controversially, scooter domination as freedom. Not pictured: people like this man, who fish rental scooters out of the lakes and rivers where vandals throw them in surprising numbers. (Bird pays a fee for each recovered scooter.) Some brand work remains to be done.
This week we’re testing earlier delivery for the CMO Today newsletter than the usual 8 a.m. We're watching the numbers, but you can also reply to this email to register your preference.
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WPP CEO Mark Read. PHOTO: TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
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WPP Chief Executive Mark Read set out his vision for a turnaround on Tuesday morning in London, describing a mix of streamlining, cuts and investments that he hopes will make the world’s largest ad holding company better-positioned to contend with the rapidly changing marketing landscape.
It intends to reduce its workforce of 134,000 by 3,500 as it pursues annual savings of £275 million ($348.1 million) by the end of 2021, though it will also invest £15 million a year until 2021 in creative leadership, focusing on the U.S., making net job losses closer to 2,500, CMO Today's Lara O'Reilly reports.
Mr. Read will also implement “a more coherent management structure” with fewer direct reports than his predecessor, Martin Sorrell, who was known for his micromanagement of everything from client relationships to identifying deal targets. “In three years’ time we will look back and see a very different company, but we will get there at the right pace,” said Mr. Read, who has already set two large agency mergers in motion at WPP.
One analyst immediately deemed the plan “cautious” given “the scale of the task” to simplify WPP after more than three decades of empire-building by Mr. Sorrell.
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PHOTO: WANG ZHAO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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Under Armour ousted two sports-marketing executives who were longtime associates of CEO Kevin Plank, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal, after the apparel brand conducted an internal review of their department’s spending.
Their spending, including on gifts to athletes and nights out, included costs that had been approved in previous years, the people said. The marketer has been reevaluating its practices amid the #MeToo movement, earlier this year ending its policy of letting employees expense visits to strip clubs.
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Mastercard Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar. PHOTO: MICHAEL LOCCISANO/GETTY IMAGES FOR MASTERCARD
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Mastercard was among the marketers that temporarily pulled its spending on YouTube last year amid reports of brand ads on inappropriate content, but marketers can’t face the power of the Facebook-Google duopoly through individual action, Mastercard Chief Marketing & Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar. “It’s not going to happen from one company jumping up and down,” he told The Drum.
Instead he’s calling for industry trade groups to get the duopoly’s attention by representing “the interests of the whole advertising community”–and for advertisers to share the lessons they've learned from their individual efforts.
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$496.5 million |
The amount Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi, the mobile video streaming service with ad-supported and ad-free tiers, plans to spend on programming before going live next year, according to a pitch deck reviewed by Digiday
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Kellogg Co.’s Pringles will return its “Flavor Stacking” campaign to the Super Bowl a year after its first big-game spot deployed Bill Hader. [Adweek]
An explosion of scoring has put the NFL, TV’s last property with reliably huge reach, on pace to recover much or all of its recent ratings losses. [Ad Age]
A day before Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s testimony to Congress on subjects including data privacy, Google said it will shut down Google+ earlier than planned after discovering a new software bug that exposed private profile information on 52 million people to app developers. [WSJ]
State Street Global Advisors’s Fearless Girl statue has relocated to the New York Stock Exchange from its location in front of the nearby Charging Bull sculpture, although the bull may not be free of her for long. [NBC News]
Clorox Co. promoted Stacey Grier to CMO, succeeding Eric Reynolds. [Ad Age]
Court TV, whose unblinking eye on proceedings like the first Menendez brothers trial was blurred with reality programming after Turner Broadcasting rebranded it TruTV, is coming back under new owners. [WSJ]
"You could be eating whale without harming whales": A visit with the entrepreneurs, scientists aiming to sell consumers on "meat" grown in a petri dish. [WSJ]
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