#86: WPP, Stagwell and the new economics of agency media

How could we go without talking about this news? Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

First of all, all the people moves.

Let's start with this.

Where do we begin? First of all, John Cook? Yeah.

leaving BML.

And then you also had some creative moves outside of some folks leaving senior roles inside of Omnicom.

Lydia, thoughts?

Yeah, I mean, the John Cook move is huge.

I mean, there's a big runtime before his departure.

He's not leaving until March of next year.

And there's a successor identified.

So it seems like, you know, all of it's rolling out according to plan.

I thought it was interesting that at first, like the Adweek coverage was like, yeah, and we don't know what's next for him.

And then it looked like AdAge got a little bit more information.

And he said, yeah, you know, he's going to go build a new technology venture.

So I thought that was interesting.

And we've been seeing a lot of people like departing from agency world and starting to invest in these new tech forward companies.

So I guess it's not surprising given all the changes over there.

Yeah.

And again, I always think about what people are leaving and what they're going to and not to take anything away from what was in the release and in the stories.

But it also may say something about succession inside of WPP in terms of maybe he's not a candidate for CEO.

And maybe that never was really part of the plan.

Maybe he was always in contention.