WPP’s fall from holdco supremacy has been apparent for a while. But newly revealed accounts from insiders lay out, in granular detail, exactly how it happened.
Before diving into those accounts it’s worth framing them properly. They come from exhibits filed as part of the amended complaint in the wrongful termination lawsuit brought by former WPP exec Richard Foster, who alleges he was retaliated against and fired after raising concerns that the group’ s media investment arm was running an improper kickback operation. As part of the filings, 13 former WPP executives were interviewed.
WPP did not address the specific allegations but did email over a statement on the updated complaint from Foster’s legal team, which includes new allegations about the holdco’s principal media practices: “This amended complaint, filed just prior to the hearing, is an attempt to avoid its dismissal. Both complaints are baseless and without merit, and WPP will be re-filing an updated motion to dismiss. We have confidence that this matter will be resolved through due legal process.”
Foster’s legal team, unsurprisingly, tells a different story. In an emailed statement, William A. Brewer III, a partner at Brewer, Attorneys & Counselors and lead counsel to Richard Foster on the filing, said “Richard Foster asked a question any agency should be prepared to answer: Are your profits derived from loyal service to your clients, or not? When Mr. Foster concluded that Defendants did not have honest answers to that question, he informed the CEO — and was summarily fired.”
With that out of the way, here’s what they said:
The transformation that never was
A former CFO at GroupM said that as of April 2024, there was no measurable progress on the holdco’s long-gestating GroupM simplification effort. The only real change was employee terminations, which compounded the problems rather than fixed them. Those cuts, the exec continued, would push the company’s return to growth by two to three years given the complexity of unwinding WPP’s structure. The exec described the process as an “admin nightmare” done with a fraction of the staff. All this, they said, while the company was externally casting itself as mid-transformation. Really, they added, WPP was “milking the cash cow” while trying to cut costs at the same time.
Those comments were backed up by a former transformation pmo project manager who joined GroupM in 2024. They knew within weeks of joining that the company’s much-vaunted simplification “was not going to happen.” By March, it was effectively abandoned, they continued, and their team was gutted mid-project. Their manager and three colleagues were fired in early April, with the exec the last one standing before a low-level assistant was handed the enterprise resource planning system they had all been working on to unify GroupM’s finance systems. It never got finished. Instead, “they just gave up,” said the exec.
The data story that couldn’t hold up
Bad as the organizational inertia was to execs, it wasn’t as immediately consequential as WPP’s data platform Choreograph. A former svp of data and technology at EssenceMediacom described the underlying dataset as “sparse” next to what Publicis built through Epsilon, and concluded WPP was five years behind. CMOs seemingly felt the same. Pitching Choreograph against its rivals, they said, was “like Shaq playing against little kids”. Signet Jewelers in particular seemed to pick up on this. The CMO there told the WPP exec that its data capabilities (or lack thereof) were a major concern, they said. So much so that the CMO said they were “the only the only thing that gives WPP a chance” because “their data sucks”. Clearly that wasn’t enough. The account was given to Publicis in April 2023.
When WPP launched WPP Open, it’s spin on AI-powered operating system, the hope was that those issues would finally be put to bed. Turns out, that’s not what happened. On the contrary, one former programmatic lead describes an internal demo ahead of launch where they asked the platform to generate audience personas for a pop star’s younger U.S. fanbase. It returned personas built around Japanese anime fans, the exec said. A former vp of global strategic partnerships said the platform was pitched to clients as a shared dashboard but functional online as an internal tool clients couldn’t access. To them, “it should be called WPP Shut.”
The clients leaving, and the execs who watched it happen
The insiders interviewed drew a straight line from these missteps to the accounts that walked, including Coca-Cola, Mars, PayPal, TJX, Abbott Labs and Paramount. One former director put it simply: clients were “vocalizing their dissatisfaction by leaving WPP”. Leadership wasn’t in the dark about it, according to those execs. Mark Read, who was CEO at the time, flew to Atlanta to meet Coca-Cola after the account went under review, said one of the execs. Another C-Suite exec kept in direct contact with Uber’s CFO given, according to one of the insiders, the “hope of retaining Uber was literally riding on that relationship”. The insiders noted that WPP’s chief operating officer JiYoung Kim sat in on every major pitch. Moreover, the C-Suite ran a post-mortem after every lost account, one insider noted.
There’s no plausible version of events where WPP’s top brass didn’t know why GroupM was losing clients and failing to win new ones.
A matter of principal
Sometime after Foster filed his lawsuit in November 2025, evidence emerged that Sony had conducted its own investigation into WOO’s rebated practices. WPP’s 15th largest client, per the amended complaint, had run its own investigation into the holdco’s rebate practices he had spent a decade flagging, and reached the same conclusions. Part of the process included Sony’s team attending a criminal trial in China involving WPP executives. Then they presented their findings to WPP’s top lawyers, first in London then in Tokyo.
Sony’s findings, laid out across six figures in the filing, describe a broker model used in China. WPP negotiated rebates directly with vendors then routed the money through roughly 47 brokers with no operations of their own as a way to warehouse the funds before converting them into WPP profit. In China alone, Sony calculated $110 million reached clients in 2024 against $350 million retained by WPP. When sony showed that the 80% discounts WPP offered on media were funded by unpublished “black box” rebates, WPP’s representatives said they had no answer because they did not want to “know the answer”, the complaint read.