What you need to know:

• GroupM CEO Aimee Buchanan is embarking on significant structural changes as she attempts to make the business more transparent and fit for a future where corporate mandates on sustainability and diversity are reflected in media investments.
• She’s also tasked with rebuilding morale and re-energising staff after a difficult period for the holding company following restructures, ownership changes and Covid’s toll.
• Staff will see key elements of the plan within the next fortnight.
• Meanwhile Pat Crowley has stepped up to lead Essence. The Ikon and CommBank account stalwart is guiding a triple-merged unit (Ikon into AQKA Media and then the merged unit into Essence) through the turbulence of those changes while keeping his hands “on the tools” to bring clients through the transition.
• Crowley says the ability to trade his way – and not be bound by group trading models – was “non-negotiable” in taking the hot seat. But he and Buchanan are fully aligned on the way ahead.
• That includes carbon counters for media supply chains coming soon as GroupM makes ESG metrics a strategic priority.
• Likewise the diversity mandates now being applied by brands and agencies must also apply to media channel planning, says Buchanan, potentially counter to the multiyear shift to consolidate the number of publishers receiving the bulk of agency-controlled ad dollars.
• Buchanan says she has authority from the very top to enact sweeping change – even if it means profit taking a hit.

Time to step up

Pat Crowley is media’s ultimate below radar operator. ‘Mr CommBank’, he’s run the account for the best part of two decades and became right hand man to Ikon’s founders Gary Hardwick and Simon White, the independents who won the bank’s business in 1999 – putting Ikon on the map.

Attracting the attention of John Singleton’s STW in 2006, which became part of WPP AUNZ, Ikon was last year merged into AKQA Media before the bundle was rolled into Essence, the agency led by Christian Juhl into WPP’s acquisitive arms in 2015.

Now Juhl is running GroupM globally and Crowley is tasked with making Essence fly locally. He has some plates to keep spinning but says “being on the tools” with clients is very much part of the remit. Remaining hands-on with CommBank was a key to taking on the CEO position – as was the ability to take an independent approach to buying.

“Part of the reason I said yes to this job is I've built a job role in the leadership team that's allows me to still focus on clients – that was a non-negotiable between Aimee and I,” he says.

Crowley, who once left Ikon for a three-month stint at Match Media, picks his bosses carefully. Yet despite moving in the same circles for donkey’s years, he and Buchanan had barely met prior to talks about heading up Essence.

“As we started the conversation, we really connected as humans. Not as colleagues, not as bosses … but really familiar spirits with similar approaches to pretty much every conversation we have. That was really important,” says Crowley.

“I've been my own career adviser. I haven’t had that many direct formal bosses for some time. I worked very closely with [former STW and WPP AUNZ CEO] Mike Connaghan when he was in the business. But moving into this new world, I wanted to learn and work closely with someone new – and Aimee has been amazing.”

Crowley also points out that he has significant experience of managing a large agency – running Ikon Sydney “for seven years before I wanted to get back onto the tools”, a desire he says was driven by family life as much as anything else.

“To be really human about this, I've got two boys that are now almost adults. I made a choice to spend as much time as I could with my children through formative years... Now they've left us – my wife and I look at each other on the weekends and there's no one around,” says Crowley.

“So I actually feel I can give [leading an agency] the energy and focus that it requires. It's exciting and it's challenging. Yes, there's pressure, but I'm feeling good about it – because there's space in my life to deliver.”

Which is why Crowley is confident he and Essence can manage the headwinds inevitably thrown up by any agency merger – let alone a triple whammy.

“Anyone that's been in this industry for 25 years has dealt with turbulence every single day, regardless of name change. During the changes, there's slightly more turbulence,” Crowley admits. “But I would say that we've come through that, we have complete buy-in from clients and staff …We can manage turbulence with transparent, honest and constant communication – and that's what I'm doing to the best of my ability.”

Rebuilding morale

New CEO Aimee Buchanan is tasked with remodelling GroupM strategically and culturally following a period of upheaval between regimes that coincided with Covid, WPP’s taking full ownership of its AUNZ outpost and an attritional restructuring under former CEO Jens Monsees.

She says her immediate task is to better support GroupM’s agency brands and re-energise its people.

“It felt like in the last twelve to 18 months, it lost a little bit of the humanness and warmth that makes people want to be here,” says Buchanan.

“So a massive focus for me is about getting the people and culture right. Scott [Laird] coming in as Chief People Officer was a massive part – hiring someone that could speak and build programs for 900 people, not twelve people sitting on an executive committee. He's making a big impact in galvanising us around that,” says Buchanan.

“I'd like to think in twelve months time that people say ‘GroupM is a better place to be. And under Aimee's leadership, she's made GroupM work better for us’.”

Trading on transparency

While leading Omnicom’s OMD, Buchanan made transparency a key plank of her proposition versus rivals such as GroupM. But now she insists GroupM has made major changes, and that she has scope to drive transparency further – even if it puts a dent in the bottom line.

“I pushed Christian [Juhl] a lot [on transparency]. I said ‘this is what I’m about’, and he was really open. He said ‘that is yours to do what you want with.’”

Now in situ, “I have never seen anything like [the level of compliance in place] ... I can’t even go to lunch without registering it," says Buchanan.

“If you speak about a business that potentially has been really tarnished in the past and has had to put in much more structure around it, this is that business. Is there work to do to think about how we build our products in different ways? Yes, there is – and Pat and I have a massive programme of work underway to look at our tech products and how we unbundle them and position them differently," she adds.

“I haven't changed … I’ve gone really hard on this… and I want to stand in front of a client and be able to speak with full authority and passion about the service that we're delivering.

“But there's some work to do on the conversations we need to have with clients around those commercial models to enable that as well,” admits Buchanan. “Unpacking what those models look like is probably one of the biggest projects we've got underway at the moment.”

Free trade agreement

Crowley seconds that call – and says he wouldn’t be in the chair if GroupM had not agreed to give him free rein on trading approaches.

“The conversation around the old Ikon business joining GroupM went on for many years – and one of the fundamental points of resistance was the group trading model,” says Crowley.

“We have a very unique approach to dynamic trading and channel neutrality. So the fact that we've come into the group with that accepted as a non-negotiable demonstrates that this is a different group to what it was five years ago.

“We're in the group. We're under the hood, but we continue to transact with our media partners in the way we did 22 years ago,” Crowley reiterates. “That was non-negotiable.”

On target earnings

The question is, can Buchanan take a cleanskin approach even if it means profit takes a hit? Global, she insists, says that’s acceptable.

“Do I have a target? Yes. But there are a thousand ways to hit a target in my view," says Buchanan.

“The conversation I’ve had openly with the global team is ‘you keep asking me why GroupM isn’t as consistent as it should be’.”

Her answer is that “we need to build for agencies, not building for the next pitch – which is my fundamental belief around where agencies get it wrong. That is not a one-year journey and they’ve told me they fully accept it is not a one-year journey.

“If I halve this business in the next year, will I be here? Probably not. But if I miss a few bits and pieces and I have to massage through to get there, I think there's a complete appetite for that.”

And her target?

“It’s no worse than I’ve ever had before, put it that way.”

ESG and programmatic carbon counters

Global CEO Christian Juhl last year outlined his agenda for a more sustainable industry – including building new ESG-focused media metrics. Buchanan says GroupM is about to find out what that looks like in Australia.

Equally, she says diversity, equality and inclusion (DE&I) mandates cannot be separated from diversity of media. Which puts the seemingly irresistible forces of media consolidation on a collision course with the apparently immovable object of diversity.

“We’ve been given this global vision, but how we are making advertising work better for people in this market is not clearly defined,” says Buchanan.

“In about two weeks, we'll go out to all staff with this – and one of the big pillars will be sustainability. That will be through the lens of a carbon calculator that will enable us to basically rate where a media plan sits,” says Buchanan.

“We’ve also got a massive program of work going on with our programmatic supply chain, where we're looking at how we offset all of the carbon that's used within that to make all of our programmatic media net [carbon] neutral.”

Juhl’s plans to help drive media supply chain decarbonisation through carbon-focused metrics was one of Mi3’s highest read stories of 2021.  The stance means that media channels with the highest carbon footprints may ultimately find they are pushed down the pecking order for ad dollars – or off the plan entirely.

Asked about a timeframe for that ultimatum in Australia, Buchanan is reluctant to talk in absolutes.

“My view is we can't force a client into aligning to our belief. Like brand safety, each brand has a different appetite for risk and each brand has a different appetite for sustainability,” says Buchanan. “Some will be really far on the spectrum, and say I only want to [advertise] with publishers that deliver to [our own decarbonisation mandates]. Others will say, ‘our own business is not there yet, so why are we being so strict?’”

But Essence’s Crowley warns businesses to prepare now – because decarbonised supply chains are coming.

“I believe carbon credits are going to become a fundamental part of every single business in this country moving forward. It's going to become a part of the accounting exercise, it's going to happen. So if we don't start thinking and planning for that future now, we'll be left behind when it's a part of running a business.”

The programmatic product, based on carbon offsetting, will be in market within six months, says Buchanan, with more to follow.

“I don’t think I’ve left a meeting in the last two weeks where a client is not grappling with what sustainability means for them in every category … It’s a big area of conversation for us.”

Diversity of media: Mandates incoming

Diversity of media is an equally strategic challenge for brands. They want their media dollars to reflect their diversity commitments, yet the industry has spent years consolidating ad dollars into the hands of the few in the name of ease of transaction and trading efficiency.

“Never before have I had so many conversations around what is our approach to more diverse representation on our media plan; what is our capability; what are we doing from a private marketplace perspective to target specific cultural groups; what is our approach to matching a client’s corporate social responsibility plan around diversity inclusion to investment strategy?” says Buchanan.

“How can you talk about diversity inclusion if you're not using the channels that those audiences consume – and they're not going to be necessarily mainstream channels?” she says.

“You have to walk the walk … So we are looking at how we curate audiences to reach people in different cultural groups across the country. And if we don't do that, we're not doing our job.”

But there’s the rub, says Crowley. Australia is relatively small and the media market is increasingly dominated by offshore-owned platforms taking a growing share of audience eyeballs as ad dollars. How can local media compete with the resources of platforms such as Google – whose multibillion dollar media account Essence handles globally – and Facebook?

“I have to go to the places where the people are,” says Crowley. “I'm glad I'm not a media owner because I think it's a really difficult time to navigate – because we've only got 25 million people and we’re a market of $16-$17 billion in investment. It's a tough world – and how that plays out determines how diverse we can be in reaching niche audiences and where we reach them to deliver client outcomes.”