WPP's Crisis: Court Documents Reveal How the Holding Company Unraveled From Within

It was already known that the standing of WPP, one of the world's largest advertising holding companies, had been slipping — but testimony from 13 former senior executives, deposed as part of an investor lawsuit in the Southern District of New York, has laid out the specific reasons in detail. The suit names WPP, former CEO Mark Read, CFO Joanne Wilson, and WPP Media global CEO Brian Lesser.

One former finance executive testified that as of April 2024, GroupM's long-running simplification program had produced no real progress, with the only tangible outcome being layoffs — which deepened the problems rather than solving them. According to this testimony, the company publicly called itself 'mid-transformation' while cutting costs, but in practice kept 'milking the cash cow.'

The situation with the company's own data platform, Choreograph, was just as dire: one former executive described it as five years behind the system Publicis built on Epsilon. Even one client, Signet Jewelers, said outright that WPP's weak database was holding up contract renewal — and it didn't help: the contract moved to Publicis in April 2023 anyway.

According to witnesses, leadership was well aware of why clients were leaving: Mark Read personally flew to Atlanta to meet with Coca-Cola, while another senior executive stayed in constant touch with Uber's CFO in hopes of retaining the account. Even so, major clients — Coca-Cola, Mars, PayPal, TJX, Abbott Labs and Paramount — kept walking away.

This testimony, alongside Sony's separate investigation into WPP's rebate practices that we covered earlier, fills in different pieces of the same picture: a company that publicly presented itself as 'mid-transformation' was, in reality, going through a systemic management crisis. WPP maintains that all the allegations are unfounded and continues to contest them in court.