Rapid Response: How to revive collaboration at work, with WPP’s Mark Read

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1:26we see the short-term productivity benefits of an extra hour off the commute we don't see the longer-term more debilitating impact on learning culture creativity that come from having a workforce that's far too separate personal productivity is not the only measure of business success business is about how you solve problems and i think you can do that better more often if you all together.

2:00That's Mark Reed, the CEO of WPP, the world's largest advertising company with thousands of workers across agencies from Ogilvy to AKQA to Wunderman Thompson. I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group and host of Masters of Scale Rapid response. I wanted to talk with Mark because controversies over return to office versus remote work have never been hotter, and ad firms like WPP are wrestling with mandates, possible penalties, and cultural impacts. The future of work is also being buffeted by the rapid adoption of generative AI, and here, too, ad agencies are in the spotlight.

2:42Mark is particularly outspoken about the disruption he expects from AI, but he also shares specific examples of how the technology is improving output now. Mark's leadership perch across a global enterprise with global clients gives him a unique perspective on what brands and businesses most need to worry about, the risks they face, and the opportunities they need to embrace. Let's get to it.

3:18I'm Bob Safian, and I'm here with Mark Reed, the CEO of advertising giant WPP. Mark, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Bob, and great to be with you today. I wanted to start with some recent news reports about some ad firms instituting in-office work mandates for their staff with promotion and compensation risks for those who don't comply. When you and I talked previously, you said, I'd like to get more people back in the office, but there are different thoughts within our leadership. Yeah. Why do you want people in the office more? And has there been any consensus among your team? Yeah, look, I think the consensus is generally that when people are in the office, they're more collaborative.

4:05Ours is a creative process and collaboration is key to it. I think people are more productive. you know people get inspired from each other i think the difference is not that we'd all like people back it's like is a mandate the right way to go to some extent i think we have to inspire people to come back to the office people have to want to come back you know pre-covid the assumption was you came to the office and you had an exception to work from home sometimes i feel now like you work from home and the exception is coming in the office that's kind of what we need to shift and mandates may form part of it, but I'm sort of more of a believer in carrots than sticks.

4:44I mean, there's some people who feel like, oh, I don't have to waste that time commuting back and forth to the office, or, you know, it opens up new talent pools. There's some folks who are more hospitable, maybe working from home sometimes than in the office. Yeah, look, I'm sure some of that is true, but my argument to those people is like, personal productivity is not the only measure of business success, right? How many emails you answer in a day or how many Zoom calls you do is not really what business is about. Business is about how you solve client problems and how you help clients succeed.

5:18And I think you can do that better more often if you're together. Sure, there are times where you can save the commute, but I was in Mumbai last week. We had a board meeting there. And it was really interesting talking to a young woman who works for us there. She commutes in an hour and a half each way every day. Now, she comes in four days a week. She used to come in five days a week. But I thought I'd pull our office statistics to give us some facts on this. Shanghai, we're running at 75%. Mumbai, 64 % average occupancy. Here in London, 52%. Milan, 45%. And New York, 24%. And in the US, I'd say we vary between 15 % to 25 % occupancy.

6:01I think we should be in the office more often in New York. And I think talking to my colleagues and other business leaders in Mumbai, they worry about the competitiveness of U.S. business, given the attendance in the office, I would say, to be polite. I mean, that gap is kind of extraordinary in different locations. It's amazing, isn't it? My experience of working in America is it used to be a little bit of a sort of FaceTime culture, right? And I think people learned in COVID, they could get back control of their time. And I think that people are reluctant to give it. So we have to have a different contract, emotional contract with our employees.

6:38I'm not one of these people that says, you have to be in the office five days a week. And, you know, I think we have to give people flexibility. But we need to get somewhere closer to London than we are today in New York. Don't you save money if you don't have people in the office? In other words, if you don't have as much office space? I mean, financially, is it better for the business? Yeah, we save some money. But, you know, if you staff your offices to be busy three days a week, and it seems everyone wants to come in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, actually is massively inefficient. You know, we have these buildings empty four days a week.

7:13But I think the big thing is around building a company's culture. And, you know, how do we train young people? Most of the things I learned in my job, I learned from people around me, overhearing, being in meetings, seeing how they dealt with situations. That doesn't happen on a Zoom call from home. We see the short-term productivity benefits of an extra hour off the commute. We don't see the longer-term, sort of more debilitating impact on learning, culture, creativity that come from having a workforce that's far too separate. For some workers, the message that they sometimes receive when they hear, oh, you have to come into the offices, oh, I don't trust you, that you're working hard enough.

7:59How do you balance that sort of trust and what your relationship is with your team? I mean, that's why in one part, why we haven't done a mandate. All I would say is we have one board member closely associated with the supermarket. And I know they've moved their cashiers from Saturday to Thursday and Friday because the shopping week is evened out a little bit. And you see anecdotes about the cheap midweek golf course being busy. I don't want to be too cynical. Look, I think we have to trust our people. And I guess there's a subtext I'm hearing in your words about the number of hours worked is not really the measure.

8:35And the magic sometimes comes in those moments when we're together in the office. It's not about the number of emails you answer. Not everything you measure is important. In fact, many of the things that are most important are unmeasurable. There was a time where, frankly, coming into work, well, you came in because you liked your colleagues. And I don't think we should all be locked away at home on our own all day long either. I don't think that's healthy for people. I think coming into an office and being around other people is in general good for people's mental health. I came in the office today on Monday morning and the office felt busy.

9:09You know, our campus here felt busy, and I think it's a sign that people are being productive. So I want to ask you about AI. WPP acquired AI firm Satalia in 2021. You announced a partnership with NVIDIA earlier this year. You told me AI is going to fully disrupt our business over the next five years. Yeah. Sounds a little ominous. Can you explain that? Well, look, I think that, you know, for the first time, we can see that computers can do what we thought only people could do, right? Take photos, write copy, create press releases. You know, not a perfect job of it, but certainly enough for the first draft to help our brainstorming to inform a creative team.

9:50And then if you think further out in the future, you can see the potential for computers to totally automate the process. You're sitting in a client office and you want to launch a new ad for Dove, you know, reaching this audience over this period of time at this budget, press a button and it goes out. Now, I think it's some time before we get to that place, but I think many of the tasks we have, AI can play a fundamental part, sometimes in replacing the human quotient, sometimes really in empowering people. I mean, AI is amazingly empowering to our organization, but it will be also disruptive.

10:27Are you using these tools with clients today? You know, a great example is this work we did in India for cabarees, a Mondelez brand, where we took Shah Rukh Khan, you know, probably Bollywood's most famous actor. It enabled hundreds of thousands of small Indian businesses to use him in their commercials so that they could then send through WhatsApp. And Gen.ai enabled us to, you know, manipulate his image and his voice, you know, with his permission, by the way, to create these ads. or we've done an ad for Virgin Cruises with Jennifer Lopez, hence the Gen AI, that allow people to create their own personalized invitation to come on a Virgin voyage.

11:05We've built a creative platform called Imagine. We get quite long briefs from clients that take a 30-page brief, and it will summarize the five key points of the brief. They probably need to read the brief against the five key points, but it saves some time. We might use Gen AI to say, come up with a new campaign idea for a new, bigger KitKat. So actually, I tried this, and it's quite interesting because one idea was have a bigger break with the new KitKat. Actually, the AI had picked up that the core intrinsic value of a KitKat was this notion of have a break and combine that with bigger. Now, is that the best slogan?

11:38I don't know, but I think that it's a starting point from which creative people can take ideas, and it shows the potential that this technology is heading. You sound personally curious and intrigued about Gen AI, like you're playing with it yourself. How do you get comfortable with it? And, you know, a lot of CEOs are sort of struggling with the right way for them to understand and use AI. And I'm curious if you have advice for any of our listeners about how you do that. Well, I think like anything in life, you're only going to know about it if you try it and use it yourself. In 2008, 2009, we did a board meeting in Palo Alto.

12:15We got sort of young people to come in and get the board signed up to Facebook and upload a video to YouTube for the first time. And I think it's a bit like that where we are with AI. People have to get on some mid-journey. we have a way of working with clients where in an hour we ask clients to develop a new product and come up with a campaign for its launch. And they can really see what AI can do. By the way, you're creating a brand for a client in an hour, but sometimes those clients would have taken six months or even a year to do, right? So the increase in cycle time is quite substantial.

12:50When you do that, you see what the technology is really good at. It's really good at coming up with ideas, but it doesn't really know what's a good idea and what's a bad idea, right? The other thing it doesn't know is that often in our business, the trick isn't answering the brief. The trick is, is that the right brief or the wrong brief, right? Because clients come to you with one thing, but actually something else is better. And my best example of this is some work we did in Australia. So clients came to us, we've got these free range eggs, the chickens roam over, you know, They're acres of land, they're very healthy, lead happy lives, and the eggs taste great.

13:26Can we do an outdoor campaign in Sydney to promote them? So we put that in the creative department, and actually a young woman in the creative department said, you know what, how about this? She said, in Australia, on every egg, you have to print the date the egg was laid. What about if we printed the number of steps the chicken took in laying the egg? So the team designed this Fitbit, they strapped it to the back of the chicken, and they calculated that the chicken would take 4 ,500 steps. They could print the number easily on the eggs. And this idea really captured everyone's imagination. The eggs flew off the shelf.

14:01It really brought to life what they were doing. But the answer was a totally different answer from the brief we got, right? Now, AI will come up with a fantastic poster. It's not going to tell you to strap a Fitbit to the back of the chicken, you know? The vision of a chicken with a Fitbit on its back is hard to shake, But so are the lessons about AI's impact and the vast gap between in-office numbers in the U.S. versus elsewhere. Coming up, we'll hear Mark's insights on optimism versus delusion, the new risks in being a purposeful company, and more. Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high.

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16:10So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash MOS and get up to three months free. Before the break, we heard the CEO of WPP, Mark Reed, make the case for more in-office work and for more reliance on AI. Now we delve into leadership challenges about managing a workforce amid disruption and the rising complications of leaning into purpose. Plus, the line between optimism and delusion and his AI strategy over three months, 12 months and five years. You know, we were talking earlier about encouraging people to come back to the office. And some of the conversation about AI also makes people who are workers uneasy.

16:56Do you hear back from your team concerns about what AI will mean for their jobs? We've got to embrace these tools. We know what jobs they will disrupt, but we don't know what jobs AI will create. And I'm sure it will create many, many jobs. If I look at WPP, probably half the jobs inside the company didn't exist 20 years ago. We didn't have social media managers. We didn't have programmatic media managers. We didn't have search engine optimizers. I could go on, e-commerce people. Net-net, will we have more people or fewer people in the future? I think the jury is out on that. Group M, our media business that's been most impacted by technology, has seen its employment grow quite strongly over the last 10 years because technology needs people to manage.

17:40No one wants to let these computers totally go off on their own. And so the computers tend to cut problems down into finer and finer things that need more and more people to manage. One of your colleagues said to me about you, he said, he's a details person, which he meant in a good way. And I'm curious, what does that mean to you and how you balance between details and strategy as a leader? So you don't get pulled into the weeds, but you stay informed about what's going on. Yeah, I think my job is to give people a sense of direction about where we're headed, but also understand whether or not we're getting there.

18:17I mean, I think I'm quite a sort of practical person, so I like to understand how these things work in practice. I sort of like to think about it as curiosity as much as being in the detail. People sort of panic a lot about the future, you know, and I think we're an industry that has demonstrated its ability to weather a lot of disruption. I mean, what makes running WPP so fascinating is we deal with many of the world's largest organizations dealing with some of the most difficult issues in society around, you know, purpose and guiding clients on tricky reputational decisions. And at the same time, you know, we're coming up with sort of creative ideas that really engage consumers sort of at the intersection of, you know, fashion and entertainment and music.

19:03We have 7 ,500 people in China, 10 ,500 people in India, fantastic business in South Africa, Brazil. So that global reach may make WPP hard to manage, but it's fantastic power to our clients. I mean, running a business the size of WPP, every day you could find things going on in your business that's like, oh, that's a disaster. And you could find things that, oh, that's great. Like, how do you know what the balance of those things are? Bad news tends to rise up any organization more than good news. Look, I think you have to ultimately just have to look at the overall numbers. Are you winning more new business than you're losing?

19:42How are your relationships with clients? Are there more pieces of work that you're proud of, you know, showing in to colleagues or friends or sometimes my kids? So there's softer, less tangible metrics. You're right. We won't win every new business pitch much as I would like to. And we are a cyclical business as well. When times are tougher economically or businesses cut back, we're inevitably impacted by that. And we're also an optimistic industry. Optimist is one of our three core values as a company, but we have to make sure that optimistic is not delusional, right? I guess that's probably my task, right?

20:18You know, let's not be delusional about things, and let's just bring a sense of sort of reality. When we talked last time, you brought up purpose and the sort of the challenge over the last year that has grown for brands, clients who are thinking or forced to take positions on societal issues? Those two words used, thinking and forced. That's the interesting thing, isn't it? I mean, I think there was a time during COVID where everyone said companies need to lean into their purpose. They need to do the right thing. And I think, you know, the Bud Light moment was in some ways a turning point that made CMOs and CEOs realize that there was no easy out in this purpose conversation.

21:03You couldn't appeal to one group without thinking through, you know, is that really what I want to say? Is that really the right way to achieve my marketing goals? If I get called out on it, am I prepared to stand up for what I believe in? And I think all of those are questions that companies need to ask. We're asked, as you can imagine, to weigh in on many of the topics facing society every day. And we try to only do so when it's directly relevant to our business or to our people. Where people have come into trouble is where they sort of, I don't want to say lazily, where they've done things they thought for the right reason.

21:40And then when they've got challenged, they've sort of had to reevaluate it. There's no way out of that reevaluation without annoying at least half the population. And that is a challenge to people today. You know, there's some news reports recently in the wake of Climate Week that WPP has more fossil fuel clients than any other ad company. And there might have been a time where, well, that was something to be proud of. And now there's some corners that are saying, oh, that's something to be criticized about. But the other thing is, there'll be other people that would criticize us for not taking those clients, right?

22:15So that's where it's got even more challenged, right? So look, my view has always been that climate change is real, that we need to move to a low-carbon economy and that energy companies, as I prefer to call them, are going to have to play a role in doing that. Not everybody inside the company agrees with that and not everyone out there agrees with that, which is fine. I also think, though, that if we were to resign those clients, we might be criticised for a violation of free speech and not enabling them to talk. So that's why I think the world has got more difficult today. You know, you can be criticized for both sides on any decision you make.

22:55You told me that it can't just be the CEO's personal position on these social issues. Isn't it in some ways, though, inevitably defined by the CEO's choices and strategy? Ultimately, I guess it does become my decision. But us working for a particular brand or court doesn't necessarily mean I agree with every element of it. I do think that the free speech angle of this sort of cancel culture debate has got more merit than some people give it. We can't be in society where if you don't like what someone says, you try and withdraw their right to say it. And I have become maybe a little bit more sympathetic to that point of view over the last year as well.

23:41So it's a challenge. You guys are in the persuasion business, obviously. Do you feel like part of your role as a business is to help persuade your clients to, you know, operate more morally, socially, acceptably? You know, we are responsible for one in four, one in five of the world's commercial messages, either creatively or through our media business. And I think with that comes some responsibility to try and shape that. About four years ago, we decided to try and eliminate single-use plastic across our business. And we've had a pretty good success in doing that. But I think one of the benefits of doing that were the conversations that started with clients about their own efforts to reduce single-use plastic in their business.

24:29But one person's persuasion is another person's imposition, if you like. And ultimately, I think we have to reflect the ability for people and companies to have freedom of speech and to advocate their positions and to respect people's intelligence that they'll decide what is right and wrong or what they believe and what they don't believe. What's at stake for you in the choices you're making? I think the biggest challenge we have is figuring out the sort of the impacts of AI on our business, you know, in the next three months, the next year, and the next five years. How do we have conversation with clients about how to use this in their business?

25:10How do we build AI into the services we offer clients in a way that will keep us competitive? If we spend too much time focusing on three months, we'll forget the future. too much time focusing on the future, we won't be able to deliver in the short run. Now, what makes me positive is every week someone sends me a new campaign using AI. Sometimes I think, oh my God, there's all these disconnected things going on. But you have to live with some level of sort of disconnection. And I think the fact that people are embracing it is probably better than me trying to sort of control it from the center.

25:41You have a tolerance for some messiness in this evolution. Maybe too much tolerance, but I think that you have to, you know, have to let a thousand flowers blossom. And the sort of people that work at WPP are kind of innovative, curious people. So the best way to motivate them is to let them do things. And then you have to say, well, OK, these are things where we're really going to focus our effort. And these are things where we're really going to make an investment. And I think that's sort of the place we're at today. Well, Mark, this has been great. Thanks so much. Thank you, Bob. And thanks for having me on.