Jens Monsees, five months into the job as CEO of WPP AUNZ, has set about simplifying the majority-owned Australian ASX-listed arm of the world's biggest advertising company.
The changes are significant and align in some ways with the way Google, where he once worked, and BMW, where Monsees was global lead for digital transformation, structure themselves along functional lines.
Monsees, when he arrived in Australia, found that each brand, or operating company, liked to do things their own way and had dedicated support functions including HR, finance, IT, marketing and legal.
Then he attended a client event last November by one agencies about data and digital-driven content. And the next day another WPP brand was at the same location in Sydney with a 20% to 30% overlap of the same clients talking about the same thing.
Monsees told himself: “I think we can do this better.”
Now WPP AUNZ will have a horizontal layer, a community of functions. Finance, HR, communications and marketing, IT and legal will work across all the different businesses.
“So it means, for example, an HR manager who was sitting in one brand with a solid reporting line to the CEO of that brand now has a dotted line to the CEO of the brand and a solid line to the head of HR in our region,” he told AdNews.
“Same for finance, same for IT. So we are actually changing the whole leadership structure and having a modern matrix approach. I think it makes a lot more sense."
And the agencies liked to have their own production facilities.
In Melbourne, Monsees found seven content studios aligned with different agencies. “If we build one content studio in Melbourne, and not seven, then we can have the best digital studio in the city,” he says. “And the people can work more closely with each other.”
For the 5,000 staff at WPP AUNZ, the changes will mean more opportunity with greater ease of movement across the brands.
“The career paths, normally quite limited in the different brands, are now opening,” he says.
A priority, he says, is to invest in people, not redudancies.
He presented the strategy at a series of town halls, bringing all staff together.
“All the different people working for us in different brands came together in Sydney and got to know each other,” he says.
“They did not know that we are so many people and that we are doing so many different things here. Not only in Sydney but also in Melbourne and New Zealand, in Perth, in Southeast Asia.”
And WPP AUNZ agencies are scattered in many offices at different buildings.
“In the future these people are coming closer together in, hopefully, one building and working together in a much closer sense,” he says.
“We are currently bringing together all our 1,500 clients and client leads and they actually have a very good relationship and in the future they will bring more solutions to the table for each of the different brands.”
And he doesn’t want the company to restrict itself to traditional ways.
“I think we should not limit ourselves and our capabilities to stay at the traditional path of the market,” he says. “I see we need a new definition for the media and marketing and advertising space as a whole.”
Monsees says he’s enjoying the way business is conducted in Australia.
“I think that the Australian people are in meetings less aggressive and more looking for compromise and for positive and supporting views,” he says.
“They all want to be heard. That is fantastic. They all have their strong opinion.
“When we had our leadership summit in January (on the NSW central coast) with the top 35 leaders, everybody was very outspoken about all the changes.
“It was a fantastic experience ... how intense and positive all the people were working together and bringing their points of view to the table. So I loved it.”
In releasing annual results, showing a slide in sales and in profit, Monsees outlined what he plans for WPP AUNZ over three years.
He wants 2% to 3% improvement in operating margins. To do this he will cut costs, look for acquisitions and leveraging assets in Asia.
He described the old WPP AUNZ: independent brands, campaign oriented, brand focused, single lense solutions, inconsistent delivery platform, and limited growth opportunities.
““We are confident in our ability to change gears and create a future of opportunity and success,” he says.
“No-one in our market is yet leading the future of consumer communication and that is where we want to be.
“We believe we are strongly placed with our creativity and technology capabilities to become the leading creative transformation business in Australia, New Zealand and South-East Asia.”
He also spoke of the need for technology.
“We must now power up our creative capability and traditional skill-set with technology to capture growing areas of e-commerce, technology and experience,” he says.
“As technology advances, the way consumers connect and communicate with brands is also evolving rapidly.
“And that is why today we have announced a new strategy to simplify and scale our business and capture the new growth areas of the advertising, media and communications market.”
Monsees' mission:
And what's happening:
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