WPP Plc Chief Government Officer Mark Learn is ready to retire on the finish of the yr, kicking off a seek for a successor at one of many world’s largest promoting company teams because it grapples with slowing gross sales.
Learn, 58, has helmed the British firm for about seven years and has been with the corporate for greater than 30 years, the corporate mentioned in an announcement on Monday.
WPP, as soon as the biggest advert company globally, has been engaged on methods to reignite progress and streamline its operations to deal with softening gross sales and a dismal outlook. The worldwide financial downturn has hit shopper spending, particularly in Asia, and the rise of synthetic intelligence capabilities to automate advert creation and distribution is elevating doubts throughout the advert business.
In February, WPP shares dropped after the group forecast gross sales would stay flat or shrink this yr, lacking analysts’ estimates, whereas rival group Publicis Groupe SA mentioned it expects natural progress of between 4% and 5% this yr.
The corporate had beforehand restructured its steady of manufacturers to chop prices and introduced a plan to spend a whole lot of thousands and thousands of kilos on new applied sciences, together with constructing out AI capabilities.
Learn’s retirement highlights “the problem his successor faces to beat years of economic and share-price underperformance in opposition to rivals, and opens the prospect of strategic and structural shifts,” mentioned Matthew Bloxham, senior business analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. “The brand new chief might want to double down on simplification, cost-cutting and expertise funding.”
Former BT Group Plc head Philip Jansen was appointed chairman of the advert group in January.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com