“Clients Aren’t Looking for a Faster Horse”: Richard Glasson on the Strategic Transformation Behind WPP Production

Last week WPP announced the launch of WPP Production, as the holding company pulls together all its production community and resources from across its agencies and production unit Hogarth under one brand.

For Richard Glasson, CEO of Hogarth and now WPP Production, the time was ripe to restructure production. It’s a change, he says, that’s driven by client need, not efficiency for efficiency’s sake.

“Clients aren't looking for a faster horse, they're looking for transformation, they are looking at something very different,” he says, tipping his hat to the immortal words of Henry Ford and hinting at a transformation and vision that goes deeper.

Solving clients’ integration challenge

Taking on a “solution design” approach, they have worked extensively with clients to create something that truly meets their needs for a production set up that can not only create content for all channels and audiences but that connects advertising, commerce and social, embracing both performance marketing and brand building creative. That means they need an internal set up that’s extensively integrated but, crucially, easy for clients to work with and navigate. And a big part of that will also be enabled by WPP Open’s production technology and AI-powered workflow.

“Our view is that there are two key elements. One is that all elements of production within WPP need to be integrated. So that's agency production, how work is commissioned and originated, linked with how work is then adapted for every audience and market, linked to personalisation, linked to commerce and linked to media deployment. So now within WPP Production, all work which is commissioned, made, deployed, adapted within WPP happens within one organisation,” explains Richard.

“Rather than creating a new silo, actually what that’s doing is us saying to our clients, "We’ll solve the integration challenge for you." Because we’ll have our origination teams embedded with creative agencies, we'll have our deployment teams embedded with media, and we'll be responsible for managing everything that happens in there.”

It’s notable that now WPP joins its competitors at holding companies Publicis Groupe and Omnicom with a consolidated production engine bearing the same naming convention. However, Richard believes that WPP Productions is unique in the market as they’ve waited until the client need for this consolidation was genuinely there. Moreover, they’re building on a strong foundation: Hogarth has been part of WPP since 2009 and Richard’s been there since 2011.

“I would argue that we’re the only people who are doing this from a client-first, capabilities-first point of view,” says Richard. As Hogarth has been growing healthily and steadily, there’s no financial pressure or drive to cut costs behind the move. And that leaves Richard and the team free to focus on what’s most helpful to clients. “We just think with what’s going on in the market, what’s going on with technology, what the client needs are at the moment, now is the time to do something which is very focused around those client needs. I would contend that some of the other realignments have taken place primarily for internal reasons. I would say that we’re very much focused,we’re doing this in response to very clear client needs, client challenges, client opportunities. And so we're very focused on how we’re bringing capabilities together in order to be able to continue to drive growth for our clients and growth for our business.”

Not an “insourcing play” but an opportunity for the indie sector

As Richard emphasises that WPP Production is entirely based on client need, he says this evolution is not about funnelling work away from the independent production sector.

“It’s not an insourcing play. It’s not an ‘everything has to be done through WPP Production play’,” he says, explaining that he hopes this juncture will allow WPP and the indies to forge deeper partnerships. He also says that one of the first things that people within WPP wanted to know was that they will still be able to work with the best directors and independent talent.

“Not only are we going to continue to work with the outside market, not only are we going to continue to work with independents, but we’re going to be really focused on how we turn those into much more genuine partnerships rather than transactional relationships,” says Richard, who hopes that the independent production community will see the news as an opportunity rather than a source of concern. “I think you can imagine that all of the creative community within WPP, all of the lead producers, that’s their first question too. They want to be able to access the best talent wherever it may be and that's part of our internal commitment, part of our client commitment and a commitment to the outside market.”

Strengthening the creative-production partnership

From a brand perspective, the launch of WPP Production means the retirement of the Hogarth brand. Richard explains that this whole move has been driven by clients’ need for simplicity and so despite his own personal attachment to it, it’s a sub brand that just adds too much extra complexity.

But WPP Production marks a major change not only for the brand but also in terms of structure. Producers across the holding company will now be part of WPP Production. However, teams will largely remain embedded with the agencies that they’re already working with. This isn’t, explains Richard, about creating another silo but helping connect agencies and clients with the full scope of WPP’s resources. He also hopes that access will help individual producers develop specialisations in new technology like AI and virtual production. The partnership between producers and creatives remains as important as it ever was.

“They're going to stay sitting with the creative teams. That creative-and-making partnership remains very important. I hope that, for all of those people and for the teams they’re working with, they'll have more direct access to a much wider set of capabilities, he says.

In fact, that partnership between creative and production will be further strengthened with the launch of a Creative Production Council, which will facilitate input from creative agency partners and global creative leads across WPP. “Obviously, we want to invent something or create something which meets all of our client needs, but we also are very conscious of making sure that we're really serving the needs of our creative community. WPP’s got an incredible creative reputation and we’re in service of the best work in every way,” says Richard.

Co-creating a new culture

As we speak, Richard is gearing up for the hard launch on February 23rd. The team has been preparing for the announcement for a good four months and the idea of WPP Production has existed for much longer in concept. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes heavy lifting going on in terms of back office things like HR. But he intends that for producers, agencies and clients the transition will feel organic and as seamless as possible.

That’s particularly important from a culture perspective. The new WPP Production is 10,000 people strong and brings together individuals from right across the holding company’s agency brands and its pre-existing production unit Hogarth. He doesn’t want the formation of WPP Production to feel like a “a Hogarth takeover”. That’s one of the reasons that the Hogarth brand will be retired, to create a blank slate and level playing field. But it also means that he’s deliberately left room in the planning process to account for the input from across this newly-formed community.

For example, with the leadership team, while Richard will be heading up WPP Production as CEO, alongside Dave Rolfe as global head of production, the rest of the leadership team is yet to be announced. “We're going to have some exceptional talent joining from different places within WPP and we'll put together a management team based on that. So again and we're taking our time in terms of how we do that rather than announce everyone’s jobs on day one,” he says. “It would be disingenuous of me to say we’re going to reimagine and co-create together if we’d already made all the decisions. And so we’ve genuinely left some decisions for as things take shape over the next couple of months.”

This approach has been formed from Richard’s experience leading Hogarth. Over the years different teams joined or were transferred in after structural changes and mergers and he feels that they have brought so much to the organisation and shaped what it’s become. “I've been here 15 years, like a lot of people have been, and we've grown up together… We've lived through a lot of change and there is –and again it's so hard to avoid clichés in this – a family sense about what we do. There is a sense that we've all built this thing together.”

As much as the change has been driven by what clients need, he also really believes that the changes will open many more opportunities and a greater sense of purpose for all the people who make up WPP Production. He’s keenly aware that the disruptions caused by technology and the emergence of new channels has, over time, expanded what it means to be a producer – but for many it’s also caused uncertainty.

“The other thing that we're hoping, as we bring everyone together, is people get a sense of: ‘now I'm part of an organization where I've got a clear path forward, I understand where I can go, I understand the opportunity’,” he says. “I think it's incumbent on us now to [make sure that we don't] have pockets of people who understand the effect of AI in production. We want to make sure that that is imbued across the entire organization so that everybody who's coming in feels they've got access to every single capability and the possibility to develop their career really constructively as well.”

Investing in talent and technology

Looking ahead, Richard says that WPP Production will be investing in talent and technology. Primarily, much of that will be focused on scaling areas the WPP has already been leaning in on, like generative AI, digital twins and virtual production. They’re also about to open a new bricks and mortar content capture studio in East London, mirroring similar WPP facilities in Shanghai and Sydney. That will give the team access to virtual production facilities to enable the production of responsive and culturally relevant content, particularly for social media.

​

“Where there are sort of epic scale productions, we’ll absolutely carry on working with partners. But we've got a number of clients for whom we’re producing content literally on a daily basis,” says Richard. He shares use cases such as being able to quickly shoot retail interiors without shutting down client stores or doing pricey night shoots. He also notes that when working with high profile, expensive celebrity talent, the studios will allow them to maximise their time.

Gearing up for February

Now that the news of WPP Production is out there, Richard says that the client response has been “incredibly positive”. Between now and February 23rd, there’s a lot of work to do, but Richard’s clearly energised by the prospect of what connecting all of these pockets of expertise and talent across the holding company will unlock.

“I come back to this: we want to co-create,” he says. “We feel that we're going to learn from the teams coming in and they'll get experience of what we have. And so yeah, it’ll be an exciting period.”