WPP: A case study in how not to do brand architecture

In 1989, Martin Sorrell paid approximately $825 million for the Ogilvy Group. At the time it was the largest acquisition in advertising history, and he knew precisely what he was buying. Not the buildings, not the client list, not the staff. He was buying the name. A name that David Ogilvy had spent four decades building into the most recognisable brand in the agency business. Sorrell understood something that many of his successors apparently do not: agency brands are real brands, with real equity, and you pay real money for them.

This week, it emerged that Sorrell’s successors at WPP are folding Ogilvy, VML and AKQA into a single holding structure to be called, with the imaginative ambition of a government committee, “WPP Creative.” In surely the ultimate indignity of the modern ad era the greatest name in the history of advertising will be subsumed within a holding company named after a bankrupt wire shopping basket manufacturer.

The individual agency brands will reportedly remain intact. They will just sit under the new masterbrand like slightly embarrassed children at a school photo. The move has being positioned as strategic simplification. It is, in fact, a case study in how not to do brand architecture.

Brand architecture is one of those marketing concepts that sounds complicated but is actually straightforward. You have four choices with two essential extremes. You run a house of brands, where each brand stands alone with its own identity, its own positioning and its own equity. Procter and Gamble is the classic example. Tide doesn’t know it’s owned by P&G and neither do most consumers. Alternatively, you run a branded house, where a single masterbrand does the heavy lifting and everything else is a generic sub-aspect. Virgin is the obvious example. Virgin Money, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Active. One brand, many expressions.

The worst possible option is attempting both simultaneously: building a hybrid that keeps all your individual brands but shoehorns them under a masterbrand that they have no historical relationship with. You don’t get the benefits of either model. You get all the cost of running multiple brands with none of the clarity of running one. And usually a pre-cursor to further drastic changes down the line. Precisely what WPP Creative appears to be.

The worst possible option: Cindy Rose’s restructure tries to unite powerful subbrands under WPP

In Sydney and Melbourne, when a CMO rings their creative agency, they don’t ring WPP. They ring Ogilvy, or VML, or AKQA. The equity lives entirely in the agency name. The client relationship, the talent attraction, the creative reputation – all of it sits under those three names, not the holding company’s. “WPP Creative” has zero meaning to the marketing director of a major Australian bank sitting in Martin Place. It has zero meaning to the graduate choosing between agencies in Surry Hills. The brand assets WPP is trying to marshal under this new banner are the very brands that will suffer from being marshalled.

Procter and Gamble spent two decades consolidating from more than 150 brands down to 65 at enormous cost. The rationale was simple: each brand requires investment to maintain relevance. Brands you cannot properly fund decay. WPP’s situation differs, but the logic is the same. If you’re running Ogilvy, VML and AKQA as genuinely separate competing brands with separate investment and positioning, commit to that and let them compete. If AI is compressing margins and you need to cut costs, consolidate properly. What you cannot do is both.

The timing is instructive. WPP shares feel steeply in Q4 2025 and investors are growing nervous about what AI means for traditional creative agency models. This restructure is not, whatever the press release says, primarily a strategic response to client needs. It is a cost play. The CFO wants shared back-end resources. The CEO, Cindy Rose, who took the job only five months ago and needed a visible first move, calls it transformation. Let’s call it what it really is – preparation for retreat.

David Ogilvy once said that “a brand is the intangible sum of a product’s attributes.” He spent his professional life building one of those intangible sums into something worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He would have had something precise and withering to say about having his name tucked underneath a corporate umbrella called WPP Creative. Sorrell, who is still very much alive and operating his own holding company, is less charitable calling the new strategy “carnage”.

The question every Australian agency chief is now quietly asking is what this means in practice. Probably not much, initially. Ogilvy Sydney will still be Ogilvy Sydney. The structural change will be felt in finance and HR long before it reaches creative or client services. But brand architecture has a way of following organisational structure. Once you name something WPP Creative, the logic of rationalisation tends to keep moving in that ominous direction. Like the Sydney train from Melbourne that isn’t there. Yet.

Less really is more in brand portfolios. It’s just that less usually means choosing one thing and committing to it, rather than building a new sign above the three things you already owned and weren’t willing to change.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, brand consultant and columnist, and the founder of the Mumbrella MiniMBA in Brand Management. The module on brand architecture covers exactly why this kind of hybrid structure costs more than it saves. Enrol at minimba.com.

Editor’s note: this column as originally posted made reference to an “announcement”. WPP has not made an announcement on the restructure, which was first reported in the Financial Times and confirmed by multiple sources.