John O’Keeffe on Fixing WPP and Getting Sacked Anyway

John O’Keeffe rescued two broken creative departments, made WPP the most awarded holding company on earth, and sold every share the week he left.

“Martin hired me, and it became the holding company of the decade creatively. Mark fired me, and it lost maybe 75% of its value.”

That is John O’Keeffe compressing twelve years at WPP into two sentences, roughly twenty minutes into our conversation. He ran creative for the largest advertising group in the world from 2008 until 2020, and before that he spent eighteen years at Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the back end of it running the creative department. Mick Mahoney told me I had to get him on the show, and I am very glad I listened.

What I had not expected was how much of his career was spent walking into buildings that were already smoking.

2000, BBH was one client away from the shutters

BBH built a reputation in the mid-eighties that most agencies would happily commit crimes for. By the time John was running its creative department, that reputation was doing all of the work on its own.

“The creative part was dreadful, frankly. It was riding on a reputation it had garnered in the mid-eighties to mid-nineties, and by the time we got round to around 2000, it was a mess. Everybody knew it, and everybody was uncomfortable, and the atmosphere was going toxic.”

Then the senior walkout happened. The creative director went, four or five senior executives went with him, and clients started drifting towards the exit. John was told the agency was a single account away from closing its doors.

“We’re one client away now. One client goes, and I think it was identified as Scottish Power. If we lose Scottish Power, it’ll be shutters time.”

He kept hold of Scottish Power. Three months later, the client told BBH it was the best advertising they had ever had, which is a decent turnaround for a department everybody had already written off. Then came the grim part, because he had to remove a lot of people and there was no budget to replace them with established names.

You couldn’t go out and say I’m Manchester City, just buy every major player in the world. So I had to find people in what we’d call sort of lesser agencies who were younger and hungry.”

He hired them on mid-twenties salaries rather than the going rate of £120,000, and almost every one of them went on to run a creative department somewhere. His selection method was not a competency framework or a psychometric test. He took them out for lunch.

“It’s always a duo, a writer and an art director. If they made me laugh and it was a convivial experience, I thought, these two are great, aren’t they?”

2008, the getaway car outside was driven by Martin Sorrell

The end at BBH arrived on the morning the agency picked up its fourteenth Agency of the Year award, which is timing so absurd it deserves its own trophy. He was called into a meeting and told the work was not where it needed to be creatively.

“Which does beg the question, where exactly do you want to be? So luckily for me, there was a getaway car outside being driven by Martin.”

Sir Martin Sorrell gave him two key performance indicators, creativity and effectiveness, and pointed him at a group that the trade press was calling the mediocre one. His predecessor Neil French had carried the same brief and left without shifting anything. John set Cannes Lions as the benchmark, because it was the only global show that clients actually turned up to. The internal advice was that WPP should aim at Publicis, who were just ahead. He chose to ignore that advice.

“I was told we’ve just got to get past Publicis, and I said no, no, we’ve got to get past Omnicom. We didn’t have to go very far to overtake Publicis. We had to go a long way to overtake Omnicom, and that was I thought what was needed.”

His mechanism for making it stick was quietly brutal. Rather than asking creative directors to present at the annual New York strategy conference, he made the network chief executives stand up and present their own creative ambitions, then invited them back a year later to report on whether they had delivered.

“And that concentrated a few minds.”

Not everyone came along quietly. The chief executive of Team Ford, the biggest client group in the building, rang him up cold.

“I’m the CEO of Team Ford. Do you know I can have you fired? I said, oh really, I didn’t realise. I got hired by Martin. I’ve never heard of you.”

Ford stayed comfortable and John was told to keep his hands off it. He warned Sorrell what would eventually happen, which is that a genuinely good creative agency would get in front of Ford’s senior people and offer them something better. Wieden and Kennedy did exactly that, and WPP duly lost the business. Some warnings are more satisfying to have issued than others.

WPP went on to win Cannes Lions holding company of the year seven years running, and in 2020 the festival named it most creative communications company of the decade. That is roughly the moment his position started to become uncomfortable.

Listen to the full episode with John O’Keeffe

Watch the full episode with John O’Keeffe on YouTube, or find every previous episode over at embracingmarketingmistakes.co.uk. John now works for himself and keeps his deliberately short LinkedIn profile as his entire shop window, which he explains in the episode with some relish.

Why did John O’Keeffe sell all of his WPP shares?

He sold his entire WPP holding as soon as his position became untenable in 2020, and the shares have fallen a long way further since.

The story starts with Donald Rumsfeld, which is not a sentence I expected to type about an advertising interview. When Sorrell left WPP in 2018, a panic set in about who could possibly replace him, and outside names were being floated who knew nothing about the business. John and a group of senior colleagues went to the board and argued for Mark Read on the grounds that he understood the shape of the company and, in Rumsfeld’s phrase, knew what he did not know.

“So he won’t interfere with you, so I swallowed that, and he became the CEO. And next thing I know, he’s hired some woman from Walmart, from the supermarket, and she’s just directing me and telling me how to be a chief creative officer.”

The public execution, as he tells it, came at another strategy conference. John had just made his case for staying number one when an IT employee asked from the floor whether the company focused too much on creativity and creative awards. Read, still on stage, said he was torn by that.

“And I thought, that’s my legs cut off at the knees in front of the entire company.”

He flew home to London and rang a lawyer that week, correctly predicting he would be called into a meeting within a fortnight. He was, he took the advice not to argue, and he walked out of the building for the last time with his bag. He also sold every share he owned. He puts the price at around nineteen pounds, although WPP had already come well off that peak by 2020, and the shares now trade nearer three pounds. Mark Read announced his own retirement in June 2025 after seven years in the job.

The line he actually wanted to deliver in that meeting never got said, which he still seems to regret.

“I told people forever after that I met Mark for a meeting and he said, this just isn’t working. To which I responded, what part of Creative Holding Company of the Decade is the bit that’s not working for you? But sadly, I didn’t really say that, and I do wish I had.”

Can AI have a creative idea?

John O’Keeffe argues that AI cannot originate an idea, because everything it produces is scraped and recombined from advertising that already exists.

He is not remotely precious about what AI can do. He accepts it will take out enormous numbers of media planning, buying and targeting jobs, and he thinks a great deal of what agencies now call creative is really just a small business telling people where to find it.

“They don’t need a Keep Walking or a Campaign for Real Beauty. They need to be in all the right places on social and just say, this is what I am, this is who I am, this is what I do, here’s how you get hold of me. That’s the creative now, and AI can do that instantly.”

His objection is narrower and, I think, harder to argue with. He keeps returning to one example, which is that somebody at VCCP looked at the word market and heard meerkat. Compare the Market was fourth out of four price comparison sites when the campaign launched in January 2009, and it ended up leading the category.

“AI is never going to say market, that sounds a bit like meerkat. That’s never going to be. AI can’t do that now, and I don’t think it ever will, frankly, because it’s just too human and too mad.”

“I always say it’s not generative, it’s regenerative, and it scrapes everything. If you say I need a beer campaign for my Australian lager, it’ll just regurgitate and compile what it knows about Australian lager advertising and give you something that’s already been done.”

His warning to the holding companies is that they are picking a fight they cannot possibly win. Going toe to toe on AI against Meta, Alibaba, OpenAI and Anthropic is not a strategy, it is a slow surrender, because those businesses were built as AI companies from the first day. The argument he would make instead is a pricing one.

“I remember being told at BBH, BBH, very expensive, very expensive. And even then thinking, you’re not, we’re better than free, because whatever you paid the agency for Keep Walking, you’re now the number one Scotch brand in the world.”

Then he told me something that genuinely annoyed me. He had recently been asked to solve a creative problem at short notice, delivered it, and the agency told him they intended to tell the client that AI had produced it. He mentioned it to Russell Ramsey, his art director of many years, expecting shock.

“And he said, I get told that all the time.”

We are apparently now at the point where human creative work is being passed off as machine output to justify the invoice. One of my own team was asked recently whether AI could simply write all our PR material and bring the cost down. Two very different conversations, same underlying assumption.

Embracing Marketing Mistakes is the weekly podcast I host with my Prohibition PR co-director Will Ockenden, where senior marketers, founders and agency leaders talk honestly about the decisions that went wrong and what they learned from them.

John’s advice to anyone starting out is simply to have more confidence than he did at Saatchi and Saatchi, where he was so frightened of presenting his own ideas that he can still remember the panic. Which is quite something from a man who, twenty years later, told the chief executive of his biggest client group that he had never heard of him.