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WPP is to drop the Group M name for its media arm in the coming months amid ongoing changes made by new global chief executive Brian Lesser, Campaign has learned.

Campaign understands WPP’s media arm will be rebranded as “WPP Media”, and that the name will officially change before the summer.

When approached by Campaign for comment, a spokesperson for Group M said: “We don’t comment on speculation.”

Brian Wieser, principal of Madison and Wall, deemed the reported rebrand of Group M innocuous. Speaking to Campaign, he said: “What’s in a name? I don’t know that it says anything at all. 

“Any brand name has some incremental cost to support, and it communicates some degree of separation that maybe you don’t want to communicate. My first reaction is – simplification in a world where agency brand names are undifferentiated and given the cost to support brand names – it makes sense. It might be as simple as that.”

Lesser has accelerated WPP’s plans to simplify Group M since joining in September last year.

Speaking during WPP’s 2024 annual results presentation in January, he said: “We know that we have to be simpler and there is more work to do.”

He added: “We are further simplifying our structure to become a unified company with one voice to clients and partners.”

Lesser has axed global agency brand chief executive roles for media agencies EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker in a bid to further centralise operations.

EssenceMediacom is the network’s and the world’s largest media agency, bringing in £1.45bn in billings, according to data from Nielsen. In recent months, both Nick Lawson and Frances Ralston-Good, its former global chief executive and chief operations officer, have departed.

Group M EMEA chief executive Josh Krichefski also left the business in March, after 14 years. Its leaders in key markets, including the UK, now report directly to Lesser.

Simplification has been one of the key aims of WPP chief executive Mark Read since he took over from Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and former chief executive of WPP, in 2018.

WPP’s global revenue declined 2.7%, according its results for Q1 of 2025. Speaking to Campaign following the result, Read said: “We’ve got some work to do in our media business.” 

Efforts to streamline Group M had been led by former Group M chief executive, Christian Juhl, until Lesser’s reappointment last year. Lesser was Group M’s North America chief executive between 2015 and 2017.

Group M launched the “Synergy” initiative under Juhl, which brought a restructure of WPP’s global performance marketing division to create Group M Nexus and led to the merger of EssenceMediacom.

Group M media agencies switched media agencies at country-level P&L, and started to centralise back-office functions, for trading, finance and HR, across Mindshare, EssenceMediacom and Wavemaker.

At WPP’s Capital Markets Day in January 2024, Juhl said that the group had “failed to get as simple as we needed to be [in the US]”. He added: “It’s not a capability problem… we just failed to tell the right story.”

Juhl stepped down from his role as global chief executive of Group M in July 2024.

Group M spin-off rumours

Group M is the world’s and the UK’s largest media buyer with about 40,000 staff globally, managing in excess of $50bn (£38bn) in billings, according to COMvergence. The network is also a key revenue driver for WPP. 

Its scale has led to speculation of a potential spin-off of the brand, notably from Sorrell, who is still a minority shareholder of WPP.

M&A advisor Ivan Fernandes, a former MediaCom employee between 2007 and 2013, has also mused on the potential sale of Group M in a blog on his LinkedIn profile.

WPP has always maintained it has no intention of spinning off Group M. When asked whether WPP would spin off other parts apart from Kantar and FGS last year, Read told Campaign: “I wouldn’t speculate that we’d do that elsewhere.” 

This article originally appeared on Campaign.