Dive Brief:
- Several months ago a sexual discrimination lawsuit ended Gustavo Martinez’s tenure as CEO of J. Walter Thomson, a subsidiary of WPP, and led to changes including the installment of Tamara Ingram as the new head of the company.
- WPP and JWT have now filed papers to dismiss the lawsuit that led to the ousting of Martinez.
- According to the Wall Street Journal and Ad Age, the filings state that JWT’s Chief Communications Officer Erin Johnson’s claims are “baseless.”
Dive Insight:
WPP is doing its due diligence to its stockholders by fiduciary standards, but the optics of the filing are not good for an industry that is under fire on a number of fronts. Marketers holding the reins on very large budgets are already wary about big agency players – ad blocking tech is still trending up, to large part built on the back of bad user experience, and the pricing models lack in transparency that marketers now find in other marketplaces.
The filing comes on the heels of Ingram’s creation of a diversity committee to help address the issue within the agency because, as Ingram put it in a note to employees, "diversity and inclusion is essential if we are going to deliver the extraordinary work that we need to do, to transform and grow our clients’ business."
The moves also follow a dust-up at the 4A's annual conference between WPP’s CEO Martin Sorrell and Publicis’ CEO Maurice Levy where Sorrell admitted sexism is pervasive in the ad industry and Levy countered with “one man” made that mistake.