• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 17, 2025

Addendum: Following publication of this column Thursday, a WPP spokesperson issued a statement saying the holding company was aware of Lesser's potential conflict of interest in the acquisition of InfoSum and evaluated it independently.

One of the best quotes I ever published was one former GroupM CEO Irwin Gotlieb said about transparency in the advertising and media-buying business during a 4As conference in 2013.

"It doesn't say in Genesis that everything has to be fully disclosed," Gotlieb said, inspiring my "Irwin Gotlieb And The Fine Art Of Being Transparently Non-Transparent" back then.

Twelve years later, Gotlieb's descendants appear to be giving new meaning to the concept, most recently failing to disclose details about WPP's acquisition of a startup it recruited current GroupM CEO Brian Lesser from just eight months ago.

To many, the deal had the appearance of conflicts of interest, and the sparse details publicly traded WPP provided in its announcement only amplified that perception, both for WPP shareholders, as well as its advertising and media-buying clients.

Among other things, WPP did not disclose the purchase price or explain if Lesser retained any of his equity in InfoSum and profited from its sale to WPP.

Consequently, I made requests to interview WPP CEO Mark Read, Lesser, and GroupM's new Chief Solutions Officer Lauren Wetzel, who succeeded Lesser as CEO of InfoSum when Lesser left to rejoin GroupM (he previously served as CEO of GroupM North America and was part of the original team at 24/7 Real Media that WPP acquired in 2007).

After being told the executives were busy, WPP's communications team provided the sizzle video below, describing it as having "a lot more substance" about the deal and the rationale for integrating it into GroupM.

At that point, I offered to provide the team with a list of explicit questions, hoping to get some real answers. Two weeks later, I'm publishing them for your own consideration below.

But there's one question I feel I should add after seeing some reporting from financial trades citing InfoSum venture capital investor Chrysalis Investments Ltd. selling InfoSum to WPP for a single cash payment of $63 million, or a report this morning by Digiday -- based in part on an interview with Lesser -- that estimated WPP paid $150 million for InfoSum. 

If either of those prices are accurate, it explains why WPP did not need to disclose it as a "material" purchase to its shareholders, although the true number likely will come eventually out when the holding company releases its cashflow statements as part of its annual reporting.

Either way, here's my new addendum question to WPP's management: If InfoSum was valued at $300 million prior to closing its series B raise in 2021, why are you putting the people in charge who were responsible for its value declining by at least half over the last four years?

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Full disclosure: The questions below came from the Deep Research model from Perplexity, which compiled an analysis of the perceived conflicts of interest in WPP's purchase of InfoSum, and I asked the source who prompted it what questions the model would ask Lesser and Read to clear it up. The source added a list of questions for WPP's shareholders too.