Adweek has been doing some useful sleuthing into holding company bosses pay and the list is topped comfortably by Omnicom’s John Wren on $21.67m. Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun, surely the top performer on most measures, gets by on a modest $8.89m.
Philippe Krakowsky at IPG is on 16.43m, about the average for an S&P 500 company in the US. He’s staying on after the merger with Omnicom, presumably on the same money. He also stands to trouser about $40m in share awards if and when the deal completes – which is a pretty good return for a performance at IPG that can hardly be called dazzling. He has, though, negotiated a pretty good deal for IPG shareholders (including him.)
Havas’ Yannick Bolloré is on $10.79m (the Bollorés are independently wealthy anyway thanks to father Vincent’s energetic and sometimes controversial deal-making) while WPP’s Mark Read (leaving at the end of the year) is on $8.64m. Stagwell’s Mark Penn gets $7.26m while S4 Capital’s Sir Martin Sorrell brings up the rear (not a position he’s used to in such tables – one year at WPP he earned £48m) on $622,000. This is a relatively modest eight times the average at S4. Omnicom’s Wren, by contrast, earns about 500 times the average there.
No info on what Accenture Song’s David Droga earns (he’s stepping sideways imminently) although it’s an £18bn company and he’s sold Droga5 twice, first partly to WME then wholly to Accenture.
US CEOs do get paid a lot and investors would say they’re worth it if, like Wren, they deliver a solid performance over decades. Does Sadoun at Publicis fret over his relatively modest earnings? He’d get a lot more if he jumped ship to take over from Read at WPP but that doesn’t seem very likely.
The charismatic Arthur is more likely to go into politics at some stage (his wife is a French TV journalist), health permitting. He had cancer treatment a couple of years ago. He’d just better be careful that those parts of the Publicis empire into AI-driven personalisation, with all the attendant privacy issues, don’t come back to haunt him.
