GroupM U.S. Chief Investment Officer Matt Sweeney to Exit
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Longtime GroupM executive Matt Sweeney has stepped down from his role, ADWEEK has learned.
Sweeney has been with GroupM since 2014, when he joined the company as senior vice president of client engagement at programmatic trading desk Xaxis. Over his decadelong tenure with the group, he succeeded to CEO of Xaxis and then to chief investment officer in the U.S.
A GroupM spokesperson confirmed his departure.
The executive steps down from the role three months after Brian Lesser took over from Christian Juhl as global CEO of GroupM.
Sweeney’s exit comes as Lesser looks to quickly transform GroupM’s business to be simpler, more collaborative, and more technologically forward.
“The vision is to continue investing in those components, including data, technology, and AI, such that we can drive our clients’ business forward,” he told ADWEEK during an interview at CES in Las Vegas earlier this month.
The news also comes as GroupM has lost major pieces of business in North America in the past two years, including Shell, Kimberly-Clark, General Mills, and Uber. According to COMvergence, GroupM’s client losses in 2024 totaled $3.54 billion in client billings.
On recent earnings calls, WPP CEO Mark Read has pointed to GroupM’s complexity as a challenge in managing clients and attracting new business. The business merged agencies Essence and MediaCom in 2022 to create EssenceMediacom, an agency with 10,000 employees.
“The simplification of GroupM that we started last year is very much a step in the right direction,” Read said on WPP’s Q3 2024 earnings call. “So, it’s very much about the continuation of that process, and I think it’s focused on talent, technology, data, and the product.”
More recently, GroupM won Johnson & Johnson’s U.S. and Canada media accounts and retained the Unilever business in the region.
Prior to his time at GroupM, Sweeney held executive roles at ad tech firms, including Crisp Media and Pixalate. He spent the earlier part of his career on the publisher side.
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