I'll be honest, seeing John Wren's compensation package makes my blood boil. Nearly $70 million last year for one exec - up 222% from the previous year - whilst the other six CEOs of the top holding companies combined made just £36m or thereabouts. And meanwhile, I'm out here explaining to clients why warmup sequences matter and that buying a cheap list will destroy their domain reputation within days.
There's a massive disconnect between the c-suite and the people actually running campaigns. Publicis at least reinvests into the business, but Omnicom ties CEO pay to stock performance. That's a recipe for short-term thinking. Someone in the thread said AI could do his job, and honestly, half of what those execs do could be automated. But they won't automate it because the system rewards stock price, not actual delivery rates or campaign performance.
Don't get me started on the bonus structures at these holdcos. When I see a client's CEO getting a fat pay hike while telling our team to cut costs on ESP tools, it's hard to stay professional. And people wonder why deliverability specialists burn out.
