Longtime GroupM executive Matt Sweeney has resigned from his position, 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. During his decade with the group, he took over as CEO of Xaxis and then as US chief investment officer.
A GroupM spokesperson confirmed his departure.
The executive is stepping down three months after Brian Lesser took over from Christian Juhl as GroupM’s global CEO.
Sweeney’s departure comes as Lesser seeks to rapidly transform GroupM’s business to make it simpler, more collaborative and more technologically advanced.
“The vision is to continue to invest in these components, including data, technology and AI, so that we can advance our customers’ businesses,” he told ADWEEK in an interview at CES in Las Vegas earlier this month.
The news also comes as GroupM has lost significant market share in North America over the past two years, including Shell, Kimberly-Clark, General Mills and Uber. According to COMvergence, GroupM’s customer losses in 2024 totaled $3.54 billion in customer billings.
On recent earnings callsMark Read, CEO of WPP, highlighted GroupM’s complexity as a challenge in managing clients and attracting new business. The company merged the Essence and MediaCom agencies in 2022 to create EssenceMediacom, a agency with 10,000 employees.
“The simplification of GroupM that we began last year is a step in the right direction,” Read said during WPP’s third-quarter 2024 earnings call. “So it’s basically a continuation of that process, and I think it’s talent-driven, tech-driven, data-driven and product-driven.”
Most recently, GroupM won Johnson & Johnson’s media accounts in the United States and Canada and retained Unilever’s operations in the region.
Prior to joining GroupM, Sweeney held leadership roles at ad tech companies including Crisp Media and Pixalate. He spent the first part of his career on the publishing side.
