Darren Minshall Joins WPP Media as Chief People Officer
WPP Media has handed its people agenda to someone who thinks the technology is the easy part. The media collective, the business formerly known as GroupM, has named Darren Minshall as its CPO, putting him in charge of workforce transformation for one of the largest media operations on earth as it rebuilds around AI.
"AI isn't the hard part. Leading people through it is," Darren wrote in a recent LinkedIn post, a line that doubles as his job description.
WPP Media manages more than US$60bn in media for three quarters of the world's leading advertisers across 80 markets. Its rebrand from GroupM last year was an open bet on AI, wiring the division into WPP Open, the group's AI marketing system.
By WPP's own estimate, that shift touches 40% to 45% of a 40,000-strong workforce. It is one of the biggest workforce-transformation jobs in global media.
People first, technology second
Darren's public thinking leaves little doubt where he stands. He is wary of the reflex to cut, pointing to a business that moved too fast to swap customer support for AI, "only to reverse the decision when customer experience dropped".
"AI should improve work, not blindly replace it," Darren says.
"If you actually understand what people do day to day, you can automate tasks and redeploy capability," he writes. "That's a very different (and smarter) conversation than reduction."
He is just as clear on where transformation really lands, and it is not the boardroom. "It's not the C-suite or the tech that makes it work," he writes. "It's the layer below. VPs, Directors, Heads of. If they're aligned, it lands. If they're not, it doesn't."
A career built on turnarounds
Darren brings more than 25 years in people leadership, most of it spent turning organisations around. He founded the advisory firm GrowthScope, guiding private-equity and venture-backed companies through growth, mergers and restructuring.
Most recently he was interim global people lead at music-tech firm Native Instruments, steering it through a change of ownership under Francisco Partners. Before that he was Global CPO at Berlin Brands Group, one of Europe's fastest-growing e-commerce businesses.
His record runs deep in media too, with senior roles at Havas UK, Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann Worldgroup and Amazon's Sizmek. His own framework for the work is three words he keeps returning to: direction, discipline and delivery.
Why it matters for WPP Media
Media and advertising sit among the jobs most exposed to generative AI, with everything from media planning to creative production now partly automatable.
Darren's brief runs across talent, leadership capability, culture and workforce innovation across the group's international operations.
His new boss frames the challenge in strikingly similar terms. Brian Lesser, WPP Media's CEO, argues that "the hardest part of marketing transformation is not adopting new technology, but believing in what it can unlock".
A people chief who calls AI the easy part is singing from the same sheet as the man who hired him.
In plain terms, that means deciding how tens of thousands of media professionals end up working alongside the machines rather than against them.
For all the technology, Darren's message to WPP Media's people is a human one. Trust, he argues, is the currency an AI transformation spends fastest.
"AI creates uncertainty. Leadership needs to provide clarity, not just tools," he writes.
