PATRICIA ITHAU, CEO, WPP-SCANGROUP PLC: THE FUTURE IS NOT TOMORROW; IT IS HERE. AS A BUSINESS, WPP-SCANGROUP IS PUTTING IN PLACE THE BUILDING BLOCKS THAT WILL ALLOW IT TO BE FUTURE-READY TODAY.

When WPP-Scangroup, Sub Sahara Africa’s leading marketing and communication group, was looking for a successor to founder and long-serving CEO Bharat Thakrar, no other candidate suited the job as perfectly as Patricia Ithau. A seasoned business and marketing executive, Patricia boasted over 30 years of experience in senior leadership roles, overseeing the expansion of leading consumer brands in Eastern Africa at companies including Unilever, Diageo/East African Breweries Ltd, and L’Oréal and then supporting the scaling of small and medium enterprises across Africa at Stanford Seed. 

An additional icing to an impressive CV was that she served on the board of WPP-Scangroup as a non-executive director from 2017 to 2020. As such, WPP-Scangroup was familiar to her, as she had an opportunity in her non-executive role to grasp the inner workings of the Nairobi, Kenya-based firm. She was the right woman for the job in all senses of the word. The role of CEO has a lot of figuring out to do.

“I’ve started to reshape what I do because the official title is CEO. What is a Chief Executive Officer? What is that? What is the role of this officer in the game-changing? What is a chief? In unpacking what it means, one of the things that I am starting to like the sound of is that I’m a catalyst or conductor. If you have ever watched an orchestra, you see incredibly disparate instruments played by talented musicians. So why is there a need for a conductor? Yet without a great conductor, the beauty of the coming together of the music played by each of those instruments, each of those musicians will never come out.” says Patricia, who has been CEO since March 2022. Although new to the role, Patricia is enjoying every bit of it.

“Here I am doing what I enjoy, and that is understanding consumer insights and communication, driving great visionary ideas in terms of how we drive a message, how to support messaging to consumers and customers, how we package our services more compellingly, and doing all that in a commercial organization with accountability to external stakeholders.”

WPP-Scangroup maintains its leadership position in the market by offering clients a full range of marketing media and communication services with outstanding creativity, deep insights, and creative technology. Its various subsidiaries, including Ogilvy Africa, Scanad & Squad, GroupM, and H+K Strategies, offer clients tailored solutions to ensure their needs, be they brand stewardship, media and communications, customer engagement, or PR and influence, are satisfied to the utmost. 

These capabilities make Patricia proud of the company she now leads. “Being a leading creative, marketing, media, communication, digital, PR, and Influence company, WPP Scangroup is the only business that can offer any individual person or company or a full suite of all those services across sub-Sahara Africa,” she claims. 

With her in charge of the business, clients can rest assured that WPP will stick to its mission of building better futures for them. She reveals to the CEO of Business Africa Magazine that the worst thing anybody can say to her is ‘You let me down’ or ‘You are unreliable.’ “I must make sure I keep my word. I must make sure that I’m somebody people trust.” If challenges arise, which they often do, Patricia’s only strategy is to figure out how to get around them or make them an opportunity. “Whatever challenges I face, I say: I can get over this. I try to think around the corner to see if something there can be to my advantage. In particular, tenacity has become very important, especially today, because business is tough. We live in a callous environment with headwinds we must face head-on.” 

Patricia takes charge of WPP-Scangroup when the world of marketing and communication is transitioning to the digital space. Recent Research by one of WPP’s Media agencies revealed a big trend, namely the Female Takeover. The best time to tell African Stories is now, as there is a gaming explosion, and Ad Blockers are everywhere. 

“For example, data tells us that Podcasting is on the rise, with 71% of urban women listening to podcasts, especially in the 18- to 25-year-old age group. Imagine the power of a podcast and the influence and the thought leadership you could drive with that particular space?” Influencers are also the other biggest thing in the marketing world today, according to Patricia. “They are big because people are increasingly looking for content to keep them entertained, for information, or even to pass the time simply.” 

“Today, YouTube is a huge platform and source of content. As a result, it has become an attractive place to reach potential customers. The ads can, at times, be annoying. Most of us wait for the 4 seconds to be done so that we can hit the skip button.” To succeed on YouTube as an advertiser, “you have to create content with which you deliver your key message in those 4 seconds – a complete shift in the way creative work is done as opposed to the past where you had the luxury of 20 or 30 seconds at least. Moreover, you must keep changing that content as it quickly becomes boring or wallpaper.” 

Against this backdrop in understanding, reaching, and speaking to consumers, Patricia reveals that the group has a new headline mission to be the agency where technology meets creativity for that true transformation to happen. With this in mind, the business is taking big bets in investing in tools and platforms that are more data and technology-driven to support the agenda of delivering maximum return on investment for its client base. Investments in products such as Optimus, a marketing automation tool that drives customer acquisition and supports growth in customer lifetime value at scale, are among the exciting products WPP has recently developed. This platform uses data to contextually target online advertising to drive high volume and quality leads. 

Digital is increasingly becoming a dominant force in media and communication. Low internet penetration rates, however, limit its reach, particularly in rural Africa. “Urban areas have no problem with the internet,” says Patricia. “But most of the population is still in less than urban areas. They are still consumers, and we need to speak to them because they’ll always be clients and customers who want to speak to potential users not living in an urban area.” How does WPP-Scangroup help clients reach these consumers? By leveraging the power and reach of traditional media such as radio, billboards, and TV. 

“The beauty of radio is its omnipresence. People are listening to the radio in the background everywhere you go, and that is again because many stations use social media or other similar platforms to broadcast.” However, she notes that as other digital channels, such as YouTube, with their diverse content, become mainstream, the impact of radio in the format we know will become less and less. “You have to become even more targeted, even more precise with what you do with radio, with some of these areas harnessing the influence of leading presenters to support the driving of messages as opposed to traditional spot radio ads.” 

The power of TV also demonstrated itself during the just concluded election period in Kenya. “You saw all those ads during the election period, before 7 pm and 9 pm news. I was like, oh my goodness, we’re still doing this? So, there’s still space for that.” Almost every billboard in the country was also donned with campaign material, once again demonstrating the power of billboards to reach the masses. Just like in radio, targeting has become very important. “If it’s a billboard, it becomes much more specific regarding where you target.” This necessitates using data and strategy, capabilities whose supply is plenty at WPPScangroup. 

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), whose implementation started in January 2021, promises to break trade barriers between countries and give companies operating in the continent access to a single market for goods and services of almost 1.3 billion people and a combined gross domestic product of around US$3.4 trillion. The World Bank estimates that by 2035, real income gains from the full implementation of the agreement could be 7%, or nearly US$450 billion. In the free trade area, companies will have immense opportunities to grow. 

However, they will need a reliable marketing partner to introduce their brands in areas they have never been before. That is where WPPScangroup comes in. The company’s reach is unparalleled, and it has an established presence in 23 countries across the continent. “When we have big regional players or business people trying to create a regional footprint, we have a structure that understands this is the way Africa is set up, and we have resources to make sure that we can harness and take advantage of that.” Although momentum has picked up, albeit slowly, Patricia can’t wait to have the free trade agreement fully implemented. 

“It’s exciting because I sit in several organizations where people talk about the African free trade agreement. In all the conversations, the one thing that stays at the back of my mind is it is a massive opportunity for us as Africans to harness the power of being one, yet when and how can we accelerate the opportunities it portends? Just think of Open skies alone and the opportunity to create more giant regional carriers.” 

A few months into the job, Patricia has a pet project of bringing all the group’s subsidiaries under one roof. The CEO reveals to us that WPP-Scangroup has about 560 staff members scattered across the different agencies on the continent. With over 300, Kenya has by far the largest number of employees in the group. Patricia sees an opportunity in all these brilliant people operating from one campus. 

“The benefit of one campus is to drive the economies of scale on things like technology but, more importantly, create a vibrant work environment that stimulates creativity and brings out the best in everyone.” The pandemic made working from home a never-before-thought possibility- a reality, and Patricia is keen to see that employees are supported in continuing to work in some form of hybrid setting. “We are working with what we have right now. My vision is to create a space where people are much more comfortable at home. Indeed, an ergonomic office space that is more fun and conducive to both physical and virtual working.” 

In a world where climate change is no longer an abstract subject but a reality faced daily, consumers demand that businesses do more to address the problem. It goes further than demands. Some consumers are choosing to only buy from companies that operate sustainably. Having sustainability goals and communicating them clearly to the public has become a key market survival strategy. 

Existing solely to build dynamic, new, and lasting relationships between clients and their audiences, WPP Scangroup is building capabilities to help clients better pass across their sustainability messages. “When you look at our PR and influence businesses, one of the things I’m looking at is how to enhance resourcing around that agenda, which is no longer a nice to have but a must-have in all businesses with a strong governance framework.”

Technology has a way of disrupting how we communicate and, in the process, revolutionizing how products and services are marketed. Patricia wants her company to be ready for the next disruption that might influence their work in the future. “I will be looking at how we are prepped and ready to have the right resources to create the technology for advertising the future.” 

To be future-ready, the company has worked on FEED 2.0, a real-time social commerce engine that enables marketers to put data at the heart of digital. This engine helps marketers harness data and machine learning to develop a data-aided customer journey, create data-informed content, and customize content at scale using atomization. The Group’s media arm, GroupM, is also now deploying Audience Origin, a unique combination of panel-based data, digital data, and client data for deep audience understanding and activation. 

“This supports more effective media buying and placement for our clients.” Patricia predicts PR and influence are other marketing aspects that will be “a huge thing shortly.” 

Looking at other future opportunities, Ms. Patricia notes sustainability, with the importance of ESG being placed at the heart of organizations, presents lots of prospects for business support. In terms of markets, Ghana presents an irresistible opportunity for Patricia because of its performance despite the economy experiencing a downturn. “I would like to spend a bit more time there actually because it is one of the areas in West Africa with much better ease of doing business.” 

Tanzania is also a market that looks promising to Patricia. It is a new world with a new dispensation, according to the WPP-Scangroup CEO. “If there is a market I’m very convinced we have to figure out how we get a stronger foothold in, it is Tanzania,” she says. “It is much more welcoming and open to business from external markets. Uganda is another one following that, and finally, Zambia, which is slower for us now, but we will figure out how to engage to drive a bigger presence.”

This feature appeared in the December 2022 edition of CEO Business Africa magazine. You can access the full digital magazine HERE.