Disclosure: a long time ago I worked for a forerunner of Burson and WPP’s dedicated agency for Colgate; Red Fuse. During that time I was based out of Hong Kong.
Later on, I won the Huawei consumer devices AOR business from my old colleagues in Hong Kong.
I know Burson’s current CEO Corey duBrowa from even further back in my agency life, we share a love of the Wu Tang clan.
What’s news?
Ok, now that’s out of the way, let’s get into what you’re really here to read. The Times ‘news‘ that Burson is a possible candidate for sale isn’t really news. It had been eluded to previously in coverage. Coming in as a new CEO to WPP, it was inevitable would take an all-up strategic review.
Executives in the group have also discussed potential disposals as part of the new strategy, with some suggesting that Burson, its PR agency, would be the easiest to consider for sale given it sits separately from the three other divisions. – WPP to overhaul creative agency structure in strategic rethink | Financial Times (February 9, 2026)
The real news was that WPP appointed Goldman Sachs to do the work and that Burson reported a 6% decline in revenue in 2025.
The shape of the new WPP has been becoming clear for a number of months.
- WPP Production was basically the same direction of travel as Hogarth with a new brand. Hogarth was a new brand in itself, and didn’t have the depth of brand equity that Young & Rubican (Y&R Brands) or J Walter Thompson (JWT) had.
- WPP Open – AI stuff. Some of which is ‘self-service’ to tap into smaller clients and some of which seems to sit in WPP Production.
- WPP Media – which seems to be a rebrand of GroupM, like WPP Production it makes complete sense.
- WPP Creative – puts the creative brands under one line item where it used to be under Y&R Brands, JWT, Ogilvy etc. The past structure was as much down to WPP’s history of acquisition as it was to strategy. Much of this work had been done under Mark Read, this seemed to be as much about cleaning up the accounting processes as anything else. PR agencies would nominally fit underneath.
Why would WPP sell Burson?
A successful sale of Burson would provide WPP with funds to use elsewhere. This could fulfil two purposes; reducing debt or reinvesting in WPP’s business and technology transformation. Burson is a business that could be packaged up, sold to the right buyer or floated in a public offering.
The downsides would be a loss of integrated pitch power, and a smaller global footprint for back-office resources.
Obviously a few questions come up about who would be a buyer and would WPP want to spend the time listing Burson as a separate business?
It also makes strategic sense
When I worked at WPP, the PR agencies outside of Ogilvy weren’t integrated very tightly to their creative agency counterparts. You had a similar distance between the likes of Golin and McCann Erickson at IPG too. So the loss of integrated pitch power less than it would at first appear.
PR is an umbrella term for two broad functions, marketing communications and management functions. Management functions would include:
- Internal communications including around change management.
- Legal and compliance, for instance around financial communications for a public company.
- Stakeholder engagement including the investor community, local communities and government.
That isn’t an exhaustive list but it covers the major areas. There is more synergy between these areas and management consultancies than there are with WPP’s offerings. WPP has already sold FGS last year. FGS is a financial communications specialist.
The ‘management functions’ is more of a boutique offering and can come with risks as Bell Pottinger found out to their cost.
It’s arguably even more risky in a volatile political environment that yo-yos between different forms of political populism.
The other side of PR: marketing communications is earned media. That side of PR has been shaken up by several factors:
- Decline in the mainstream media.
- Search, generative AI and social algorithms as tastemakers.
- The creator economy.
- Brand media: led by the technology industry who published their news directly via blog posts.
In the past creative agencies thought about talkability, which was earned impact from advertising creative. Now creative agencies think about campaigns even more in terms of earned impact, including earned first approaches and WPP agency Ogilvy has managed to integrate its PR function into this process.
Specialist agencies tap into the creator economy and it’s been well documented by senior leaders in PR like Stephen Waddington how the PR industry missed the SEO opportunity.
PR agencies have looked to redefine themselves. The world’s largest PR firm, Edelman calls themselves a ‘global communications firm’ to help it position itself against management consultancies and advertising agencies.
The question WPP would have been asking themselves would have been: do they really need Burson when a lot of its function is now being done by media and creative agencies?
What does Burson gain or lose from leaving WPP, one way or the other?
Burson and its previous constituent agencies have been part of a conglomerate for the past quarter of a century that wasn’t focused on their business. WPP’s former CEO Sir Martin Sorrell used to talk about WPP primarily being a ‘media investment’ business for its clients. Helping them make the most effective, efficient investments in advertising for its clients.
Burson could be allowed to chart its own course, with less constraints put upon the business.
Burson would lose access to shared services over time, having to reorganise:
- IT support
- Offices
- Time-tracking
- Finance
- Employee and at least some client contracts
- New business prospecting
- Client contracts where the work is shared with WPP agencies
Over time Burson could rebuild partnerships and capabilities that it would have previously had through WPP.
There is a bigger question about whether the natural consequence of the structural bifurcation of modern PR into ‘management’ and ‘marketing communications’ specialists leaves room for a large full service generalist agency like Burson.
The industry itself is splitting rapidly between highly specialised management consultancy style operations handling the C-suite, and earned-first creative shops driving marketing communications. The traditional, full-service generalist model that Burson and its ancestors helped invent is finding it harder to operate in the middle ground. For example, Edelman, the PR industry’s bellwether fell below the $1 billion fee income mark in 2024, a 5% global decline.
If the world’s largest PR firm is struggling to make the integrated generalist model work, it may be that the model itself might be broken?
Who may want to buy Burson?
Private equity (including supporting a management team buyout)
I think that Burson would be a tough sell for an informed private equity (PE) firm. PE firms tend to look for business with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over 10%.
Here are some estimates that are why I came to this conclusion and I may be wrong.
Global Industry CAGR (2024–2030) is projected at 6.1% to 6.4%, although some aggressively optimistic estimates suggest up to 10.5%. That is based around assumptions on digital transformation and AI-driven services being fully integrated.
Looking at historic data from PRovoke Media’s global top 250 PR firms (2015 – 2023), CAGR was typically between 3.5% and 5%. These numbers maybe a bit optimistic due to currency fluctuations. (During CoVID, 2020 was flat and there was a sharp rebound in 2021.)
Burson’s constituent agencies BCW and H+K were running somewhere around 3.5 – 4% CAGR.
The outliers are AxiCom and ASDA’A who are Burson’s tech specialist brand and its Middle East agency presence – both operating in high growth sectors. They had CAGR somewhere between 12 – 14%.
This is the reason why PE has focused on specialists in the healthcare area or financial communications like FGS Global where the growth rate and margins are higher than normal.
Given the length of time that Burson has been within WPP, the consolidation that the business has been through merging:
- Burson-Marsteller
- Cohn & Wolfe
- Hill and Knowlton (H+K)
- JeffreyGroup
WPP likely trimmed out any organisational ‘fat’ which leaves little if any efficiency gains to be made by an acquiring PE firm.
When these firms were all separate it’s not like WPP were generous at the best of times. I heard allegations of bonuses either cancelled , or like pay rises constantly pushed out as aggressive cash management and cost reduction with junior and mid-level staff taking the brunt of this process.
Another PR agency network
Another PR agency network purchasing Burson may gain some operational efficiencies by de-duplicating the back office business processes from finance to HR departments.
But given that Burson is the world’s number two agency by fee income according to Provoke Media and PR Week; it is unlikely to be acquired by another PR network.
If the current number one Edelman bought them, they would run into antitrust issues and this would put them on the radar of the Trump administration in the US. Given the progressive leaning content of their Trust Barometer research, Edelman may end up creating its own business crisis.
Omnicom are likely too wrapped up in consolidating their purchase of Interpublic to attempt it. Even if they did make an offer, WPP may not be inclined to sell to a direct rival.
Publicis and Havas both have their focus on larger growth opportunities elsewhere and PR are much smaller parts of their business.
Most of the rest of the largest global agencies in the PR industry are either industry specialists like Real Chemistry and Invizio Evoke (health), FGS Global, APCO and Brunswick (financial communications) or national champions like Germany’s mc Group.
Conducting a leveraged buyout (LBO)of Burson would be unattractive due to the cost of debt servicing versus Burson’s CAGR. So this would make financing for a management buyout (MBO) challenging too.
Spin out or spin-in
From a PR agency perspective Burson has a good quality management team at the top. Someone like Corey duBrowa, who has previously worked at major corporates like Google and Starbucks. If the business was spun off or floated like Next15 Group, it could make sense on the London Stock Exchange.
Retail investors would be likely to give the best return for WPP. However, an IPO would take a major effort and a good deal of time to make happen that doesn’t feel like the kind of cadence that the WPP Elevate28 plan / platform wants to move at.
A spin-in might make some sense. Merge Burson with a publicly listed company (for instance Next15 or Stagwell) and then WPP sell down their shares over time. WPP maybe able to securitise its shares in such a way that it gets its (diminished) return upfront and a financial partner gradually sells down the shares with a view to making a profit on the money it paid WPP versus the price it gets on the stock market.
Clients get a vote too
Clients get a vote too. If the future of Burson affects client team morale, capacity or make-up they are likely to head for the door. The agency intellectual capital is their practitioners.
We saw a client exodus happen during the protracted acquisition of IPG by Omnicom with 3.5 percent drops in year-on-year revenue and peaked as high as 10% on a quarterly basis in markets like Australia.
Maintaining the client base will require a swift disposal process that doesn’t have Burson people keeping one eye on LinkedIn and the jobs section of PR Week or Ragan PR Daily.
Omnicom is desperate to rejuvenate its business and stealing unhappy Burson clients would be an easy win. Publicis is a high-performing group of agencies already and boutique shops live for ‘giant-killing’ new business pitches. Havas had a healthy PR business that would provide an alternative for any unhappy Burson clients.
The Human Cost of Structural Change
The current speculation surrounding Burson reflects a broader structural shift across the industry. For the professionals within the agency, many of whom have spent years managing complex briefs for major clients, this period of uncertainty will be unsettling.
Burson’s current position is not a reflection on the capability of its staff. It is the logical outcome of the continuing bifurcation of modern PR.
The sector is dividing between specialist management consultancies advising the C-suite and agile creative shops leading marketing communications.
The traditional generalist model, is finding the middle ground smaller and tougher than it used to be.
WPP’s wider strategy is now firmly anchored in technology and integrated creative solutions.
Operating independently or with private equity backing, Burson would have the operational freedom to determine its exact shape in this new market. Stepping away from a holding company structure is sometimes the clearest route to finding the necessary focus. The talent remain in place; the immediate requirement is a business model aligned with current market realities.