Jens Monsees’ most excellent Australian adventure

Chris Pash
By Chris Pash | 21 May 2021
 
Jens Monsees

Jens Monsees came to Australia from Germany to run WPP AUNZ, stayed less than two years, got paid well and started restructuring the local advertising business.

He set about simplifying what was then the majority-owned Australian ASX-listed arm of the world's biggest advertising company.

The changes were significant and aligned in some ways with the way Google, where he once worked, and BMW, where Monsees was global lead for digital transformation, structured along functional lines.

Monsees, when he arrived in Australia, found that each brand, or operating company, liked to do things their own way and had dedicated support functions including HR, finance, IT, marketing and legal.

Then he attended a client event by one agency about data and digital-driven content. And the next day another WPP brand was at the same location in Sydney with a 20% to 30% overlap of the same clients talking about the same thing.

Monsees told himself: “I think we can do this better.”

He set about creating a horizontal layer, a community of functions. Finance, HR, communications and marketing, IT and legal will work across all the different businesses.

“So it means, for example, an HR manager who was sitting in one brand with a solid reporting line to the CEO of that brand now has a dotted line to the CEO of the brand and a solid line to the head of HR in our region,” he told AdNews in February 2020.

“Same for finance, same for IT. So we are actually changing the whole leadership structure and having a modern matrix approach. I think it makes a lot more sense."

Winston Churchill, the leader of Britain during WWII, once said: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” 

Monsees used the quote when presenting to his first local AGM last year, a virtual event due to social distancing rules of the pandemic. 

He used the disruption from measures to combat COVID-19 to accelerate his change program at WPP AUNZ. He first outlined his three-year strategy in February last year, five months into the role as chief executive and before the pandemic took hold.

Part of that plan was to align with the way Google, where Monsees once worked, operates with remote teams. 

Pay
Now that WPP AUNZ has been removed from the ASX, as the UK-based global holding company took 100% control, we can’t be sure of Monsees final pay. 

We do know that he has done well from his shares in the local company. 

In May last year he went on market to buy 420,000 shares, paying an average 23.5 cents each for a total cost of $98,700, taking his direct interest in WPP AUNZ to 600,000 shares. If he still had those 600,000 shares, he would have got $420,000 for the parcel in the WPP plc takeover. A handy return. 

He was due to get a special allocation of $1.5 million in share rights, spread over the two and a half years from his appointment in October 2019, as compensation for lost opportunity at his previous employer, BMW Group.

And then he was paid an annual base of $1.5 million. But the overall deal could have delivered 150% of that ($2.25 million) in short term incentives, for a total of $3.75 million a year.

And then the long term incentives could add another $1.5 million. This was subject to performance conditions.

He could be walking about with $5.25 million for the past year and whatever he could have negotiated as a bit extra to walk away.

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