When Patricia Ithau joined WPP-Scangroup in March 2022, she saw an opportunity to help organisations save face. Two years later, she is presiding over a communications conglomerate that is itself in dire need of a facelift.
WPP-Scangroup is confronted with what some critics would call a ‘PR [public relations] nightmare,’ and Ms Ithau, the CEO of the Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed firm, whose primary role is to offer PR services, probably can’t sleep a wink as a result.
It emerged that Ogilvy Africa, one of WPP-Scangroup’s subsidiaries, parted ways with Airtel Africa after 15 years of acting as the marketing and advertising agency of the telecom’s operator across the continent, after a group of its former employees orchestrated one of the most daring corporate coups, dealing a fatal blow to the once-giant public relations juggernaut.
Airtel Africa is said to have accounted for nearly a fifth of WPP-Scangroup’s annual sales that stood at Sh2.4 billion last year, a size that required the WPP-Scangroup to publish the notice under regulatory material information rules.
Indeed, Ogilvy Africa’s fortunes have been on a free fall. Its market share has shriveled from its peak as the dominant marketing agency in the region, as splinter outfits conceived by its former employees tear through its pie through price undercutting.
It is in this environment of uncertainty that Ms Ithau finds herself, having held senior leadership positions at Unilever East Africa and East African Breweries.
She was also the founding CEO of L'Oréal East Africa, a subsidiary of the French-based L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetic firm. She replaced Bharat Thakrar, Scanad's founder, who resigned amid allegations of misconduct.
Ms Ithau would be right to fear that the exit of Airtel might have a domino effect, with more employees jumping ship and dragging more clients with them, or clients themselves just joining the frenetic exodus on their own volition.
Ms Ithau would certainly not like to cap his 30-year career by presiding over a dying business.
At 59, she is just at the tail-end of her career. Joining WPP-Scangroup was “her last stretch to make a difference,” she said in a past interview.
“I’ve got this new opportunity (Scangroup). I’ve got a very clear vision that if I don’t double this business in the next four or five years, I would have failed. So it’s fundamental for me to figure out how to do that,” she said in a past interview, soon after she was appointed the CEO of Scangroup.
Yet, she finds herself holed in a crumbling advertising fortress. Her 30-year career is at risk of not having a happy ending.
Ms Ithau is not the kind that Nairobians despise as ‘Waku come’ (those who came to the city from rural Kenya). She grew up in Nairobi’s suburbs of Lang’ata and Loresho, with a disciplinarian mother who would force them to always wake up before the sun to do some cleaning, even though she was not a morning person. It is this discipline that she has sought to imbue into her two daughters.
A workaholic who doesn’t subscribe to the work-life dichotomy, the former Ms Kenya is, however, approachable, easy, and fun to be around, she said in a previous interview. She loves cooking, entertaining and travelling.
There is very little doubt that she is a woman of means, having been in the C-suite for more than 20 years. She was among the first board members of Capital Club East Africa, an exclusive member only club, when it opened in Kenya in 2012.
Two years earlier, she was among the senior executives who parted with over Sh120,000 to correct her visual problems using the then new laser technology known as Epi-Lasik.
But it is this touch of amiability that she reckons is her most lethal weapon in her arsenal as she confronts one of her biggest challenges. She is determined to arrest Scangroup’s free-fall, which will only be exacerbated by disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence.
She puts the challenge of taking up this job, with all the attendant risks, at par with her 15-year elusive desire of taking up exercise to shed some 10 kilos, she said in a past interview.
“Everybody prays for things to go the way they want. Life throws you curveballs and you ask yourself, ‘Am I going to be able to get through them?’
If she has been able to perfectly hit all the curveballs that have been thrown her way, the latest will test her batting skills. As the occupant of WPP-Scangroup’s corner office, she will find herself taking all the credit and blame for the performance of the company. The company slid into a net loss of Sh506.7 million in the year ended December 2024, reversing a profit after tax of Sh130.1 million recorded a year earlier, on the impact of lower revenue and foreign exchange loss.
It booked a foreign exchange loss of Sh248.7 million in the period under review, compared to a gain of Sh288.4 million the year before, while its revenue fell to Sh2.4 billion from Sh3.1 billion, partly due to its from several markets and the loss of two key clients.
“Two very big clients reduced their business from creative point of view with us. They retained media, PR and influence, but they dropped the creative and that also had quite an impact on our topline,” she said last month during the launch of WPP-Scangroup’s financial results.
But the client hemorrhage would extend to 2025, with the Airtel business snapped up by a rival French multinational agency Publicis Group Africa through its local affiliate The Partnership Africa.
The Partnership Africa was founded in 2023 by three former Scangroup executives. Its chief executive officer, Sandeep Madan, headed WPP-Scangroup’s wholly owned subsidiaries Scanad & J. Walter Thompson East Africa, between 2012 and 2023, having previously been the CEO OF Ogilvy Africa for a year and a half.
The company’s chief operations officer, Sally Sawe, served as managing director at Scanad and JW Thompson between 2015 and 2023, while its chief creative officer held a similar role at Scanad between 2018 and 2023, having previously served as creative head at both Scanad and JW Thompson.
WPP Scanad, and its parent WPP Group, is still grappling with a case filed by its former CEO Bharat Thakar, who is demanding $50 million (Sh6.4 billion) for irregular removal.
Asked about the possibilities of losing more clients when she was announced the CEO, even as the shadow of Bharat loomed large, Ms Ithau sounded just like his predecessor when faced with a similar breakaway in 2016.
“There is space for all of us,” she said.
But is there space for everyone, or is it a zero-sum fight that will push WPP-Scanad into oblivion?
