VML’s Jon Cook Exits After Decades of Corporate Alchemy—Now, Eric Campbell Gets the Hot Potato
The era of Jon Cook at VML is officially cooked. After thirty years of climbing every rung in the agency’s corporate ladder, Cook just stepped down from his role as creative boss for both VML and WPP. The timing—Saturday morning, with autumn’s election-cycle anxiety humming in every Manhattan coffee shop—couldn’t be more textbook. Agencies love to dump leadership shakeups when everyone’s distracted by weekend plans or doomscrolling the polls.
Let’s not pretend this is just another polite baton pass. Cook was WPP’s golden retriever for transformation spin, shepherding the company through endless reorgs, mergers, and the kind of bland “creative leadership” that makes agency PowerPoints multiply like rabbits. If you ever sat through a VML pitch in the last decade, you heard the same jargon: digital-first, brand purpose, transformation at scale. Rinse, repeat, bill the client.
Now Eric Campbell gets the keys to the kingdom. Here’s what nobody in the LinkedIn echo chamber will say: Campbell’s real job isn’t vision or creativity—it’s keeping the Frankenstein monster alive. WPP, swollen from a decade of forced marriages and desperate pivots, is less a creative powerhouse and more a patchwork of legacy decks duct-taped to last year’s AI press release. The talent flight to indie shops and in-house teams is real. If Campbell wants to do more than keep the lights on, he’ll have to cut through layers of mid-manager deadwood and kill off the “transformation” theater.
This is the moment for VML to admit the emperor has no clothes. The market doesn’t need another agency selling “storytelling ecosystems.” It needs someone who’ll call bullshit on the bloated retainers and actually ship work that lands. If Campbell’s first memo uses the word ‘synergy,’ you’ll know nothing changed.
My uncomfortable advice: VML, take your medicine. Fire half your PowerPoint jockeys. Build a pod that ships real campaigns in eight weeks, not eight months. And for the love of God, stop letting consultants write your creative strategy.
