By EPR Editorial Team
Edited on Jun 28, 2026.
On April 13, 2026, WPP confirmed it had hired Goldman Sachs to explore strategic options for Burson — the merged communications agency formed in 2024 from Hill & Knowlton and BCW. The sale process, if completed, would mark the near-total exit of the world's second-largest advertising holding company from the public relations business — leaving only Ogilvy PR inside WPP's portfolio. The unwinding follows the late-2024 divestment of FGS Global to KKR at a $1.7 billion enterprise value. Two of the most recognized names in twentieth-century PR — Burson-Marsteller and Hill & Knowlton — are now consolidated inside a single entity that may not be inside WPP a year from now.
Below — the full arc of WPP's PR empire: how it was built, how it was consolidated, and how it is now being dismantled.
The Roster That WPP Built
For most of the last forty years, WPP — founded by Sir Martin Sorrell in 1985 — accumulated the largest PR roster in the world. The acquisitions were sequential and aggressive:
- Hill & Knowlton (founded 1927 in Cleveland) — acquired by JWT Group in the 1980s, then absorbed into WPP via the 1987 JWT acquisition.
- Burson-Marsteller (founded 1953 by Harold Burson) — acquired by Young & Rubicam Group, which WPP then acquired in 2000.
- Cohn & Wolfe (founded 1970) — acquired via Y&R; later merged with Burson-Marsteller in 2018 to form BCW (Burson Cohn & Wolfe).
- Ogilvy Public Relations — embedded within the Ogilvy Group acquired by WPP in 1989.
- FGS Global — formed in 2021 by WPP's consolidation of Finsbury, Glover Park Group, and Hering Schuppener, with Sard Verbinnen added shortly after.
By the early 2020s, WPP controlled four of the top fifteen global PR firms by revenue. The roster generated billions in fees, served thousands of clients, and represented an institutional concentration of communications expertise that no rival could match.
The 2024 Consolidation — Burson Is Born
In January 2024, WPP announced that Hill & Knowlton and BCW would merge into a single agency under the new name Burson — named after PR pioneer Harold Burson. The merger went operational July 1, 2024.
- Corey duBrowa, the former Alphabet/Google communications chief who had joined BCW as global CEO in 2023, was named global CEO of Burson.
- AnnaMaria DeSalva, Hill & Knowlton's global chairman and CEO since 2019, became global chairman of the new entity.
- The combined firm: more than 6,000 employees across 43 markets.
- Hill & Knowlton was retained as a distinct brand within Burson for select global clients — primarily where conflicts inside the merged agency required separation.
The merger was positioned as a competitive consolidation move — combining two top-ten global agencies into a single top-two global communications operation. The strategic logic was scale: a merged Burson could compete more aggressively against Edelman, the world's largest independent PR firm, and against the consolidated networks at Omnicom and IPG.
The First Major Unwind — FGS Global Sold to KKR
In late 2024, WPP sold its majority stake in FGS Global to private equity firm KKR. The deal valued FGS at $1.7 billion enterprise value. WPP received approximately $764 million in cash after tax — proceeds used to reduce holding-company debt.
Then-CEO Mark Read framed the sale as strategic focus: FGS Global was a specialized corporate and financial communications operation that did not fit neatly within WPP's "core" PR offer — defined as corporate and consumer PR via Burson and Ogilvy. Read argued WPP was simplifying the portfolio to concentrate on its strongest assets.
The market read it differently. Sell-side analysts began questioning whether WPP would continue to retain PR as a core line of business at all — or whether FGS Global was the first move in a broader exit from the category.
The Leadership Change — Cindy Rose Takes Over
In September 2025, Mark Read stepped down as WPP CEO after seven years in the role. He was succeeded by Cindy Rose, who took over the holding company at a moment of significant strategic pressure.
Rose inherited a company facing:
- Holding-company debt of approximately £3.4 billion at year-end 2025.
- A share price that had fallen from a 12-month high of 608p in May 2025 to roughly 251p by mid-April 2026 — a decline of more than 50%.
- PR segment revenue of £667 million in 2025, down 6% on a like-for-like basis, generating £102 million in headline operating profit.
- A multi-year strategic plan, "Elevate28," that emphasized portfolio simplification, cost reduction, and a return to organic growth.
As part of Elevate28, Rose placed Burson inside a new WPP Creative umbrella alongside VML, Ogilvy, AKQA, Landor, and Design Bridge and Partners — a structural shift that combined creative agencies with the largest remaining PR operation. The signal to the market was clear: PR was no longer being treated as a stand-alone category at WPP.
April 2026 — The Burson Sale Process Begins
On April 13, 2026, multiple trade publications confirmed that WPP had retained Goldman Sachs to advise on strategic options for Burson — including a potential sale. Both WPP and Goldman Sachs declined formal comment.
The sale process, if successful, would mark the most significant unwind of a PR portfolio by a major advertising holding company in the modern history of the industry. It would also represent the first major divestment engineered by Rose — and a clear signal that WPP's exposure to traditional PR is being structurally reduced.
Analyst commentary has flagged the practical challenges. Burson is large — 6,000 people across 43 markets — and legacy global PR firms have not commanded premium acquisition multiples in the current market. KKR's appetite for FGS Global was driven in part by the firm's specialized corporate and financial focus; whether private equity or strategic buyers will pay comparable multiples for a generalist communications agency is an open question.
What's Left Inside WPP
If Burson is sold, WPP's PR operations will be reduced to Ogilvy PR — the PR practice embedded within the broader Ogilvy creative agency, which sits alongside advertising, design, and brand consulting. Ogilvy PR is a meaningful operation in its own right, but it represents a fraction of what WPP controlled at the peak of its PR roster.
The end state, if the sale completes, is a WPP that has essentially exited the PR holding-company business — retaining PR only as an embedded service within its broader creative and advertising practices.
What This Means for the Industry
Three structural implications worth understanding:
1. The PR holding-company model is being tested. The thesis that a single holding company should own multiple competing PR brands — once the dominant industry model — is being unwound at WPP, has already been partially restructured at Omnicom following its November 2025 acquisition of IPG, and is under quiet pressure across the rest of the holding-company sector. The independent firms — Edelman, APCO, MikeWorldWide, Finn Partners, Ruder Finn, and a growing tier of mid-market specialists — are the structural beneficiaries.
2. Institutional brands matter — but only when the institution owns them. The names being consolidated and sold off — Burson-Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Cohn & Wolfe — were built over decades. They carry brand weight inside client decision-making and on the global tombstone league tables. But when those brands sit inside a holding company that is itself under pressure, the institutional value of the underlying brand becomes a liability rather than an asset.
3. The cost-base math is reshaping the holding-company sector. Traditional PR fees are under pressure from procurement-led pricing discipline, in-house consolidation at major brands, and the broader shift in marketing-services billing from time-and-materials to outcome-based pricing. Holding companies built around legacy fee structures are facing margin compression that their cost bases cannot easily absorb. The firms that have already restructured around the new commercial model are taking share.
The Lesson
WPP's PR empire was built across forty years through aggressive acquisition. It is being unwound across approximately twenty-four months — driven by debt pressure, leadership transition, structural change in the discipline itself, and the broader question of whether large holding companies are the right home for PR firms in 2026.
The agencies that emerge from this transition with the strongest position will be the ones that built genuine institutional independence — and the ones that adapted their commercial models to the post-procurement, integrated-services era now defining the global PR market.
Burson — PR Agency Profile · Ogilvy PR — Profile · FGS Global — Profile · PR Firms Directory
