GroupM to WPP Media: A quick recap of a 22-year era

Less than a year into his role as global CEO at GroupM, the world’s largest media buying company, Brian Lesser has overseen some startling changes.

The first was the removal of agency chief executive roles at EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker, the company’s agencies. This was followed by the announcement that the firm would drop the GroupM name and rebrand as WPP Media.

The aim of this rebranding is to transform GroupM into a single operating model, where its agency brands will house client teams rather than function as separate business units.

Changing a 22-year-old name, under which more than 40,000 people are employed — over a third of parent company WPP’s workforce — is no small decision. According to GroupM’s website, it manages more than 60 billion US dollars in annual media budgets. Its major clients include Coca-Cola, Amazon and Unilever.

It was back in 2003 that WPP merged its two largest media businesses, Mindshare and Mediaedge:CIA, to form GroupM.

According to MediaPost, an advertising and marketing news company, the move was a response to clients rejecting the decades-old standard agency fee of a 15 per cent commission on media buys. The idea was to create a menu of media planning and buying services that agencies could purchase separately from the fees paid to creative agencies.

In the same year, WPP Marketing Communications, the holding company of media brands MindShare, MindShare Fulcrum and Maximize, was renamed GroupM Media India. At the time, WPP was the third-largest advertising and media conglomerate after Omnicom and IPG.

Over the next two years, GroupM acquired Mediacom in 2004 and began operations in the United Kingdom, WPP’s home country, and across Europe in 2005.

During the latter half of the decade, WPP and CHI & Partners established a new media agency called M/SIX, and in 2008, Maxus, a new media agency, was launched. Mediaedge:CIA was renamed MEC in 2010.

The following decade saw GroupM accelerate the development of its agency brands.

WPP acquired the digital agency Essence in 2015. This agency would later merge with Mediacom to become EssenceMediacom in 2023. In 2017, MEC merged with Maxus to form Wavemaker.

A year later, major leadership changes occurred at WPP. Mark Read was appointed CEO after the departure of founder and CEO Sir Martin Sorrell, who left the company following an investigation into allegations of personal misconduct.

In the same year, Sorrell founded S4Capital, which its website describes as a technology-led, new era digital advertising, marketing and technology services company.

In the post-Sorrell era, GroupM saw Finecast, Xaxis and GroupM Services consolidated to create GroupM Nexus. Mindshare absorbed the performance agency Neo, and M/SIX was rebranded as MSix & Partners.

Now, in 2024, WPP has yet to officially announce the renaming of GroupM to WPP Media. Nevertheless, what a tale of mergers and rebrands the world’s largest media buying company has experienced.