Tag: GroupM

Philippines – Media investment company GroupM welcomes Crisela Magpayo-Cervantes as its new chief executive officer for the Philippines, marking her return to the group since previously working with its agency, Mindshare. The appointment will be effective in February.

With over 20 years of experience in the industry, Magpayo-Cervantes brings expertise in leveraging technology to her marketing strategies. 

Magpayo-Cervantes has served as director of digital practice at Mindshare Philippines and more recently as Mindshare Indonesia’s principal partner. She began her career in the industry at Ogilvy Philippines, where she served as an account director.

Prior to rejoining GroupM, Magpayo-Cervantes held the role of vice president head of media and marketing communications at Globe Telecom for three years. 

During her tenure at Globe, she has led the digital and creative transformation of the company and the marketing communications industry, maintaining her commitment to talent development.

Singapore – Himanshu Shekhar, most recently the chief executive officer for Southeast Asia at GroupM, has stepped down from his role this month, the company has confirmed to MARKETECH APAC when reached out to.

“After two and a half decades with GroupM, Himanshu Shekhar has decided to step down from his role managing our business in Southeast Asia this month. Himanshu has been a strong leader for us over the years. We’re grateful for his many contributions to our success in the region and wish him the best for the future,” a GroupM spokesperson told MARKETECH APAC.

Himanshu served as GroupM’s CEO for the region beginning in May 2023. Prior to this, he was the CEO of GroupM Indonesia and then expanded his role to also include the Thailand and Vietnam markets.

He also served as the managing director of Mindshare Indonesia in 2010 before being elevated to the position of CEO in 2012 and subsequently as its CEO for Southeast Asia in 2015.

The recent move also follows a recent shake-up in GroupM’s APAC leadership, which expanded the remits of Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom’s regional agency leaders to include responsibility for critical GroupM-wide functions and capabilities.

Korea – GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has been named L’Oréal Korea’s media partner of record, responsible for all media planning and buying activities.

GroupM was chosen by L’Oréal Korea after a competitive process, impressing with their in-depth understanding of the Korean market, strategic prowess, significant media buying power, and advanced capabilities in technology and commerce.

Michael Beecroft, GroupM’s CEO for Northeast Asia, said, “We are hugely honoured to be expanding our relationship with such an iconic and ambitious brand in such an exciting market.” 

“Korea is home to many of the world’s most sophisticated beauty consumers. We look forward to helping L’Oréal Korea meet their needs with compelling, relevant media that drives growth and innovation,” Beecroft added. 

This appointment strengthens the global relationship between L’Oréal Groupe, the world’s fourth-largest advertiser, and GroupM, expanding their partnership to over 30 markets worldwide, including the key Korean market.

Singapore – Grab’s advertising arm GrabAds have announced the expansion of its strategic partnership with GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, to help the latter’s clients unlock the power of Grab’s retail media network (RMN) capabilities for brand, performance and business growth. 

As part of the expanded partnership, GrabAds will enhance its first-party audience data with geo-based signals, which GroupM will further aggregate and integrate into their internal proprietary platforms. 

With these insights, GroupM clients across Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam can look forward to more refined, data-driven media planning within an integrated omnichannel ecosystem.

The partnership will enable GroupM to access anonymised and indexed consumer insights based on real transactions which are then enhanced with geo-based signals, all of which are fully compliant with personal data privacy standards. These include data categories like cuisine preference, frequently travelled points of interest, and spend attributes. 

These geo-based first-party audience insights will enable more precise targeting capabilities for GroupM’s clients, that they can leverage to further optimise their media strategies and achieve marketing objectives. Brands will also benefit from full-funnel marketing capabilities with GrabAds’ RMN ecosystem, to maximise advertising spend for brand-building and sales objectives. 

It is worth noting that GroupM and GrabAds have been working together since 2021 to help advertisers harness retail media more effectively. With this expanded partnership, GroupM clients will continue to benefit from GrabAds’ existing and upcoming innovative omnichannel advertising offerings, including native advertising formats exclusive to Grab, data-driven campaigns, offline fleet placements, and programmatic buying capabilities. 

GroupM and GrabAds will also co-innovate on advertising solutions and media strategies. This collaboration will provide GroupM clients across sectors with early access to integration benefits and testing opportunities, enhancing their advertising effectiveness.

Anita Munro, chief investment officer at GroupM Asia-Pacific, said, “We embarked on this partnership with Grab given our confidence in their ability to work together with us to unlock market-leading advantage and value for clients in the evolving advertising landscape. As we continue to build and invest in a high-quality media ecosystem that is diverse, sustainable and audience-first, we are excited at the opportunity Grab presents with rich first-party audience insights and their strength as a platform that serves advertiser needs to connect the online to offline consumer journey. Multiple elements of the partnership will come together to accelerate growth for our clients including data, geo and audience-based expertise and more.”

Meanwhile, Ken Mandel, regional managing director and head of GrabAds and enterprise at Grab, commented, “We are excited to continue working alongside GroupM to help their clients unlock the true potential of retail media advertising, whether that’s crafting full-funnel campaigns or providing more precise means of measuring advertising returns. By combining GroupM’s scale, commitment to innovation and client-first mindset with our superior RMN capabilities, we are well-positioned to help GroupM clients drive accelerated growth in Southeast Asia.”

Singapore – GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, today announced a series of leadership changes to accelerate business growth and further the implementation of the company’s simplified operating model in the Asia Pacific (APAC) region. 

The changes expand the remits of Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom’s regional agency leaders to include responsibility for critical GroupM-wide functions and capabilities.

First off, in addition to her Mindshare leadership duties in APAC, Helen McRae will oversee GroupM’s growth and business development teams in the region. McRae will work closely with regional leadership and GroupM’s recently appointed global chief growth officer, Hamish Davies, to ensure teams responding to new business opportunities benefit from shared knowledge, best practices, tools, and processes in all markets and across all GroupM agencies. 

Meanwhile, Sindhuja Rai, Wavemaker’s regional lead for Asia-Pacific, will take on the additional responsibility for overseeing GroupM’s client leadership communities in the region. Rai will partner with GroupM and agency leaders throughout APAC, including CEOs Prasanth Kumar (South Asia), Rupert McPetrie (China), Michael Beecroft (North Asia), Himanshu Shekhar (Southeast Asia), Aimee Buchanan (Australia/New Zealand), and Arshan Saha (Singapore), to implement GroupM-wide best practices for client service and experience across all accounts and in all markets. 

Lastly, EssenceMediacom’s chief operating officer for APAC, Josh Gallagher, is promoted to client president for the agency in the region. In this new role, Gallagher will oversee GroupM’s client strategy capability and talent communities in the region, applying best practices and implementing cutting edge strategic planning tools and technologies across all agencies and APAC markets. He will also manage EssenceMediacom’s portfolio of clients across APAC, succeeding Rupert McPetrie who was appointed into a new role as CEO for GroupM in China in February.

Speaking about the leadership changes, Brian Lesser, global CEO at GroupM said “GroupM’s depth of talent in Asia Pacific is well known, both in the region and around the world. In Helen, Sindhuja, and Josh, we have some of the most outstanding leaders in the industry working to make sure GroupM keeps raising the bar for client service and marketing innovation. I’m excited to see the positive impact I know they will have on the way we leverage our collective intelligence and technology to deliver value for our clients and give our teams every opportunity to collaborate, grow, and win together.” 

Vietnam – L’Oréal Vietnam has selected WPP’s Onefluence as its full-service influencer marketing agency under a three-year retainer agreement, underscoring the beauty giant’s dedication to leveraging brand advocacy as a strategic driver for business growth.

Powered by VML’s ClickMedia and GroupM’s Mindshare in Vietnam, Onefluence is a bespoke agency solution designed to elevate L’Oréal’s influencer marketing strategy.

Following a rigorous pitching process, Onefluence secured the win as VML and Mindshare showcased a deep, nuanced understanding of the Vietnamese influencer market, backed by comprehensive audience insights and a strong command of emerging trends.

With a data-driven approach focused on performance management and analysis at every stage, the agencies will collaborate closely with L’Oréal Vietnam to deliver strategic and impactful influencer campaigns.

Additionally, a dedicated team of experts from L’Oréal Vietnam and WPP’s Onefluence, including local and regional specialists, will unite to form the WPP Beauty Tech Lab. This team will work seamlessly across agency-client boundaries to elevate their influencer marketing efforts. 

Matthieu Guerin, chief digital marketing officer at L’Oréal Vietnam, said, “In today’s dynamic landscape, advocacy has become a critical element for success, especially for the beauty industry. We are confident that this partnership will enable L’Oréal Vietnam to strengthen and accelerate our advocacy performance, drive advocacy strategy that connects with consumers in innovative and authentic ways, and drive strong love of our brands.”

Ha Nguyen, CEO of VML Vietnam, added, “We are thrilled to partner with L’Oréal Vietnam, a leader in beauty innovation. By bringing together our expansive capability suite in strategic thinking and creativity with our expertise in innovative technology, we will empower L’Oréal Vietnam to achieve its influencer marketing goals.”

This partnership represents a major milestone for L’Oréal Vietnam, VML, and Mindshare, reinforcing their shared commitment to shaping the future of influencer marketing in Vietnam.

New York, USA – Following their partnership launch last year, GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has fully integrated SeenThis’ adaptive streaming technology into its carbon calculator tool, resulting in carbon emission reductions equivalent to charging over 15 million smartphones.

Through their collaboration, GroupM and its agencies have utilised SeenThis’ expertise and proprietary technology to manage and minimise carbon emissions while enhancing the performance of display advertising campaigns.

SeenThis’ technology minimises data waste by transferring data only for visible creative assets, which enhances user engagement and reduces the number of impressions needed to achieve campaign goals. This approach also lowers CO2e emissions, as it reduces the energy required across the internet supply chain.

Last year, the global partnership reduced over 230 tonnes of CO2e emissions, equivalent to charging more than 15 million smartphones. According to GroupM, approximately 260 of its advertisers across 28 markets have benefited from this technology, simultaneously enhancing the performance of their digital ads.

With SeenThis technology fully integrated into GroupM’s carbon calculator, advertisers can now evaluate optimisation impacts during pre-campaign planning. This integration highlights GroupM’s ability to scale successful trials into repeatable processes. 

Furthermore, as industry interest grows and standardised metrics become more crucial, GroupM’s focus is on embedding this technology into ongoing campaigns to enhance business outcomes and reduce carbon intensity.

Commenting on the partnership, Kieley Taylor, global head of partnerships at GroupM, said, “In 2023, we set out in partnership with SeenThis to minimise emissions using data from our partners. One year on, we are achieving what we said we would do, building on our global framework for media decarbonization. The success of this partnership marks an important step in our commitment to decarbonise our media supply chain, and the more advertisers opt into SeenThis, the more they can drive positive results across both emissions and performance.” 

Thomas Bowens, global agency director at SeenThis, also said, “Our partnership is one of the first examples of a vendor providing an immediate turn-key solution to enable GroupM to deliver CO2e reductions while enhancing the user experience. We’re thrilled that GroupM is focused on the combination of minimising emissions while maximising performance and is embracing the use of SeenThis data to share this insight with their advertisers to encourage lower carbon cost of business outcomes.”

Singapore – GroupM and Internews have announced that over 350 news publishers in Asia-Pacific have received increased advertising investment from GroupM in 2023, following the rollout of an industry-first programme to help brands support quality journalism by re-investing media budgets in trustworthy news publishers.

In the Asia Pacific region, the duo has mapped a year-on-year increase in advertising investment on more than 350 news websites. These websites are from ten major Asian markets, including Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. There’s been a further 43% year on year increase in spending on these sites when comparing Q1’23 to Q1’24 across the markets. 

GroupM and its Back to News initiative, in partnership with Internews, a media support nonprofit, have been working to provide advertisers access to ad environments on local, national, and international news websites across the globe.

This win for journalism and news accessibility comes when legitimate digital news publishers increasingly face competition from made-for-advertising websites and artificially generated content. With this increase in investment, positive changes on the publishers’ end will holistically help uplift the ecosystem. 

The positive impact on client campaigns is also clear with recent results from a leading automotive client in the region showing viewability improving by 16.5%, an increase in click-through rate by 60% and a decrease in CPM by about 20%.

Anita Munro, chief investment officer for APAC at GroupM, said, “As the largest single-point media buyer in APAC we have a responsibility to support a diverse, sustainable, transparent and high-quality media ecosystem. The Back to News initiative has been an important component of our Responsible Investment Framework and aims to ensure we continue to invest alongside our clients into high-quality news publishers and provide a counter to the proliferation of fake news and MFA content that has flooded the market in recent years. The work that our supply management team has done in this space is truly market-leading.”

London, England – GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has announced its appointment as global media partner of record to international financial services provider Allianz Group to service the account on both a global and market-by-market basis.

In this appointment, GroupM will have full responsibility for Allianz’s full-funnel media strategy, planning, buying, and campaign execution.

Multiple agencies under GroupM will work together to service Allianz Group, with global media and marketing services company Mindshare taking the helm and leading the business globally and in two-thirds of its markets.

On the other hand, the global media, commerce, and content agency mSix&Partners will support Allianz’s business in their main headquarters in Germany, while marketing agency EssenceMediacom will continue to service Allianz in nine international markets where it was the incumbent.

Allianz’s decision to select GroupM and its agencies’ comes down to the group’s ability to coordinate effective and consistent media performance globally while delivering deep market-level expertise to help local teams navigate market-level complexity.

The media investment group is set to handle an account that serves more than 122 million customers in over 70 countries and is operating under a global ‘One Brand Strategy’.

Dr. Christian Deuringer, head of global brand management and marketing at Allianz SE, said, “With the new partnership, we are able to deploy our one-brand strategy perfectly and connect with our customers in an even more relevant way across the entire customer journey. The new set-up combines the strengths of globally managed strategies with tailored roll-outs in local markets. We also expect significant synergies through more standardised processes and performance measurement.”

Adam Gerhart, global CEO at Mindshare, also said, “Millions of people around the world trust Allianz to safeguard their futures for good reason. We’re excited to have the opportunity to help such a respected brand and responsible company harness the power of media to unlock new levels of growth, engagement, and marketing performance.”

Singapore – WPP’s media investment group GroupM and commerce media company Criteo have announced their partnership to strengthen omnichannel commerce media capabilities in the Asia Pacific region.

This is a first-in-APAC partnership that unifies product sales data and the proprietary media solutions of GroupM with Criteo’s proximity-based insights to enable omnichannel commerce through in-store and retail media integration.

GroupM’s clients will be able to access Criteo’s insights technology to further enhance media planning, budget allocation, and best-in-class activation, enabling new levels of relevance, optimisation, and conversion.

The partnership will also expand access for GroupM’s clients to Criteo’s holistic omnichannel monetization solution, allowing retailers to manage their entire media inventory across both ecommerce and physical retail while enabling brands and agencies to seamlessly discover and purchase omnichannel media from leading retailers.

The tools now available to GroupM clients include 360° media asset activation, ranging from in-store activations such as point-of-sale displays to out-of-store activations like inbox sampling and online activations such as email and social.

Criteo and GroupM are also planning to evolve the partnership by looking at strategic opportunities across media-buying capabilities and insights to drive predictive decision-making. Their collaborative efforts to develop best practices in the area aim to unlock many exciting possibilities as a response to the continuous acceleration of commerce media.

Anita Munro, chief investment officer at GroupM APAC, said, “The innovation in commerce that will be made possible through this collaboration with Criteo is a significant and hugely exciting development for advertisers in APAC and for our industry as a whole.”

She added, “Combining Criteo’s commerce media capabilities with our own not only strengthens our commerce offering in the region but also allows us to set a new standard for what’s possible in advertising by bringing products, media, clients, and consumers closer than ever before.”

Speaking on the partnership, Taranjeet Singh, managing director of enterprise at Criteo APAC, also shared, “Together with GroupM, we are honoured to usher in the next era of omnichannel marketing in the region. This partnership represents a union of industry leadership, and we are optimistic that it will drive greater integration across omnichannel campaigns and elevate success for brands and advertisers.”