“You would have seen this with all the major consolidated pitches coming through, but we’re seeing it across our entire client base,” Geraghty said. “Media plus production or creative plus production to deliver gigantic, hyper-personalized content at scale; that’s one bucket of opportunity that we’re seeing a lot of. We’re continuing to see great interest from our top 50 clients on global scale social and influencer programs.”
Fernandez told Ad Age that WPP had a fairly “nascent relationship with Amazon as a global partner” that grew under his direction as the global client lead (WPP won a sizable portion of Amazon’s global media business following a review last year). He said he was responsible for working with Geraghty and other WPP agencies to identify growth opportunities for Amazon and then going to the e-commerce giant’s procurement team to say “‘This is what we’ve done here … we think there are replicable opportunities for us to take it to other lines of business or other geographies.’”
Now, as WPP builds “more services and platforms,” it’s looking to “share the love” with more clients, he said. “I’m wanting to sit there and say, ‘How do we democratize more of these learnings?’” Fernandez said.
How WPP Open plays a part
Geraghty said WPP’s AI brand hub will be central in rolling out her team’s integrated services to more clients. The holding company last year announced Open, which is a re-imagined technology hub backed by annual investments of $318 million and used by over 35,000 employees to service blue-chip clients including Coca-Cola, L’Oréal, Nestlé and Ford.
“WPP was early to market with their AI strategy,” Zerrenner told Ad Age. “That is a unique and compelling proposition when we look at the competitive landscape right now.”
Zerrenner is responsible for growing WPP’s top clients and will be using Open to do that. And she said leaning on Open to help fuel creativity is what makes WPP’s proposition attractive to clients.
“There’s been this false paradigm in the marketplace that you have to choose,” she said. “Are you going to be a machine-driven marketing organization or are you going to be a creative-driven marketing organization? Clients aren’t getting the growth that they need and they realize that they have to find a way to do both.”
Corona said WPP’s Open was one reason she was drawn to the holding company. She’s already used the platform “a lot” including in her role acting as the global client lead for Verizon. “I went down a rabbit hole on Open one weekend doing category analysis, a segmentation analysis, journeys, finding opportunities that we were missing, competitive comparisons … and it runs it all within 10, 15 seconds,” she said.
“The capabilities available, the resources available at the hold company level is just not something that you get at a small agency,” Corona added. “[At] the small agency, you’re rolling up your sleeves trying to get access to every free thing that you can. It’s incredible to watch how the teams within the agencies and at WPP use Open.”