WPP has bolstered its client growth team in response to increasing demand for integrated services. One of several new executive roles is being filled by Lyndsey Corona, who was poached from independent creative boutique Slap Global.

Corona, who joined WPP as global growth lead, is best known for her role as president and partner at Slap, which was founded by Gerry Graf and Maxi Itzkoff. But her experience also spans holding company agencies including Stagwell’s Forsman & Bodenfors and Interpublic Group of Cos.-owned McCann.

In her role at WPP, she will lead a new growth agenda for the company in North America as well as its relationship with Verizon.

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Also rounding out the team: Crystal Zerrenner, the former chief growth officer of period underwear brand Thinx, acquired by Kimberly-Clark in 2022, who has been named executive VP, global clients. Will Fernandez has been elevated to executive VP, global strategic growth from global client lead managing WPP’s Amazon account. Amy Spurgeon has been promoted to VP of North America growth from director of sales for North America for WPP’s performance-driven shop The Brand Power Company.

All of these executives took on their new respective roles in January. They report to WPP Chief Client Officer Jane Geraghty, who took that job in January 2024. Geraghty reports directly to WPP CEO Mark Read. Geraghty’s team is based in New York, except Fernandez, who is based in London. Technically the team is hybrid, said Geraghty, since their jobs will require a lot of travel to meet with clients.

Geraghty said Corona’s experience both within holding company networks and at Slap can help her in the new role at WPP. “Having that entrepreneurial spirit on the team but good, strong experience in a large-scale network; that’s the energy that Lyndsey is bringing to us,” she told Ad Age.

“One of the things that got me excited about this is going from one of those entrepreneurial ventures, basically a startup with Slap Global and Gerry, to working at WPP,” Corona told Ad Age. “There’s a gravitational pull in our industry. It’s going in two directions. One is in the direction of [the holding companies] and consolidation and the other is with the small agencies, and there are reasons for that.”

There is increasing client demand for high-quality creative campaigns that are churned out quickly by small agencies, coupled with demand for big, integrated holding company models servicing everything for major marketers under one roof. The latter is where WPP and its other holding company rivals such as Publicis Groupe excel—and it’s the space where WPP wants to double down with this new client growth team.

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Increasing client demand for integration

Geraghty said that when she started in her role last year the global client teams were focused on WPP’s top 50 clients. Each of those clients are appointed global client leads at the holding company level who help them find solutions across the network’s various capabilities and agencies.

But she said those top 50 clients “continue to disproportionately grow and we are hearing more and more from clients that they want the best of WPP integrated solutions.” That’s what these new executives will help provide a larger number of WPP clients.

“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.”

Geraghty pointed to several client wins in which integrated strategies played a critical part. They include Johnson & Johnson’s media account in the U.S. and Canada in December 2024, which is serviced by various agencies including CMI Media Group and GroupM; Kimberly-Clark's global baby and childcare and adult care brands in January; retaining the United States Marine Corps account in November 2024; and Unilever consolidating its global creative and strategic duties for its beauty brands with the holding company in August 2024.

Spurgeon told Ad Age, when she was working for The Brand Power Company, that WPP global client leads were “quite paramount to some of the success that we saw across our top clients.”

“Not only were they able to introduce us to opportunities, but we were able to showcase a lot of the innovation that we were developing and bring to the table” for other client opportunities, Spurgeon said.