GroupM announces senior leadership appointments
GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, has announced a raft of senior leadership appointments at its recently-unveiled performance media organization, GroupM Nexus.
The new appointments include global leaders for operations, transformation, product, people and clients, as well as a new global CEO at outcome media specialist Xaxis, which forms part of the new organization. The new leadership team showcases the strength in depth across GroupM Nexus with new, expanded roles for existing global talent.
Joining Nicolas Bidon, who was announced in April as GroupM Nexus’ first Global CEO, are:
Colin Barlow, Chief Operating Officer (prior, President, GroupM Services)
Silvia Sparry, Chief Transformation Officer (prior, Global COO, Xaxis)
Rich Astley, Chief Product Officer (prior, Global Chief Product Officer, Finecast)
Jodi Weintraub, Global Chief People Officer (prior, Global Chief People Officer, GroupM Services)
Henry Stokes, Global President, Agencies Enablement (prior, Global MD, Clients, Xaxis)
John Wittesaele, Global CEO of Xaxis (prior, EMEA CEO at Xaxis)
The appointments follow the addition earlier this year of Sargi Mann as Global Activation Practices Leader, JiYoung Kim as GroupM Nexus President for North America, Girish Menon as COO of Global Offshore, and Nicola Lewis, as Global CEO of Finecast, the addressable TV specialist that also forms part of the GroupM Nexus offering.
Nicola Lewis, Global CEO, Finecast: “GroupM Nexus unites leading digital media talent, services excellence, cutting-edge AI technology and unique scaled partnerships into a new cross-channel performance organization with one purpose: power growth for our people, our agencies and the amazing brands they represent. This newly formed leadership ensemble represents some of the best and brightest across GroupM Nexus and, together, will help create a world-leading performance platform and organization to help make advertising work better for our clients and their customers. I can’t be more excited to work with this team to unlock higher ROI from advertisers’ digital media investments.”
GroupM Nexus unites GroupM’s global digital activation solutions and services, including GroupM Services, Xaxis, Finecast, and proprietary AI technology Copilot, into a single unit. It will be underpinned by a new cross-channel performance platform and international delivery hubs to set new benchmarks for outcome-driven planning, activation, and optimization for GroupM’s agencies and clients.
The new organization comprises 9,000 practitioners around the world, collectively responsible for the activation of the more than two million campaigns managed by GroupM each year, and with expertise across search, social, programmatic, AI, cross-channel optimization, and data-driven technologies and software.
More leadership announcements are planned in the coming months.
