GroupM Nexus, WPP’s performance media investment group, has made new leadership appointments following its recent media agency mergers.
Earlier this year WPP executed a collection of mergers amongst its media agencies, including the creation of GroupM Nexus, which brought together the digital and media services of GroupM Services, Xaxis, Finecast and Copilot, a proprietary AI technology.
In addition to GroupM Nexus, the company made two other consolidations—Essence and Mediacom to form EssenceMediaCom and Mindshare with a global performance agency Neo.
“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,” said Nicolas Bidon, global CEO of GroupM Nexus in a statement.
The new organization has 9,000 practitioners, from across the world, under its wing. They are collectively responsible for the activation of the over two million campaigns GroupM manages each year.
Among the new leadership hires are Bidon as the global CEO of GroupM Nexus and John Wittesaele as the global CEO of Xaxis.
The rest of the appointments are:
- Colin Barlow, chief operating officer (previously president, GroupM Services)
- Silvia Sparry, chief transformation officer (previously global COO, Xaxis)
- Rich Astley, chief product officer (previously global chief product officer, Finecast)
- Jodi Weintraub, global chief people officer (previously global chief people officer, GroupM Services)
- Henry Stokes, global president, agencies enablement (previously global MD, clients, Xaxis)
These appointments are following earlier additions that were made at the beginning of this year. Those appointments included Sargi Mann, global activation practices leader; JiYoung Kim, GroupM Nexus president for North America; Girish Menon, COO of global offshore; and Nicola Lewis: global CEO of Finecast.
The company expects to make further changes in the coming months.