GroupM No More
What’s in a name?
WPP will shortly retire the GroupM brand, Adweek reports, renaming its ad-buying arm WPP Media. This tracks with moves at Publicis and Omnicom, which houses their respective ad-buying agencies under the monikers Publicis Media and Omnicom Media Group.
WPP started out as Wire and Plastic Products plc, a shopping cart manufacturer that Sir Martin Sorrell used as a springboard to create one of the largest agency holdcos in the world.
But, more recently, WPP’s media and creative agencies have suffered a string of blue-chip account losses.
Publicis snagged Coca-Cola in the US and Ferrero in Europe, while Dentsu’s iProspect took the eBay account from GroupM’s EssenceMediacom. PayPal, meanwhile, is looking for a new media agency.
This is a “year of transition,” WPP CEO Mark Read put it to investors recently. One of those transitions, it’s worth noting, was the arrival of Brian Lesser, who joined GroupM (sorry, WPP Media) as CEO last year.
But, hey, the rebrand isn’t that big of a deal. Honestly, it’s almost a breath of fresh air after WPP started just stuffing old agency names together.
VMLY&R, anyone? And, FYI, Wunderman Thompson is not a law firm.
Still, there’s a feeling of nostalgia because GroupM was for a long time the single largest ad buying org in the world. Pour one out for GroupM, we guess.
Talkin’ TikTok
Ban, what ban?
If you were in attendance at TikTok’s NewFronts presentation on Tuesday evening, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the social media platform’s presence on US mobile devices was ever in flux.
“TikTok is here,” Khartoon Weiss, VP of mobile business solutions, told the crowd. “We are absolutely confident in our platform and confident in the future of this platform, so we’re going to continue to invest in it.”
Where advertisers are concerned, those investments include new brand suitability features and custom content sponsorship packages.
TikTok Pulse, the company’s in-house ad suite, is also getting new features and capabilities that will help ads appear next to related content and trending topics.
On top of that, TikTok announced a few new publisher partners, including Formula 1, Red Bull Media and Warner Bros. Discovery.
And, apparently, it’s good to be one of TikTok’s partners, according to, well, one of TikTok’s partners. Steve Ellis, Paramount Advertising’s COO, told the NewFronts audience that TikTok is better to work with than “some other platforms out there.”
Well then, guess we have to hope TikTok gets to stick around in the US.
Full Meta Jacket
Meta is entering another “trust me” phase, writes Ben Thompson at Stratechery.
Usually, Meta simply cruises. But there have also been times when its revenue and ad metrics were on a downswing or when expenditures got out of hand.
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg made a rare podcast appearance and hopped on the Stratechery pod – which hadn’t happened since 2021, back when Facebook rebranded to Meta while awkwardly disclosing that Reality Labs, a marginal revenue contributor, cost $10 billion per year.
Fast-forward, and Meta’s expenditures on Reality Labs in Q1 2025 alone were $4.6 billion.
Meta’s rocketing costs are like a painful teeter-totter, since the company’s cash flow decreased 17.6% year over year. At the same time, total ad impression growth has plateaued, likely as the Reels inventory tailwind has faded. Threads might provide some pick up.
But … c’mon. Threads?
Perhaps more discouraging, Meta’s price-per-ad growth is flat to down, too, Thompson writes. It’s okay if the price per ad is down so long as total impressions are going up, and vice versa.
But it’s “a lot less attractive when both are decreasing simultaneously,” according to Thompson. “Indeed, I can’t even make a solid prediction of what this means, given how rare this is.”
But Wait! There’s More
Inside Meta’s “low performance” layoffs earlier this year. [Business Insider]
College sports now account for 40% of ESPN’s ad revenue, up 42% year over year. [Sports Business Journal]
NBC will use AI to approximate the voice of famed ’90s NBA announcer Jim Fagan, who died in 2017. [NYT]
Fubo capitalizes on its merger with Hulu + Live by knocking $20 off its streaming prices. [Variety]
How would tariffs on foreign-produced movies even work? [Vulture]
VideoAmp has formally started its Media Rating Council audit. [release]
As of March, 13.14% of Google search queries produce an AI Overview, and these overviews are associated with higher zero-click behavior. [Semrush]
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