WPP forms Health & Wellness company to extend competitive advantage

It unites the group’s broad capability under one banner to advance its offer and partnership significantly with clients across the spectrum of health and wellness.

Strategy includes new international specialist unit

The company’s strategy includes three initial priorities in 2017:

Creating a new healthcare specialist unit:

Building on a long history of partnership on team accounts, WPP Health & Wellness is placing four specialist agencies — Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide, Sudler & Hennessey, ghg | greyhealth group, and CMI/Compas — into a new specialised healthcare unit. The agencies will continue to operate under their current brands, but will now be united by a shared vision and purpose, leverage shared services and resources, and mobilise talent across the unit to deliver the full depth and breadth of their specialised services to clients.

In the Americas, the agencies will continue to be led by their current leadership (Jed Beitler [Sudler & Hennessey], Lynn O’Connor Vos [ghg | greyhealth group], Stan Woodland [CMI/Compas], and Ogilvy CommonHealth’s four managing partners [Darlene Dobry, Michael Parisi, Shaun Urban, and Marc Weiner]).

Mike Hudnall

To service the rest of the world, the company is creating a new international healthcare specialist unit with hubs in Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. Claire Gillis has been appointed to lead this international division as International CEO, Healthcare Specialist Agencies. Previously, Claire was CEO of ghg | greyhealth group Europe.

Global CEO Mike Hudnall said, “Individually our healthcare agencies are well known and respected for their strong partnership and meaningful work they deliver for our clients. This new structure centres on keeping those brands and cultures alive, builds on those strengths, and enables new cross-agency collaboration that will benefit our clients and provide greater career opportunities for our people. We are focused on sharing best practices, scaling our strengths and developing new services.”

Developing a specialised health consulting service:

Focused on providing innovative, pragmatic strategic counsel for clients’ increasingly complex needs, WPP Health & Wellness will create a new health consulting capability. The service will build on and scale the group’s current brand strategy, medical affairs and market access capabilities to advance its specialised offer further.

Creating the industry’s most robust health-focused data and insights offering:

WPP has more data sources and proprietary data assets than industry competitors do. Building on this asymmetric advantage, WPP Health & Wellness will work with group companies such as Kantar, GroupM and Wunderman to create one of the first data and analytics capabilities and offers in health. This will provide clients with more sophisticated segmentation and targeting, the ability to use data to deliver more valuable information to change behavior and, most importantly, to deliver better health outcomes.

For more information, go to www.wpphealth.com.