WPP Milestones
25 pioneering initiatives and achievements (part 2)

1997 Partnership in Practice case studies
Over 70 client-endorsed case studies, gathered from winning entries to WPP’s Worldwide Partnership Program, provide hard evidence of Group companies collaborating across skills and geographies to create tangible success for their clients

2004 Global client teams
A cross-group WPP team wins a global client assignment, from HSBC, for the first time. Subsequently, a growing number of major international clients have taken a co-ordinated, team-based approach to their marketing, drawing on the Group’s relevant skills and disciplines through the portal of WPP. The Group now works with over 10 global clients in this way, including Coca-Cola, Ford, HSBC and Procter & Gamble. www.wpp.com

2000 WPP Digital
WPP’s digital investment initiative (known as wpp.com until 2007) manages the parent company’s digital investments and helps the Group and its clients understand and exploit emerging digital technologies and the online digital space.

2003 GroupM
GroupM is formed to oversee WPP’s ever-expanding media investment management interests, with a focus on the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation and new communication services, to bring unfair competitive advantage to clients and companies. www.groupm.com

2007 24/7 Real Media
WPP acquires one of the world’s leading search engine marketing and ad serving technologies as a core part of the Group’s technology strategy to enable our clients to target their customers more effectively. 24/7’s award-winning search technology, Decide DNA, has been widely adopted across WPP, and is currently used by more than 700 clients, running campaigns across 50 countries and 15 languages in 37 different currencies. Connecting to 100+ search engines and feed publishers, the technology bids and reports on 60 million keywords daily. www.247realmedia.com



1996 WPP Space Program
The Group launches a real estate management process for WPP companies; the online version wins a major industry award for innovation in 2002.

1998 The Store
A specialist resource for WPP companies, this global retail practice provides expertise, support and added value to client initiatives and projects in retail and fast-moving consumer goods. It assists with agency and client initiatives, facilitates projects which bring WPP companies together to explore new concepts and findings within the retail sector, and contributes to conferences, presentations and pitches.

2008 Deliver
This pioneering digital production capability provides WPP companies and their clients with specialist, low-cost production services on a global scale. www.deliveroffshoring.com



1992 CommonHealth
WPP creates an international healthcare communications network, drawing together the specialist skills of professionals across the Group. CommonHealth is now a family of 13 collaborative brands each offering unique expertise. www.commonhealth.com

1995 WPP Marketing Fellowships
Over 120 graduates have participated in the Group’s unique graduate recruitment program, which offers unrivalled opportunities through three years of practical work experience rotating around three WPP companies in different geographies. www.wpp.com/wpp/careers

1997 Mindshare
WPP combines the media operations of two of the world’s biggest agency networks - JWT and Ogilvy - to create the industry’s first ‘new generation’ media company. www.mindshareworld.com

2000 BRANDZ
Devised by Group company Millward Brown, WPP’s global diagnostic and predictive brand measurement tool now covers over 50,000 brands in nearly 400 categories in 31 countries. www.brandz.com

2007 Stream
Described as a free-form, super-democratised, extreme social networking un-conference, Stream events attract the brightest and most innovative leaders and future leaders from the creative, media and technology industries to discuss, debate and shape ideas and opportunities for our cultural, commercial and digital future. stream.wpp.com

2008 Marketing Research Program Awards
WPP and Google set up a $4.6 million three-year program to support research into online media and its influence on consumer behaviour.


2010 WPP goes mobile
WPP launches its mobile application, with real-time news headlines, the latest share price and recent press releases from wpp.com. The service for WPP people includes the fully searchable directory of Group companies where you can find people and offices and, with one click, call or email them. m.wpp.com




This article originally appeared in WPP's global newspaper, The WIRE (issue 35).