Neo@Ogilvy Joins Mindshare Performance Group to Fuel Enhanced WPP Horizontality

New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai, June 16, 2017: WPP agencies Ogilvy and Mindshare announced today that Neo will join Mindshare as part of the Mindshare Performance Group, effective immediately.

The move will:

• Accelerate horizontal collaboration between Ogilvy and Mindshare and other WPP creative agencies where both creative and media briefs are held within WPP to clients’ advantage
• Enable Neo to grow bigger, faster by having more direct access to the data, technology and planning/buying capabilities of GroupM, enabling it to better service clients
• Strengthen Ogilvy’s brand positioning and value promise to clients as part of its Next Chapter transformation
• Add to Mindshare’s existing performance capabilities held in its FAST (Future Adaptive Specialist Team) units, helping to accelerate the next stage of marketing evolution for clients as more channels become addressable and more clients move to outcome based approaches.

Neo’s management will join the newly formed ‘Mindshare Performance Group’, consisting now of both Neo and FAST leadership. In addition, Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO, Neo and Bradley Rogers, Global Chief Operating Officer, Neo, will join the Mindshare leadership team in addition to continuing in their existing roles.

Nick Emery, Global CEO Mindshare said: ‘The combination of Neo and FAST fuels our ambition to create a pre-eminent and consistent digital, data, distribution and content spine for clients by investing further in these outcome-based capabilities. We look forward to welcoming Neo into Mindshare for the benefit of our clients.’

John Seifert, WW Chairman and CEO, Ogilvy, said: ‘We could not be more excited about this consolidation of offerings in service of Ogilvy's 'Next Chapter' strategy. The vision of creating Neo was inspired over a decade ago as we saw – before most of our competitors – a media landscape that would become increasingly digital and performance driven in planning, delivery, and business accountability. In a rapidly changing client and media industry environment, Nasreen and I believe that embedding Neo under Mindshare management will best serve our client-centric strategy and the ongoing enterprise transformation across WPP.'

Norm Johnston, Global CEO, Mindshare FAST, said: ‘We’ve been leading the media agency world in the development of performance capabilities through our FAST proposition since its inception two years ago. Clients are demanding more and more outcome based solutions in response to the digitisation of media channels and Neo is a great addition to the Mindshare Performance Group that will enable us to deliver more transformative and adaptive solutions for our clients.’

Nasreen Madhany, Global CEO Neo, said: ‘Building Neo as a performance engine within Ogilvy has been an incredibly inspiring experience over the last decade for the Neo team and myself. We are now equally excited about the prospect of taking Neo on its next journey as part of the Mindshare Performance Group, entering a new era of horizontality with all the opportunity it brings for our clients and our people.’FILTERS