WPP Media

WPP Media is the media-investment arm of London-listed WPP plc and, by billings, the largest media agency network in the world. The unit was known as GroupM from its 2003 founding until May 28, 2025, when WPP retired the GroupM name after 22 years and relaunched the business as a “fully integrated, AI-powered” company under CEO Brian Lesser. Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom continue as client-facing brands inside WPP Media but the network now reports financials as a combined entity by market rather than along agency lines.

The scale is the story for buyers and sellers. WPP Media manages more than $60 billion in annual media investment across 80+ markets — $64.6 billion in 2025 billings per COMvergence, 18.2 percent ahead of the next-largest media agency group — and works with more than 75 percent of the world’s leading advertisers. Choreograph, the data unit launched in April 2021, sits across the brands as the network’s data-and-technology backbone; the 2025 acquisition of InfoSum folded a clean-room capability into the same stack. Standalone units Xaxis, Sightline, Finecast, and INCA were sunset between 2023 and early 2024 and consolidated into GroupM Nexus, the network’s performance-marketing division.

For The State of Streaming’s audience, the relevant frontier is what Lesser is doing with that scale on CTV and AI. He has staked the network’s strategy on AI rather than identity — pushing 100 percent adoption of WPP Open and Media Studio, the holding company’s AI-enabled marketing platform — and has paired the platform bet with a Vision’30 restructuring that WPP says will affect 40-45 percent of the roughly 40,000-person workforce. The April 2026 launch of YouTube 5K with Google — an AI-curated 5,000-channel brand-safety inventory plus automated creative versioning into 10/15/20-second cutdowns — is the first concrete CTV-adjacent product to come out of that strategy. WPP also sits as a founding buy-side member on the IAB Tech Lab’s Programmatic Governance Council, launched April 21, 2026 to write transparency rules for the $200 billion U.S. programmatic market.