WPP’s Agency Restructuring Continues: Grey Moves to Ogilvy, AKQA Regains Independence

The restructures continue at the UK's largest advertising network.

In a personal LinkedIn post last week, I reflected on WPP’s consolidation of some of its most iconic creative agencies. I was at WPP (working at Cognifide) during the integration of the Adobe AEM consultancy into Wunderman, which later merged with Young & Rubicam and JWT, two of the most renowned names in advertising to form Wunderman Thompson. That brand was also sunsetted last year, with Wunderman Thompson being folded into VML, at the time creating the world’s largest advertising group by headcount.

These changes were not limited to creative agencies. WPP recently announced that its media division, GroupM, will be rebranded as WPP Media. This new structure will bring together Mindshare, Wavemaker, and EssenceMediacom into a more streamlined and client-centric operation and most importantly under a single P&L which will reduce costs and headcount across all the media agencies.

This week WPP announced another significant development: Grey will now become part of the Ogilvy Group, while…