New Offering Bolsters Best-in-Class Capabilities for Global, Regional and Local Clients

LONDON & NAIROBI, Kenya - Thursday, February 19th 2015 [ME NewsWire]

(BUSINESS WIRE)-- GroupM announced today the launch of its MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare media agencies in sub-Saharan Africa, supplementing GroupM’s existing offering in South Africa and Northern Africa and strengthening its position as the global leader in media investment management. This development follows the lead of GroupM parent company WPP, which last year increased its stake to a controlling interest in Scangroup, the leading advertising and communication services group in East Africa.

Clients who work with MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare will benefit from the consolidated media management of GroupM, while receiving best-in-class client leadership, communication strategy and executional delivery deeply connected to the agencies’ respective global networks. This will provide clients in sub-Saharan Africa with the market’s most advanced media capabilities and give access to training and development on the latest strategic planning, media tools and technology.

“Sub-Saharan Africa is a key growth priority for many of our clients and we are increasing our presence and capabilities across the region,” said Dominic Grainger, GroupM CEO EMEA.

These operations will have a market-leading position and the overall network, along with its affiliates, shall comprise a team of more than 150 people across sub-Saharan Africa. The evolution of the company’s media offering supports its growth strategy, client growth, and fast-changing opportunities for brands.

Nandu Buty will assume day-to-day leadership of GroupM in sub-Saharan Africa, in addition to his responsibilities as COO of Scangroup, with the management team of each of the operating agencies.

“This is an important development for us as it means we can advance our media agencies aligned to their respective global networks,” said Nandu Buty, GroupM sub-Saharan Africa.

Based out of Nairobi, GroupM and the three media agencies will manage all sub-Saharan entities and client relations managed out of Nairobi. Monica Kambo, Rajiv Gopinath and Mac Machaiah will serve respectively as the agency leads for MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare. Kambo comes over from Ogilvy & Mather Africa where she was the general manager of media services, Gopinth joins from MediaCom Singapore where he was responsible for running the P&G account in China and Machaiah previously led Mindshare in Southern India.

ABOUT GROUPM

GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Mindshare, MEC, MediaCom and Maxus, as well as Xaxis and Catalyst. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation, and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies. Discover more about us online at www.groupm.com.     

Contacts

Harmonica / GroupM

Katy Saeger or Peter Epstein

+1 310-597-2337 or +1 323-251-3567

katy@harmonica.co or peter@harmonica.co

or

Nandu Buty

Nandkishor.buty@scangroup.biz

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