WPP, the global communications services group, has announced the formation of WPP Health & Wellness. The new sub-holding company unites WPP’s broad capability under one banner to significantly advance its offer and partnership with clients across the spectrum of health and wellness. WPP Health & Wellness is headed by Global CEO Mike Hudnall, a 20-year marketing veteran with deep experience in healthcare marketing and global client leadership.

According to Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, “Health and wellness is one of the most exciting sectors of the global economy and offers enormous opportunities for our businesses. WPP Health & Wellness will build on the excellent work we are already doing in this space and take us into new areas with a much more comprehensive offer. This new unit is significant because it represents the next evolution of horizontality, through which WPP will continue to lead and transform health marketing.”

Building on a long history of partnership on Team Accounts, WPP Health & Wellness is placing four specialist agencies – Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide, Sudler & Hennessey, ghg | greyhealth group, and CMI/Compas – into one specialized healthcare unit. The agencies will continue to operate under their current brands, but will now be united by a shared vision and purpose, leverage shared services and resources, and mobilize talent across the unit to deliver the full depth and breadth of their specialized services to clients.

In the Americas, the agencies will continue to be led by their current leadership (Jed Beitler [Sudler & Hennessey], Lynn O’Connor Vos [ghg | greyhealth group], Stan Woodland [CMI/Compas], and Ogilvy CommonHealth’s four managing partners [Darlene Dobry, Michael Parisi, Shaun Urban, and Marc Weiner]).

To service the rest of the globe, the company is creating a new international healthcare specialist unit with hubs in Europe, Asia Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, and New Zealand. Claire Gillis has been appointed to lead the international division as International CEO, Healthcare Specialist Agencies. Previously, Gillis was CEO of ghg | greyhealth group Europe.
Med Ad News caught up with Urban and Dobry to get their perspective on the changes.

“The whole purpose of doing this is to be able to tap into the talent and resources across the health and wellness team and to be able to offer this integrated service offering up to our clients,” Dobry notes. “The purpose of this coming together is not to just address conflict, but to be able to deliver the full depth and breadth of those specialized services to our clients.”

At the same time, however, “the vibrancy and the viability of the individual agencies are alive and well and will be maintained in the marketplace, because there is uniqueness to each of those individual agencies that our clients and brands have come to appreciate, respect, and love over the years,” Urban says. “And there also is as aspect of conflict and conflict management, that we absolutely need to maintain the vibrancy of the individual agencies because of how importantly we take the conflict management situation.”

According to Urban, the moves demonstrate the philosophy of Sir Martin Sorrell, “who has talked about horizontality for a number of years now.”

“That philosophy is simply working across the breadth and depth of resources within WPP, to bring the best talent and resources and innovation for the benefit of our clients and our brands,” Urban says. “This is horizontality really working at its finest specifically in healthcare.”

“I think the opportunity for us through these changes, to be really able to mobilize all of these various communications services for our clients is terribly exciting,” Dobry remarks. “It allows us to tap into a great deal of resources and talent.”

Matt Giegerich, chairman and chief executive officer of Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide, is expected to retire by early second-quarter 2017.

“We have been working with Matt – Darlene, myself, Michael Parisi, and Marc Weiner – over the course of the last couple of months to transition his responsibilities and leading the agency accordingly,” Urban says. “And the benefit to this is we have all worked with one another for about 13 years now, so it’s a very tenured management team who has worked very closely for a long time now. We see this as being seamless in the transition.”