WPP Media

WPP Media, formerly GroupM, is a U.S. based media business which is owned by the multinational holding company WPP plc. WPP Media was the world’s largest media buying agency, as of 2023, when it was still GroupM.

WPP Media’s headquarters are located at 3 World Trade Center, in Lower Manhattan, and the company had subsidiaries in Asia, Australia, North America, and the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

Businesses associated with and therefore owned and operated by GroupM included Essence Global, Mindshare, Wavemaker, as well as the defunct media agency Maxus, and the influencer marketing agency Goat.

In May 2025, GroupM was rebranded as WPP Media.

WPP plc formed GroupM in 2003 to unite Mediaedge:CIA and Mindshare Worldwide.^[5][6]

In 2015, GroupM began requiring all media partners to acquire anti-piracy certification from the Trustworthy Accountability Group.^[7] In 2019, GroupM formed a coalition to help brands reach multicultural audiences.^[8] The company had a diverse media advertisement investment goal of five percent; an initial goal of two percent Black-owned media, set in 2021,^[9] was expanded in 2023 to include AAPI, Hispanic, and LGBT media.^[10]

Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, GroupM deemed Twitter a “high risk” platform.^[11] GroupM removed the classification in 2023, when Linda Yaccarino was named Twitter’s chief executive officer (CEO) and the two companies collaborated on a brand safety project.^[12]

In 2022, GroupM debuted a carbon calculator to determine an advertisement’s carbon output. The company also partnered with Good-Loop to launch an initiative to reduce the environmental impact of advertising spending. GroupM was the first agency holding group in Australia to offer carbon offsetting.^[13][14] The company formed a decarbonization coalition with 20 clients in 2022,^[15] and improved the calculator’s accuracy in 2023.^[16]

In 2023, GroupM removed made-for-advertising sites (MFAs) from its programmatic businesses.^[17] The move “[set] a precedent” for the advertising industry, according to Digiday, and was an expansion of work by the company’s team in the U.K., which maintained a list of approximately 6,000 domain names that were not MFAs.^[18] GroupM also launched an initiative to help brands invest in quality journalism.^[19]

The business rebranded from GroupM to WPP Media in May 2025. It was confirmed that EssenceMediacom, Mindshare, T&Pm and Wavemaker would no longer operate as separate businesses and that there would be redundancies.