• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, April 25, 2022

WPP is going all-in on direct-to-consumer ecommerce with a new service called Everymile. The holding company claims it is the only firm in the ad-marketing sector to offer an end-to-end ecommerce solution.

The firm is not new to ecommerce—it already offers strategy, CX and technology development services. But now, with Everymile, the company says it is adding demand generation, online trading and merchandising, supply chain and logistics, covering all stops on the path to purchase from a customer’s screen to product delivery.

Everymile will be led by Mark Steel, previously director, retail & consumer industry at Google Cloud. Before that he was digital director at Sainsbury-owned big box retailer Argos, where he worked with WPP CFO John Rogers. Rogers was CEO at Argos before joining WPP as CFO in 2020. He is being tasked as the new endeavor’s C-suite champion with the title of “executive sponsor” of Everymile.

Everymile has collected a team of specialists from companies including Sainbury’s, Disney Store and ASOS.

Everymile is built on a proprietary ecommerce technology platform, using resources from WPP’s Cloud Commerce Group, which has already helped deliver omnichannel commerce services to global brands. According to the company, this platform gives Everymile clients full ownership of their online brand experience and first-party customer data. WPP agencies will also partner to integrate their creative and media solutions on a global scale.

As a fully managed service with a revenue share commercial model, Everymile will help bring products to market quickly and will enable clients that choose to do so to build their own in-house D2C capabilities over time.

WPP CEO Mark Read said, “The last couple of years have changed the way people shop forever. The acceleration of ecommerce, the shift to customers buying direct from brands, and the increasing importance of social in the commerce journey, have all meant that there is a demand for a fully managed service with omnichannel expertise.”

He added that those shifts, coupled with the company’s growing expertise in the space, present a set of circumstances that make now the optimal time to launch the Everymile service.