WPP is preparing another major rebranding and will rename its media management arm GroupM, according to multiple reports. The new name will reportedly be WPP Media.  

WPP officials said the company was not currently commenting on the reports, which they said were speculation.  

But the company has been consolidating and rebranding many of its biggest agencies for years as part of a major overhaul designed to streamline company operations and make them more comprehensible to clients and prospects.  

Within GroupM two of its biggest agencies EssenceMediacom and Wavemaker were merged and rebranded within the last few years. Essence and Mediacom were merged in early 2023. Wavemaker was formed with the merger of MEC and Maxus in 2017.   

WPP formed GroupM in 2003, when the firm put its then biggest media operations—Mindshare and Mediaedge:CIA under one management umbrella arm. It was a pioneer of the so-called unbundling trend in the 1990’s, which in part was a reaction to clients rejecting the decades long standard ad agency fee of a 15% commission on media buys. The idea was to create a menu of media planning and buying services that agencies could purchase, separate from fees paid to creative agencies.   

But that was then, when WPP and GroupM were top dogs in the agency world. During the later years of the Martin Sorrell reign (he left in 2018) growth slowed and the company was criticized for being unwieldy and hard to work with. Current CEO Mark Read has spent a lot of time trying to simplify the business.  

Still, growth has been hard to come by. The company lost ground last year and says it will be flat at best this year. In the first quarter WPP’s organic revenue slipped 2.7% and GroupM was down 0.9%.   

Will a name change help? Hard to say. Likely more helpful will be the big ideas and turnaround plan that new GroupM Global CEO Brian Lesser is now putting in place and that Read is counting on to help change the fortunes of the company.