Essence
Report by Christian Juhl
Global chief executive officer
A
As our first full year operating within the WPP/GroupM network, 2016 proved to be one of expansive growth with new-found scale. We opened offices in Chicago, Delhi, Shanghai and Sydney, bringing our headcount to over 650 full-time people and continuing our mission to ‘make advertising more valuable to the world’. Growth-wise, all of our regions are up year-on-year. As with 2015, Asia Pacific was the rocket ship, almost doubling for the second year in a row. North America and EMEA were impressive in their own right, contributing towards our 10th year in a row of double-digit growth. And, our investment in ad tech maintained momentum, as our proprietary media management platform, Olive, almost doubled its contribution year-on-year towards our overall revenue.
Asia Pacific was the rocket ship, almost doubling for the second year in a row
On the new business front, in North America we won the Target account in conjunction with GroupM’s Team Arrow, and picked up two global pieces of business – FrieslandCampina and DAZN. Together with our organic growth, these new accounts contributed to our billings climbing 30% year-on-year; crossing over the $1 billion mark. Key hires such as a chief talent officer, a global head of strategy, an EMEA CEO and a new global head of analytics reaffirmed our commitment to hiring the best talent in the business, as well as our unwavering loyalty to further developing our data and analytics offerings globally.