The&Partnership appears to be embracing innovation with a vengeance: London CEO Sarah Golding has been banging the drum for emerging technologies such as A1 in her stint as agency trade body IPA president and now it’s promoted head of digital strategy Oliver Feldwick to global head of innovation, charged with the onerous-sounding task of “future proofing” the rapidly growing network in a time of rapid change.
Feldwick (below) says: “As every other part of the marketing landscape gets disrupted, our processes for getting to new ideas, for harnessing creativity, have remained remarkably unchanged. Too often innovation is treated as a sideshow. But the only way we can properly embrace the challenges of today’s marketing landscape, and figure out how to be as creative as we want and need to be, is to apply that innovation to the core of what we do: creativity. I’m excited to figure out how we put this into practice across The&Partnership.”
Golding says: “When I hired Oli, I knew he would play an important role in The&Partnership’s future. This is an exciting promotion for us, and I couldn’t think of a better person than Oli to take the helm as we future-proof our ways of working across the network. We firmly believe the next generation of agencies will be those that capably bring together the holy trinity of creativity, data and tech – and Oli will play a pivotal role in helping strengthen our position at the forefront of that movement.”
The&Partnership has grown via its mix of on-site agencies for the likes of Toyota Europe, News UK and RBS with central hubs, anticipating a trend that has taken root across the agency landscape. It also has its own media agency m/SIX which benefits from 49 per cent shareholder WPP’s GroupM volume deals.
In many ways it’s a microcosm (albeit quite a big one) of what new WPP CEO Mark Read is trying to achieve with his much bigger but far more diffuse empire.
