GroupM to Be Another Agency Partnering with BuzzFeed

WPP’s media buying arm GroupM has formed a global strategic partnership with BuzzFeed to reach the publisher’s more-than-200 million monthly unique visitors.

Under the agreement, GroupM’s and WPP’s agencies and clients will be able to access BuzzFeed‘s creative and data assets. They can get preferential media pricing, and WPP creative teams can leverage BuzzFeed‘s expertise in producing social content for all platforms. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed Motion Pictures will produce branded video content for WPP clients. The GroupM deal also includes the first beta partnership with POUND, BuzzFeed‘s proprietary data technology that offers insights and analytics around how content spreads across the social web.

Rob Norman, chief digital officer at GroupM, explains that the agency prefers BuzzFeed over other media companies due to its “unique combination” of creative and data assets.

“BuzzFeed owns a platform, publishes both to that platform and every other platform, has a unique skill set that will benefit advertiser content creation and a data set that views the journey of creative assets across platform,” Norman says. “The only thing that’s somewhat comparable is Mashable from a publishing and data point of view – their data platform is called Velocity – and MEC, and GroupM agency is already a leading partner of theirs.”

GroupM is not the first agency looking to collaborate with BuzzFeed. Last May, Publicis’ DigitasLBi and BuzzFeed initiated a program called “BuzzFeed in Residence,” where the news site’s marketing executives resided in the digital agency’s New York office, working together on strategies for brands like Taco Bell, American Express and Virgin Mobile.

But Norman points out that GroupM is not just following suite.

“[Our partnership with BuzzFeed] is different from Digitas’ because it’s global and involves multiple GroupM and WPP agencies, as well as the unique cocktail I mentioned [in the fourth paragraph],” he notes.

Homepage image via Shutterstock