Five Reasons Why ... T&Pᵐ Is Reinventing The Full Service Agency For The AI Age

The UK has a new fully-integrated agency, redefining the traditional full-service model for the AI future. The&Partnership and its sibling media network MSix are coming together into one fully connected business called T&Pᵐ, which will work with brands on end-to-end solutions to drive growth.

Led by one of the industry’s most established and successful management teams, which includes Sarah Golding, Nick Howarth, and Jack Swayne – all currently CEOs within the group, alongside founder Johnny Hornby, the new company will knit together all the tools that drive modern brand-building, powered by AI.

It all began in fairly traditional style in 2001. Strategist Simon Clemmow, account exec Johnny Hornby and creative Charles Inge launched a creative agency called Clemmow Hornby Inge. But the business has always liked to push at conventions, focussing its offering on ‘big ideas’ before that became mainstream, refreshing itself as CHI Partners and then The&Partnership around a collaborative model with specialist services such as media and PR, and pioneering in-housing by embedding its talent and expertise inside its clients’ organisations. And along the way it sold a stake to WPP (which now owns over 70 per cent) and expanded from its UK base to be a fully-fledged global agency network.

T&Pᵐ launches with over 1,900 people working in 45 offices across four continents.

Five Reasons Why T&Pᵐ Has Been Created

• The&Partnership is one of the fastest growing creative networks, more than doubling revenues over the last five years through innovative partnerships with major clients like Mars, Toyota, NatWest, TELUS and News Corp. Its mSix&Partners sibling, a joint venture with GroupM, has quickly established itself as one of WPP’s fastest growing media agencies, with deep expertise in performance-led solutions for clients including EA, easyJet, and PVH’s Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Uniting them into a single agency offer under the T&Pᵐ name promises to ‘connect talent and tech to fuel brand growth’, combining capabilities across creative and media, experience and technology, to offer the kind of genuinely end-to-end marketing solutions it has already built for the likes of Toyota and News Corp.

• Marketers want streamlined, integrated solutions – and fewer supplier relationships – to allow them to move at speed with the best possible advice and solutions. By housing best-in-class specialisms under one roof with a unified management structure, T&Pᵐ can ensure the right decisions are taken quickly and efficiently, with greater flexibility to adapt at speed to changing market conditions.

• But integration is not just about speed and efficiency. It’s about truly agnostic thinking. T&Pᵐ is the next evolution in The&Partnership’s long-term strategy to provide clients with uniquely integrated, agnostic answers to their marketing challenges. Since the dissolution of full service agencies in the 80s and 90s marketers have often had to glue together solutions from a roster of agency partners each championing their own specialisms. The rise of integrated agencies in recent years – as the media landscape has become more complex by the day – has helped give marketers clarity. But bringing media fully into that integrated offer means clients should expect genuinely unbiased and holistic solutions in service of brand growth.

• AI is transforming marketing communications, from the creation of content to its deployment and optimisation. Having an array of specialist advisors in siloed businesses limits the potential of AI to work to super-power marketing. Hornby says: “AI’s power really is at a pivot point for our industry, but will only be harnessed by a much more holistic approach. Combining our unique model with WPP’s £250m annual AI investment, means T&Pm will be well placed to help our clients seize this opportunity.”

• In a media and creative agency marketplace where points of differentiation can sometimes be hard to find, T&Pᵐ now has a clear, distinct offering that gives it standout. No other major agency has brought media properly back in-house in a fully integrated service and for some clients and talent, this will undoubtedly be a compelling alternative to the rest of the market.

Founder and CEO Johnny Hornby says: “Looking back, I’m not sure whose idea it was for our industry to separate creative and media agencies, but I’m sure the motives were more profit - than client-driven. If that separation ever made any sense, it certainly doesn’t today. Modern brands need to connect the dots, brilliant creative thinking can’t be divorced from the smart media systems that bring it to life, all of which can now be personalised at scale by breakthroughs in AI.” He adds that T&Pm will now apply “its independent Partner-led mindset to WPP’s market-leading AI platforms, to effectively become WPP’s AI ‘speedboat’, and accelerate growth across its entire roster of clients.”