Grey Global Group
Encyclopedia
Grey Group is a global advertising
and marketing
agency, whose slogan is providing "Famously Effective" solutions - with headquarters
in New York City
, and 432 offices in 96 countries, operating in 154 cities — organized into four geographical units: North America
; Europe, Middle East & Africa
, Asia
-Pacific and Latin America
.
As a unit of communications conglomerate WPP Group
, Grey Global Group operates branded independent business units in many communications disciplines including: advertising
, direct marketing
, public relations
, public affairs
, brand development
, customer relationship management
, sales promotion
, interactive marketing
— through its subsidiaries: Grey, G2, GHG, GCI Group, MediaCom Worldwide, Alliance, G WHIZ, and WINGLATINO.
Grey Group’s international clients include: Procter & Gamble
, GlaxoSmithKline
, Nokia
, BAT
, Diageo
, Volkswagen
, Novartis
, Wyeth
, Canon, Direct TV and 3M
.
The company has won: 10 Cannes Lions; beside the Addy
, Clio
and one Emmy Award
. Grey Group's European network, Grey EMEA, won 26 Euro EFFIE
awards, and is the four-time Euro EFFIE Agency Network of the Year, in four consecutive years of 2005–2008.
company named Grey Studios, reflecting the color of the wall of its original quarters, changing to Grey Advertising in 1925.
In , Grey acquired its first major client, Procter & Gamble
. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Grey continued to acquire such major accounts, and grew into related communication fields. In , Edward H. Meyer became CEO and would remain in that position for 36 years before selling the company and joining his son, Anthony E. Meyer
, in management of private family wealth.
In , the off-shore operation, London
-based Grey Communications Group, recruited Barry Chapman as Group IS Director. In Chapman developed the New Media Experiment. Chapman explored the use of the internet
as an alternative to traditional advertising media putting Grey at the forefront of the internet revolution.
In , Grey Advertising became Grey Global Group. On , WPP Group
beat out Havas
in a race to acquire Grey Global, the seventh-largest advertising agency at the time, for approximately 1.3 billion USD.
In late 2005, James R. Heekin III became CEO of Grey Worldwide, Grey Global Group's traditional advertising agency
. On , he became Chairman and CEO of Grey Group, the renamed agency holding company. He reports to Martin Sorrell
, CEO of WPP Group.
Grey Group, Grey Advertising New York and G2 moved to a LEEDS certified building at 200 5th Avenue in New York in November 2009, after 45 years at their previous location.
In 2010, Grey was put on Ad Age's "Agency A-List".
In 2006, Grey was awarded 12 "Spots of the Week" by Advertising Age
, which placed it second-highest overall.
, Duck Phillips joins Grey Advertising after being dumped by Sterling-Cooper.
In episode three of the 2010 series of BBC Three
's Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum
, the young adults spend a day at Grey Advertising working on a mock sexual health campaign.
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
and marketing
Marketing
Marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments...
agency, whose slogan is providing "Famously Effective" solutions - with headquarters
Headquarters
Headquarters denotes the location where most, if not all, of the important functions of an organization are coordinated. In the United States, the corporate headquarters represents the entity at the center or the top of a corporation taking full responsibility managing all business activities...
in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and 432 offices in 96 countries, operating in 154 cities — organized into four geographical units: North America
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
; Europe, Middle East & Africa
Grey EMEA
Grey EMEA is the largest division of Grey Group, a global advertising and marketing agency and member of the WPP network...
, Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
-Pacific and Latin America
Latin America
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
.
As a unit of communications conglomerate WPP Group
WPP Group
WPP plc is a global media communications services company with its main management office in London, United Kingdom and its executive office in Dublin, Ireland. It is the world's largest advertising group by revenues, and employs over 150,000 people in 2,400 offices in 107 countries...
, Grey Global Group operates branded independent business units in many communications disciplines including: advertising
Advertising
Advertising is a form of communication used to persuade an audience to take some action with respect to products, ideas, or services. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common...
, direct marketing
Direct marketing
Direct marketing is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses and nonprofits to communicate straight to the customer, with advertising techniques such as mobile messaging, email, interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional...
, public relations
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
, public affairs
Public affairs (broadcasting)
Public affairs, a broadcasting industry term, refers to television programs which focuses on matters of politics and public policy. Among commercial broadcasters, such programs are often only to satisfy Federal Communications Commission regulatory expectations and are not scheduled in prime time...
, brand development
Brand management
Brand management is the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand.The discipline of brand management was started at Procter & Gamble as a result of a famous memo by Neil H...
, customer relationship management
Customer relationship management
Customer relationship management is a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing,...
, sales promotion
Sales promotion
Sales promotion is one of the four aspects of promotional mix. Media and non-media marketing communication are employed for a pre-determined, limited time to increase consumer demand, stimulate market demand or improve product availability...
, interactive marketing
Interactive marketing
Interactive Marketing refers to the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation. John Deighton argued that interactive marketing features “the ability to address an individual and the ability to gather andremember the response of that...
— through its subsidiaries: Grey, G2, GHG, GCI Group, MediaCom Worldwide, Alliance, G WHIZ, and WINGLATINO.
Grey Group’s international clients include: Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....
, GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline
GlaxoSmithKline plc is a global pharmaceutical, biologics, vaccines and consumer healthcare company headquartered in London, United Kingdom...
, Nokia
Nokia
Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...
, BAT
Bat
Bats are mammals of the order Chiroptera "hand" and pteron "wing") whose forelimbs form webbed wings, making them the only mammals naturally capable of true and sustained flight. By contrast, other mammals said to fly, such as flying squirrels, gliding possums, and colugos, glide rather than fly,...
, Diageo
Diageo
Diageo plc is a global alcoholic beverages company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest producer of spirits and a major producer of beer and wine....
, Volkswagen
Volkswagen
Volkswagen is a German automobile manufacturer and is the original and biggest-selling marque of the Volkswagen Group, which now also owns the Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, SEAT, and Škoda marques and the truck manufacturer Scania.Volkswagen means "people's car" in German, where it is...
, Novartis
Novartis
Novartis International AG is a multinational pharmaceutical company based in Basel, Switzerland, ranking number three in sales among the world-wide industry...
, Wyeth
Wyeth
Wyeth, formerly one of the companies owned by American Home Products Corporation , was a pharmaceutical company. The company was based in Madison, New Jersey, USA...
, Canon, Direct TV and 3M
3M
3M Company , formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation based in Maplewood, Minnesota, United States....
.
The company has won: 10 Cannes Lions; beside the Addy
Addy Awards
The ADDY Awards is the world's largest advertising competition with over 50,000 entries annually. Founded in Florida in 1960 it was adopted by the American Advertising Federation, a not-for-profit industry association, as a national competition in 1968....
, Clio
Clio Awards
The Clio Awards are annual awards bestowed to reward innovation and creative excellence in advertising, design and communication. The categories include work in nearly all types of media, and the judges are advertising professionals from around the world....
and one Emmy Award
Emmy Award
An Emmy Award, often referred to simply as the Emmy, is a television production award, similar in nature to the Peabody Awards but more focused on entertainment, and is considered the television equivalent to the Academy Awards and the Grammy Awards .A majority of Emmys are presented in various...
. Grey Group's European network, Grey EMEA, won 26 Euro EFFIE
EFFIE
The Effie Awards are marketing communications awards given yearly by Effie Worldwide, Inc., a non-profit organization, to honor the most effective marketing communications ideas: ideas that work...
awards, and is the four-time Euro EFFIE Agency Network of the Year, in four consecutive years of 2005–2008.
History
Founded in by Larry Valenstein and Arthur Fatt, Grey Global Group began as a direct marketingDirect marketing
Direct marketing is a channel-agnostic form of advertising that allows businesses and nonprofits to communicate straight to the customer, with advertising techniques such as mobile messaging, email, interactive consumer websites, online display ads, fliers, catalog distribution, promotional...
company named Grey Studios, reflecting the color of the wall of its original quarters, changing to Grey Advertising in 1925.
In , Grey acquired its first major client, Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble
Procter & Gamble is a Fortune 500 American multinational corporation headquartered in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio and manufactures a wide range of consumer goods....
. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Grey continued to acquire such major accounts, and grew into related communication fields. In , Edward H. Meyer became CEO and would remain in that position for 36 years before selling the company and joining his son, Anthony E. Meyer
Anthony E. Meyer
Anthony Edward Meyer is a private investor, entrepreneur and philanthropist who manages a family office, investment management company alongside his father, Edward H. Meyer ], retired Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of Grey Global Group...
, in management of private family wealth.
In , the off-shore operation, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
-based Grey Communications Group, recruited Barry Chapman as Group IS Director. In Chapman developed the New Media Experiment. Chapman explored the use of the internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
as an alternative to traditional advertising media putting Grey at the forefront of the internet revolution.
In , Grey Advertising became Grey Global Group. On , WPP Group
WPP Group
WPP plc is a global media communications services company with its main management office in London, United Kingdom and its executive office in Dublin, Ireland. It is the world's largest advertising group by revenues, and employs over 150,000 people in 2,400 offices in 107 countries...
beat out Havas
Havas
Havas is the second largest advertising group in France and is a "Global advertising and communications services group" and the sixth-largest global advertising and communications group worldwide, operating on the communications consulting market through three main operational divisions:*Euro RSCG...
in a race to acquire Grey Global, the seventh-largest advertising agency at the time, for approximately 1.3 billion USD.
In late 2005, James R. Heekin III became CEO of Grey Worldwide, Grey Global Group's traditional advertising agency
Advertising agency
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients. An ad agency is independent from the client and provides an outside point of view to the effort of selling the client's products or services...
. On , he became Chairman and CEO of Grey Group, the renamed agency holding company. He reports to Martin Sorrell
Martin Sorrell
Sir Martin Sorrell is an English businessman and the chief executive officer of WPP Group. He has served in that role since he started the company.-Biography:...
, CEO of WPP Group.
Grey Group, Grey Advertising New York and G2 moved to a LEEDS certified building at 200 5th Avenue in New York in November 2009, after 45 years at their previous location.
Awards
In 2010, Grey was named to Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies.In 2010, Grey was put on Ad Age's "Agency A-List".
In 2006, Grey was awarded 12 "Spots of the Week" by Advertising Age
Advertising Age
Advertising Age is a magazine, delivering news, analysis and data on marketing and media. The magazine was started as a broadsheet newspaper in Chicago in 1930...
, which placed it second-highest overall.
In popular culture
In the AMC series Mad MenMad Men
Mad Men is an American dramatic television series created and produced by Matthew Weiner. The series premiered on Sunday evenings on the American cable network AMC and are produced by Lionsgate Television. It premiered on July 19, 2007, and completed its fourth season on October 17, 2010. Each...
, Duck Phillips joins Grey Advertising after being dumped by Sterling-Cooper.
In episode three of the 2010 series of BBC Three
BBC Three
BBC Three is a television network from the BBC broadcasting via digital cable, terrestrial, IPTV and satellite platforms. The channel's target audience includes those in the 16-34 year old age group, and has the purpose of providing "innovative" content to younger audiences, focusing on new talent...
's Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum
Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum
Young Dumb and Living Off Mum is an entertainment/reality series airing on BBC Three. The series follows a group of young adults who have been waited on hand and foot their whole lives. The series sees them living together in a house and fending for themselves...
, the young adults spend a day at Grey Advertising working on a mock sexual health campaign.
See also
- Space ChairSpace ChairSpace Chair is a British television and cinema advertisement launched by Toshiba in 2009 to promote its Regza SD LCD televisions. The 60-second piece, following the launch of an armchair into near space attached to a weather balloon, is the second in the "Projects" campaign, following on from Time...
recent ad for Toshiba - Let The Issues Be The IssueLet The Issues Be The Issue"Let The Issues Be The Issue" was an American viral political advertising campaign by the New York division of the Grey Group that focused around the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. Tor Myhren, a Creative Director within the group, devised the campaign...
(Campaign about the 2008 U.S. Presidential election)