GroupM Announces Acquisition of Analytics Firm Sandtable

Agent Based Modeling (ABM) specialists will be integrated within GroupM’s technology practice

New York, N.Y. (March 5, 2020) – GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, announced today the acquisition of U.K.-based behavioral analytics firm Sandtable. Sandtable will become fully integrated within GroupM’s technology practice, offering cutting edge simulation capabilities and reinforcing GroupM and WPP’s commitment to innovation in data science. With the acquisition, GroupM becomes the first media agency group to purposefully invest in Agent Based Modeling (ABM).

Since 2015, Sandtable, an analytics company specializing in ABM, has added significant value working collaboratively with GroupM on pitches and existing business. Bringing Sandtable into the fold allows GroupM and its agencies to leverage ABM to build powerful strategy and planning tools, as well as assist clients in making marketing decisions in complex, and often ambiguous, environments.

“We’ve worked with the Sandtable team for a number of years and have been close partners,” said GroupM Global CEO Christian Juhl. “It made sense for us to bring them into GroupM as both companies are aligned on the vision of how to leverage data and advanced simulations, which furthers the execution of our strategy to provide technology enabled services to all of our agencies and clients. We are excited to have Sandtable’s highly talented team join GroupM’s corporate vision of making advertising work better for all people.”

ABM has risen to prominence recently thanks to the availability of elastic computing resources and the need to support data driven decisions while respecting individual privacy. Sandtable and GroupM have been pioneering this technology to address client problems where there is disruption and complexity, as it computes important trade-offs in a consistent, comparable way that links individual behavior with sales.

“We’ve been working with GroupM since 2015 to bring new insights to the work their teams do for clients through the use of advanced simulations,” said Sandtable Founder and CEO Andrew Skates. “We’ve seen firsthand the way GroupM is able to utilize technology to provide better outcomes for their clients; this is just the natural next step for us to apply our approach at a greater scale and help GroupM’s clients better understand complex, changing markets and unlock future sources of growth. ABM is also the type of technology that can help create a healthier advertising world. We’re excited to do that as part of the GroupM family.”

Sandtable, founded in 2009 and based in London, employs highly skilled data scientists, software engineers, behavioral scientists and strategic planners.