Henkel expands WPP partnership with global creative and production win

GERMANY – Henkel has named WPP, a trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands,  as the global creative lead for its top household and beauty brands. 

This move effectively shifts Henkel’s flagship brands away from a fragmented, multi‑agency setup to a tightly integrated, full‑service model anchored by WPP.

WPP will take on a consolidated global creative and production mandate for Henkel Consumer Brands, notably covering icons such as Persil (laundry), Schwarzkopf and Syoss (hair care). 

The remit extends beyond traditional “big‑idea” campaigns to include end‑to‑end creative, production and marketing‑technology services across all key markets, effectively making WPP the strategic backbone of Henkel’s external creative machine.

Cindy Rose, CEO of WPP, stated, “Henkel’s ambition for end-to-end marketing excellence aligns perfectly with our ability to bring together world-class creativity with the transformative capabilities of WPP Open, our agentic marketing platform.” 

“Building on the success of our European media partnership, we’re ready to accelerate Henkel’s growth by connecting creative, production and media in one seamless engine.”

The creative win builds directly on WPP’s prior appointment as Henkel’s consolidated media partner for Europe, which it secured in a separate, high‑stakes global pitch against Omnicom. 

Meanwhile, last year WPP Media consolidated Henkel’s European media business into a single, centralized structure across 30 markets, taking full control of the FMCG group’s previously fragmented media operations on the continent.

The move brought around €825 million (USD 965 million) of European media spend under one umbrella, covering both traditional and digital channels for Henkel Consumer Brands’ portfolio.

This consolidation saw WPP Media add 13 new markets, such as Austria, Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Romania, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine, to the 17 it already managed, including the UK. 

The remit encompasses major brands such as Persil and Perwoll in laundry and home care, as well as beauty‑care labels Schwarzkopf and Syoss, with digital media activation led from key hubs in Düsseldorf and London.

The European media win was framed as part of a broader “future of media” strategy, leveraging AI, automation and data‑driven optimization via WPP’s WPP Open platform and its Open Media Studio model, which has already supported more than 900 Henkel‑branded campaigns. 

This consolidation now underpins WPP’s expanded global creative and production mandate for Henkel Consumer Brands, awarded after a 12‑month worldwide pitch, which unifies creative, production and media under one operating model for Persil, Schwarzkopf, Syoss and other global brands.

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