By Tim Vaughan
— December 18th, 2025
For WPP, one of the world’s largest communications companies, enterprise-wide communication must match the scale and ambition of the business itself.
With more than 100,000 colleagues across the globe, even routine IT updates carry real weight.
Against this backdrop, the WPP Enterprise Technology Communications team set out to raise the benchmark for its communications—reducing complexity, improving engagement, inspiring a standardized approach across the organization, and unlocking colleague feedback to enhance IT services.
But the legacy technology at their disposal wasn’t built for the scale or sophistication they needed. The team delivers approximately two million emails a year, yet fragmented systems required inefficient, time-consuming workarounds that limited both quality and impact.
A good illustration of this was The Wrap, the monthly newsletter sent to 2,000 Enterprise Technology colleagues. Created in one platform but distributed via Outlook or Salesforce, it could support only the most basic design. Engagement reflected the constraints: open rates hovered at 30–35 percent.
The monthly all-colleague feedback survey faced even steeper challenges. A costly legacy provider delivered emails that looked like spam and were often caught in spam filters, leaving the team unable to accurately mine data from more than 100,000 colleagues.
“As you would guess, this was a big problem for us,” said Lewis O’Neill, Senior Communications Business Partner, “because we knew we had a potentially golden source of data that we weren’t able to get our hands on.”
In 2022, the team selected Poppulo to transform how they communicated across the enterprise. The results have been sweeping. With Poppulo, each communicator now saves nearly two days—15 hours—per month, reclaiming time for more value-add work. Engagement has doubled.
The team rebuilt The Wrap from the ground up, introducing standardized templates, dynamic content, social features, microsites, and deeper personalization.
“We dropped a bomb on the newsletter and made the content much more colleague-focused,” said O’Neill. He described the change as “night-to-day,” a shift made possible by Poppulo.
Survey response rates have “shot up,” said O'Neill, unlocking reliable feedback that now informs onboarding, training, and continuous improvement across IT services.
And as early adopters, the Enterprise Technology Communications team has helped fuel broader Poppulo adoption across WPP, raising the communications benchmark company-wide and laying the groundwork for continued communications maturity.
Read the full WPP-Poppulo story here.