GroupM Forms New Partnership With City College of New York

Scholarship Program Is Among Initiatives Intended to Attract Students to Advertising Industry

groupmGroupM, the global media investment management unit of WPP, today announced the establishment of a new partnership with the City College of New York designed to identify and cultivate college students for careers in the advertising industry.

The program, dubbed the GroupM Professional Development Initiative, will be available to students in CCNY’s Advertising/Public Relations Program with an emphasis on undergraduates with ethnically diverse backgrounds.

The project consists of two principal components: a scholarship program, and a separate enrichment fund designed to benefit a wide range of Ad/PR majors by allowing them to participate in professional development opportunities in their junior or senior years. Both elements will help GroupM identify promising talent early among CCNY’s Ad/PR majors and cultivate relationships with students for possible internships and employment.

“GroupM is looking forward to our new partnership with CCNY and to tapping into its rich tradition of academic excellence,” said GroupM North American Chief Executive Officer Rob Norman. “Our goal is to help CCNY’s richly diverse student population discover and participate in the many challenging and rewarding career opportunities available in our industry. I would also add that we are truly inspired by the students we have met so far and are learning as much from them as they are from us.”

Under the scholarship initiative, GroupM will provide ten $1,000 annual scholarships to be awarded in the spring and applied to tuition payments the following fall, each one representing an amount that could cover as much as 40 percent of a single semester’s tuition. Among other criteria, recipients must be full time students in CCNY’s Ad/PR Program entering their junior or senior year and must maintain an overall GPA of at least 3.0.

The second element, known as the GroupM Student Enrichment Fund, will benefit a wide range of Ad/PR majors beyond the scholarship program. Eligible students will be able to participate in professional development opportunities in their junior or senior years and will be chosen by CCNY’s Ad/PR faculty based on their GPA and the level of their intent to pursue a career in advertising. One of those opportunities includes GroupM sponsoring two students to attend the 4A’s Transformation Conference next March in Austin, Texas. The event is an annual gathering of leading executives from top U.S. advertising, marketing and media companies organized by the 4A’s.

“GroupM’s leadership in building a relationship with CCNY demonstrates an important commitment to cultivating diversity in the advertising profession,” said Lynn Appelbaum, professor and Director of CCNY’s Ad/PR Program. “GroupM’s scholarship support and professional development sets an example for the industry. This is the beginning of a very important a relationship and a very important learning cycle.”

About GroupM
GroupM is the leading global media investment management operation. It serves as the parent company to WPP media agencies including Maxus, MEC, MediaCom and Mindshare. Our primary purpose is to maximize the performance of WPP’s media communications agencies on behalf of our clients, our stakeholders and our people by operating as a parent and collaborator in performance-enhancing activities such as trading, content creation, sports, digital, finance, proprietary tool development and other business-critical capabilities. The agencies that comprise GroupM are all global operations in their own right with leading market positions. The focus of GroupM is the intelligent application of physical and intellectual scale to benefit trading, innovation and new communication services, to bring competitive advantage to our clients and our companies.

About CCNY’s AD/PR Program
The Advertising & Public Relations Program of the Media & Communication Arts Department at City College offers a Bachelor of Arts degree to a diverse, yet selective, group of highly motivated students. In addition to providing a rigorous curriculum which explores current theories in integrated marketing, advertising, corporate communications, public relations and communications management, the Program is dedicated to delivering practical knowledge and hands-on experiences that students can only get by studying in New York City, the communications capital of the world. The program not only gives students access to global corporations, leading-edge firms and dynamic grass roots organizations, but also to an engaged faculty that includes working professionals.

Primary Contact:
John Wolfe
GroupM
(212) 297-7160
(914) 659-8663
[email protected]

Secondary Contact:
Jay Mwamba
City College of New York Public Relations
(212) 650-7580
(917) 892-0374
[email protected]