Wpromote expands its offerings to full service, dubbing it ‘brandformance’

Wpromote hired Janna Navarro away from her role as svp of planning at Dentsu’s Carat to become its first vp of brand strategy, and her background includes six years at Crispin Porter + Bogusky overseeing Domino’s media strategy. 

Navarro isn’t the only newcomer to Wpromote — Kingsley Taylor is the agency’s new managing director, charged with shaping the “brandformance” approach across the board. Taylor joins from Candor, where he was md as well, after four years managing Digitas West working out of the Bay Area and a stint as md of Organic.

As Christine Schrader, Wpromote’s vp of innovation explained it, the moves are a reaction to the changing habits and nature of consumers and potential customers for the agency’s clients, which include Athletic Brewing Co. and streamer Peacock. She likened it to the classic Chutes and Ladders game. 

“We’ve built a lot of media processes around the assumption that we’re going through this linear process of the board that ends in purchase, right? And we can roll the dice and incentivize that as you go,” said Schrader. “But it’s actually the chutes and ladders that jump you to the different parts of the board that have become a lot more the reality of how people are interacting with media and how they’re making decisions around what they’re going to buy and when … We’re not looking at a step-by-step through the funnel — that ends up with a lot of inefficient media and also disconnected media that’s not really reflecting how consumers are actually thinking.”

A veteran of many holding company jobs, Navarro said Wpromote feels more Silicon Valley than Madison Avenue in its desire to seek new ways to get brands connected to a more fickle consumer. 

“Having worked on huge Fortune 25 type brands, I’ve come to realize is there’s still this crazy disconnect between brand media and performance,” she said. “I know brand media is driving this and performance is driving that, but how do they connect? The fact that [Wpromote was] founded on a performance-based analytics mindset made me believe, if there is one place that can figure this out and how to attribute and measure brand media, it’s going to be this place.”

Thanks to investment from private equity firm ZMC, the agency has been able to invest in Polaris, an internal intelligence platform that serves as its operating system. Fellow holding company veteran Taylor sees that as a turbocharger of Wpromote’s full service aspirations. 

Wpromote “wasn’t built by acquisition or in a vacuum,” said Taylor. Polaris “isn’t just for day to day running of client media, but also for all of our talent and resources and management of talent, and pretty much everything that is done from an agency operational standpoint. There’s a whole team that nurtures and manages this system. So it is, it is a thing which is very rare in agency land.”

Athletic Brewing Co. is a client that’s worked with the agency since 2022, but just expanded Wpromote’s remit to be full service from a more pure performance-driven plan, said Kate Breen, media strategist for the non-alcoholic beer brand. And Polaris is already factoring into the brand’s efforts to track and measure its more brand-related work. The trick, said Breen, is to find ways to integrate all its other measurement tools and synthesize it through Polaris. 

“How do we get this one holistic view so that Polaris is becoming our one-stop shop?” said Breen. If it can be done, “it’ll make my life so much easier. Instead of having to log in here and here and here and putting together endless slides and decks, just one Polaris pull is the ideal future, if you will.”