Sven Wollner

Hi, I am Sven Wollner, born 1971, working as Managing Partner and Director of Next at the media investment company GroupM in Düsseldorf, Germany.

I am responsible for corporate marketing & strategy, communication and innovation culture at GroupM.

My job in one sentence: To ask day by day "What's next?" and hopefully delivering the right answers for our more than 2000 employees in Germany.

I have co-founded the GroupM's tech & innovation conference nextm which expanded to several countries in EMEA already.

By the way, please check out our employer branding & career platform campus.groupm.de which I invented together with my team in 2017. This award-winning website helps us to attract the talents, movers & makers for GroupM and our agency brands.

Some words about my educational background and my work as university guest lecturer:

I have a diploma in media science and communication research from the Institut fuer Journalistik und Kommunikationsforschung (IJK) , Hannover/Germany.

Since 2005 I am a guest lecturer at several universities covering trend research, strategic communication planning and creative brainstorming methods. At the Hamburg Media School I teach their great MBA students all about about trend research and innovation management since 2007. And it still makes fun!

Further activities and publications:

I have served as Board Member for the the TEDx activities in Germany till 2019.

Find some articles and PoVs here: Innovation at nextm, Bridging the Death Valley of Innovation, Evolution of Moving Pictures

Sven's career track list:

I started my career at TrendbueroHamburg, then I joined the strategy agency diffferent in 2000, established the Berlin office in 2001, and worked as a strategic brand consultant for about 40 brands and blue chip companies.

In 2007 I moved to Dusseldorf, and became the first Director of Freshness at MediaCom - supporting the culture of curiosity of this agency and their 900 employees. I also worked as strategic facilitator for many of the 300 clients and last but not least in my role as head of marketing I was responsible for all communication & branding topics of MediaCom.

In 2016 I moved to MediaCom's holding company GroupM.

Private facts:

Married father of two daughters, an amateur guitar player (but getting better every day....), Hobby-DJ (80s...) and a big fan of string theory, because before I graduated in media science, I studied physics for two years. But that's another story...