Sven Wollner

Hi, I am Sven Wollner, born 1971, working as Managing Partner Corporate Marketing at the media investment agency group WPP Media (formerly known as GroupM) in Düsseldorf, Germany.

I am responsible for corporate marketing at WPP Media (formerly known as GroupM) in Germany.

• Developing and implementing the corporate marketing communication strategy including corporate brand portfolio management and corporate brand experience
• directly reporting to the managing board.
• Co-leading a team of several experts (PR, internal & external communications, intranet, social media, CI/CD, events)
• steering external suppliers and service providers
• closely working together with practice leaders, people/HR department, legal, DevOps, finance etc.
• Founder and curator of our innovation & tech event NextM in Germany, which evolved to one of the leading innovation conferences (starting in 2017 / now with more than 900 participants) see more at www.nextm.de
• Responsible for and curating our presence at leading events like d3con, OMR, dmexco etc.
• member of WPP Media's global marketing community

My job in one sentence: To ask day by day "What's next and what's important?" and hopefully delivering the right answers for our more than 2900 employees in Germany.

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:

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

I am also supporting start-ups (stealth mode) in their marketing topics.

My 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, which renamed into WPP Media in 2025.

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...