Paul Wille

Paul Wille is a 25 year industry veteran and leader currently serving as Chief Operating Officer for VML, one of WPP’s largest operating companies. Paul has designed, scaled and optimized agencies and multi-disciplinary teams to be relentlessly client-centric and results-driven. His commitment to excellence has been instrumental in crafting and executing strategic business operations that foster growth both for Wunderman Thompson and its valued clients.

In Paul’s tenure at WPP, he:

• Transformed Wunderman Thompson’s operating model during the pandemic to be agile, client-centric and talent-first irrespective of geography
• Drove multi-year agency transformation and simplification effort to operate as one P&L, standardized onto a single ERP and introduced common tools and frameworks to work at the speed clients expect
• Held multiple interim Managing Director roles during business transformation, restructuring and reorienting teams toward growth
• Designed a collaboration model for distributed and global teams, increasing multi-continent work by over 200%
• Developed and deployed a proprietary business intelligence platform to bring real-time staff planning and resourcing insights to client teams and business leads

Prior to joining WPP, Paul was co-founder and the Chief Operating Officer of Swift, a social-first creative agency headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Under his leadership, Swift experienced exponential annual growth, doubling in size year after year, until its acquisition by WPP in 2014. Paul was integral in successfully integrating Swift into the WPP family post-acquisition.