Catalyst’s Beth LeTendre to Lead GroupM Performance Marketing Organization

June 4, 2019 –  Yesterday, GroupM, WPP’s media investment group, announced U.S. leadership changes.

Under North America CEO, Tim Castree, GroupM aims to simplify the complexity brought on by media fragmentation and bring clients the most progressive digital, data and performance capabilities as they pursue brand and business growth. As part of these changes, Catalyst co-founder, Beth LeTendre, has been named CEO of GroupM Performance U.S., where she’ll lead Xaxis, Catalyst, and GroupM’s other performance marketing businesses.

LeTendre will now oversee high-performing, innovation driven teams comprising more than 800 performance marketing experts across GroupM. Her main focus will be growing GroupM’s specialist performance businesses and scaling best practices in the group’s performance-marketing shared services of excellence.

For more on this announcement, please see the official GroupM press release here.

More about LeTendre

Beth LeTendre is CEO and co-founder of Catalyst, a search, social, and ecommerce marketing agency servicing the Fortune 1000. LeTendre founded Catalyst in 1998 and was instrumental in negotiating the 2006 acquisition of Catalyst by WPP, the world leader in marketing communications services. In 2008, Catalyst was placed within GroupM, where LeTendre oversaw all of GroupM’s search and social business, consistently driving double-digit growth for the agency and leading Catalyst’s global expansion. Her strategic vision and leadership has been key to the development and launch of Catalyst’s industry-leading and proprietary tools like eShelf and FUSION, as well as Catalyst’s top performance in the 2016 and 2017 Forrester Search Marketing Wave.

In 2017, LeTendre led Catalyst’s initiative to grow the agency’s direct business outside of the GroupM network. As part of this, she increased Catalyst direct billings by 224%, increased revenue by 220%, and increased new clients by 117%. Also in 2017, LeTendre demonstrated and reaffirmed Catalyst’s SEO expertise and strength through the launch of the TechSEO Boost conference. TechSEO Boost is the only digital marketing conference 100% dedicated to advanced technical SEO and has become a globally-recognized SEO event. A passionate New England sports fan, Beth is the driver of Catalyst’s unique, collaborative, and successful agency culture, including an employee retention rate of over 90%.

About GroupM

GroupM is the world’s leading media investment company responsible for nearly $48B in annual media investment through agencies including Mindshare, MediaCom, Wavemaker, Catalyst, Essence and m/SIX, as well as the outcomes-driven programmatic audience company, Xaxis. GroupM creates competitive advantage for advertisers via its worldwide organization of media experts who deliver powerful insights on consumers and media platforms, trading expertise, marketing-leading brand-safe media, technology solutions, addressable T, content, sports and more.

Discover more about GroupM at www.groupm.com

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