Today, we've announced our strategic partnership with WPP, a world leader in communications, experience, commerce, and technology.
Through the years, brands have entrusted Vercel and WPP’s global network of agencies to help them modernize their digital experience with the best creative and the best technologies. Together, we serve leading organizations like The International Olympic Committee, James Hardie, Fluor, and Country Road Group.
Building on the foundation we’ve had, Vercel and WPP will be further investing resources into:
Co-developing an AI-first approach to the development and delivery of digital experiences
Facilitating quarterly global technology leader forums
Optimizing project delivery efficiency through a shared and standardized development process for Next.js and Vercel
Providing early product roadmap access to WPP and its selected customers
To illustrate what this partnership means for global brands, we went straight to the experts: CTOs from around the world, who have their finger on the pulse of the web and its future state.
Here are six of the trends they see realized with WPP and Vercel.
With many clients using legacy digital technology, they couldn't move forward with the latest advancements or cooler technologies—notably AI. Next.js has enabled our teams and clients to adapt and modernize their experiences, building faster, with the adaptability brands need to keep up with changing consumer needs and reduce overall costs.
Page load speeds, time to first byte, and other speed metrics factor directly into Google Vital search ranking scores. Both propositions are high priorities for the CMO, CDO, and CIO who want to deliver the best experiences in the most cost-effective manner.
Adam Wolf, Chief Technology Officer, VML Americas, a WPP Company
Next.js and Vercel empower our clients to bring relevant content closer to their global customers, ensuring continuous scalability and availability while minimizing maintenance costs and mitigating infrastructure failures. Based on a recent client's experience, we estimate cost reductions of up to 30% while increasing availability in the high 90s.
Jaison Manian, Chief Technology Officer, Ogilvy, a WPP Company
See the math for yourself .
Get the line-by-line breakdown of the efficiencies that add up to $2.4M in in The Total Economic Impact™ of Vercel’s Frontend Cloud, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting.
AKQA led a global retail client through an incremental transition to a new architecture, powered by Next.js and Vercel. With the integration of feature flags through Next.js Middleware, the retail leader has the power to enable new features independently from deployments. This allows for a test-and-learn approach, significantly reducing risk.
Eric Orton, Executive Technology Director, AKQA, a WPP Company
Next.js is enabling us to develop scalable ecommerce solutions for a diverse range of clients. Through this platform, we have successfully created a large-scale ecommerce platform for two prominent brands and support eight languages across 50 digital properties. This innovative technology has empowered our teams to take ownership of various aspects of the user journey and deploy new features seamlessly.
Glen Burson, Chief Technology Officer, VML, a WPP Company
Vercel's "framework-defined infrastructure" approach allows AKQA developers and creative CX teams to spend their time focused on building features that generate real business value for their clients, instead of configuring infrastructure. Brands benefit from a fast platform that scales to meet demand, as well as the ability to view and comment on changes via Previews, and the rich information Vercel provides about their apps' performance via Speed Insights.
Bennor McCarthy, MACH Technology Director, AKQA, a WPP Company
Hydrow, along with VML (formerly Wunderman Thompson Commerce & Technology), were intent on delivering an evolved digital experience internally and for their end users, encompassing real-time content updates, streamlined collaboration, and an unparalleled user interface.
By moving to a headless architecture and adopting Next.js and Vercel at the helm of their tech stack, Hydrow achieved:
3,000% faster site updates
50% improvement in Core Web Vitals, catapulting from the bottom 25% to the top 25% of ecommerce sites
Authoring time cut from weeks to minutes
Hydrow put the future of the web into action by activating with Vercel and WPP.
