In the picture: Nicolas Blanc

Acceleration is one of GroupM’s five units, and it has a new boss – recruited internally, but brought in from outside.

A year and a half ago, a new GroupM unit was launched, Acceleration, as a merger of Business Science and Flip Studio. And half a year ago, Marianne Hjaltelin quit as head of the unit.

Now GroupM is ready to announce who will be taking over as the new Nordic Managing Director of Acceleration, which has a particular focus on data and tech.

The new MD is Nicolas Blanc, who moved to Copenhagen from Paris with ten years of experience from Wavemaker France.

Initially, he was employed as commercial director in Acceleration in August 2021, and is now stepping into the role as the official head of the unit.

“Nicolas has shown a fantastic understanding of our business and culture, and we are really excited to see him lead Acceleration into the future”, says GroupM Nordic CEO, Jonas Hemmingsen.

Two focus areas
In his new job, Nicolas Blanc will focus on customer cooperation and products development.

The task that lies in focusing on products, is expressed by Nicolas Blanc as follows:
“At Acceleration, we have been historically developing and delivering advanced solutions to our customers. Last year we launched Paradigm, developed under the context of advertisers’ increasing need to comply with changes in privacy regulations and the phasing out of third-party cookies. It is an end-to-end cookieless solution that evaluates media investments in real time and allocates media budgets directly on media buying platforms. It gives advertisers the opportunity to simulate and test the performance of different investment scenarios.”

The collaboration goes in the direction of integrating Acceleration employees with customers rather than selling solutions. Nicolas Blanc explains:

“Agencies have sold media-related solutions for a long time, and have organized themselves around the delivery of those solutions. But with the increased focus on data and privacy, it has become business-critical for customers to own their solutions within data and tech. That is why we work more and more towards integrating our employees with the customers instead of selling finalized solutions.”