LONDON — BP has completed the competitive review of its media, advertising and PR accounts and has retained WPP as its preferred partner to provide marketing communication services across its corporate, fuels and Castrol businesses globally.

WPP has created Team Energy to service the BP account, which will bring together expertise from agencies across the network, including Ogilvy, VML, Mindshare, Grey, Essence, SocialLabs and Landor, to provide advertising, media investment management, digital media, marketing communication, branding and research and PR.

Media relations and investor relations will continue to be handled in-house, while non-WPP consultancy Brunswick retains the corporate brief. Under the new model, the rest of the PR element of the account is likely to be serviced by a bespoke team being pulled together from across WPP’s PR agencies, which include Ogilvy, Hill+Knowlton Strategies and Burson Cohn & Wolfe, rather than landing with one agency.

David Nicholas, head of BP’s group press office, said: “This new agreement continues the work that WPP has been providing BP for many years – including advertising and media buying – but with a new cross-agency approach to most effectively support our advertising and marketing communications. As with our existing long-standing relationship it includes neither investor relations nor media relations, which are carried out in-house. Nor does it affect our continuing work with Brunswick.”

Team Energy will be based in London with hubs around the world. As part of the new approach, Team Energy includes a flexible media model for BP – EnergyMedia – that combines talent from across WPP agencies including Mindshare, Essence, Neo and POSSIBLE to match global buying power with specialist programmatic, search and e-commerce skills.

BP group head of communications and external affairs Geoff Morrell said: “BP has enjoyed a highly successful relationship with WPP and we appreciate their exceptional partnership throughout the last 20 years. As we enter the third decade of our relationship, we have agreed on a completely new way of working to enable easy access to the best talent and ideas that WPP has to offer.”