Gemma Spence

CEO, VML Marketplace WPP Group

Gemma Spence is a recognised global commerce leader with over 15 years’ experience operating at the intersection of sales, marketing, technology, and retail. Her career spans client-side, retail, and agency leadership roles, with a consistent focus on building growth models that reflect how commerce actually works today — across platforms, algorithms, and consumer decision-making.
Gemma is CEO of VML / WPP’s Luxembourg business and leads WPP’s Amazon and Marketplace Centre of Excellence, supporting brands and teams across EMEA and globally. She works with over 1,800 commerce specialists to deliver integrated, performance-led commerce strategies — from discovery and consideration through to conversion and lifetime value. She is also a driving force behind the evolution of WPP’s commerce capabilities, including Commerce Studio and next-generation AI-led tools designed to optimise content performance, visibility, and operational efficiency at scale.
Previously, Gemma was Chief Commerce Officer at PHD (Omnicom Media Group), where she founded Transact, a global eCommerce consultancy. Her work has spanned FMCG, beauty, automotive, and consumer electronics, including hands-on leadership of in-house eCommerce operations for some of the world’s largest brands.
Gemma is widely recognised for shaping how the industry thinks about modern commerce. She has been named one of CIO Magazine’s 20 Businesswomen to Watch, Management Today’s 35 Women Under 35, Mediatel’s Future Media Leader, and was honoured by Aviva’s Women of the Future. As a contributing editor to WARC and Econsultancy, she regularly writes on the future of digital commerce, visibility, AI-driven discovery, and the changing role of marketing in automated environments.
She holds an Executive MBA with Distinction from the University of Oxford and is currently pursuing a PhD in Marketing Science, focused on how AI, recommendation systems, and signal-based decisioning are reshaping brand growth.