Leaving the Mad Men behind - how WPP's agentic platform play is shaping a new market pitch for an AI-enabled ad age

Here’s an interesting - and for some, no doubt, alarming - stat: in 2025, YouTube pulled in $40.4 billion in advertising revenue in 2025, according to estimates from media research firm MoffettNathanson. That’s more than Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Warner Bros Discovery combined - total, $37.8 billion.

YouTube also took 12.5% of total US television viewing in January, outperforming the combined streaming viewership of the other four legacy media companies. AI is playing a significant role here as creators of YouTube content tap into new tools that slash financial and production hurdles.

It’s this sort of sectoral behavior shift that has prompted a radical shake-up in how UK advertising powerhouse WPP operates in order to maintain its position in the market, as incoming CEO Cindy Rose alluded to back in November last year. Coming in from the tech sector - she was most recently COO for Global Enterprise at Microsoft - she clearly has a strong awareness of the disruptive potential of AI.

Her mission, which she has chosen to accept, is to ready the world’s largest ad agency for the changes ahead and halt the slide in sales that has afflicted the giant in recent times. For 2025, full year revenue of £13.55 billion was down 8.1% year-on-year, while WPP’s Top 25 clients declined 4.1% in 2025 as spending tightened across all sectors.

Now just over six months in situ as CEO, some clear targets have been identified, including the sale of assets, some sweeping headcount reduction, but most importantly, a clear plan to become “a simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business”on the back of £500 million of annual savings by 2028.

While her remit is specifically centered on the WPP global empire, Rose has a bigger picture view of the advertising market in mind when she explains:

For some time now, we've known that our industry is experiencing dramatic transformation. With the rapid diffusion of AI, we're not just seeing incremental shifts in consumer behavior, like this is a complete metamorphosis of the commercial ecosystem. Brands are now discovered in AI-driven conversational search.

This has serious implications for advertisers:

All the old barriers that protected established brands are gone. creators and influencers have reshaped consumer preference and can launch brands in an instant. Media is everywhere. It's in everything. It's no longer episodic and campaign-driven. It's continuous, always on, a stream where social, search and physical spaces all blend together. Commerce is the new organizing principle. Every action, every interaction is shoppable, and we're rapidly shifting to agented commerce where AI agents do the shopping on our behalf.

And in a cynical buyer market, trust is ever scarcer, she notes:

It must be earned every day in this world of synthetic content and deep fakes. Brands need to balance hyper-personalization with personal privacy. As the world is flooded with AI-generated content, the demand for verifiable human creativity, craft, empathy, taste is increasing as key brand differentiators.

Mad Men reach for their drinks...

It’s enough to make the Mad Men (and Women) of Madison Avenue reach for their 11am Scotch-on-the-Rocks with added fervor. But this is the new world order, insists Rose, and there’s no turning back:

These changing dynamics are not fleeting trends. The acceleration of AI is unstoppable. It's driving a complete metamorphosis of the commercial ecosystem. This is the reality our clients are navigating every day. The fragmentation, the complexity, the pace of change is dizzying for our clients and the paths to growth are much harder to find.

That changes the challenge facing the likes of WPP, and the services they offer to the market, she notes:

It’s never been more urgent to build compelling trusted brands that endure for generations and provide competitive advantage and long-term enterprise value. To cut through this noise and find new growth audiences in this environment, brands need to embrace new strategies grounded in deep data insights, real-time signals and AI that acts on these signals at the speed of light. 

In this perpetually-changing environment, clients don't need more traditional marketing agencies. What they need is a new playbook for growth and a trusted partner who can help them build it and operationalize it. A partner that operates as an intelligent orchestration layer across creativity, media, commerce, data and tech who fuses technical expertise with breakthrough creative thinking into one cohesive approach to modern brand building. 

But this new playbook requires “real transformation” in new ways. This isn’t just a re-arranging of the messaging deck to add in a few more buzzwords; this is proper tech transformation and that’s where Rose’s expertise is seen as an asset by WPP:

I spent the last decade delivering large-scale technology transformation to enterprise clients around the world, and I can tell you, it's not easy. Clients need to have AI-ready data foundations and agentic tool and governance in place. They need to be trained and skilled. Processes need to be re-imagined. There's really no shortcut when it comes to AI transformation. Every client I meet is going through it, and they all need our help.

So, beyond Rose’s own resume, what does an old advertising war horse like WPP bring to this brave new world? Shouldn’t clients be looking to slick newcomers to navigate this re-imagined market sector? Rose pitches:

We have world-class capabilities that span the entire marketing workflow from media to commerce, creative, PR, production, digital experiences, software engineering, data, AI and more. We’ve made really smart investments over the years in technology that have now enabled us to build WPP Open into a powerful future-facing agentic marketing platform, giving us a real competitive advantage. We have a presence in over 100 countries around the world, which means we can serve the most complex multinational, multi-client brands in the world. We have a scaled media offer and partnerships with every relevant player in the ecosystem. But maybe most importantly of all, we have an ambitious, competitive, high-energy team that is ready to embrace change and hungry to win.

Agentic marketing

The WPP Open agentic marketing play is a particularly important weapon in WPP’s AI arsenal. Rose explains:

WPP Open is a platform that we've been investing and building for a few years now.We recognized that we needed an end-to-end orchestration layer to connect workflow inside of WPP. And the platform enables us to scale intelligence and best practice across our group and reimagine business process and client solutions with the agentic capabilities that now live inside Agent Hub, an important recent addition to the platform.

She cites a recent example of this in action, centered on Google’s Pixel smartphone:

Using WPP Open and AI personas, we analyzed millennial conversations from across social media, uncovering a shift towards romanticizing everyday life and re-framing mundane moments as cinematic moments. Guided by this insight, our brand agent recommended focusing on Pixel's camera coach feature to help users take control of their story. Thanks to specialized agents, our workflow moved from social listening to creative concepts in just one  hour. With Google's advanced AI models within WPP Open, campaign assets were approved and live within 24 hours. This delivered a three percent increase in brand uplift, demonstrating a new marketing flywheel where insight, creativity and production really move at the speed of culture.

There’s been a lot of work put into WPP Open over the past year to enhance its capabilities, she adds:

Open Intelligence [WPP’s data management and integration solution] is our foundational intelligence layer that securely connects trillions of live data points from clients, partners and WPP in a privacy-first way. It's now integrated and powers the entire WPP platform end-to-end. We consolidated our technology and data solutions into one organization. We have one WPP development team, one integrated product road map, and one set of design and portfolio management principles, which dramatically simplifies how we think about evolving this platform in the future.

All of this has implications for how WPP staffers go about their business. Rose says:

Our people work on WPP Open every day, and it features in every client pitch as the single unified agentic platform that clients need to deliver integrated marketing workflows and a collaborative workspace where humans and agents can work together to deliver a system of growth that clients can trust. There are many, many point solutions available in the market today that address pieces, fragments of the marketing workflow, and they're often tied to specific platforms, leaving clients to manage costly complex tech stacks with fragmented workflows. WPP Open solves this problem in a single end-to-end platform. It's an agnostic system built on a common data model. It gives clients one source of truth to integrate operations, optimize investment and drive growth at scale.

But even if WPP Open lives up to everything that is claimed for it, it’s not enough in its own right to guarantee success for the firm. Or as Rose puts it:

In today's changing world, no single company can go it alone. WPP Open, as the name indicates, is open by design. We will continue to enhance our own technology with the very best and latest AI models and agentic tool sets through our groundbreaking strategic technology and data partnerships with Google, Microsoft, TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Stability AI and more.

The latest signing made by WPP to this end is an expansion of its existing relationship with Adobe, embedding that firm’s AI marketing suite directly into WPP Open. Rose explains:

This is a powerful integration that delivers effective streamlined marketing operations for our clients, enabling them to scale personalization, optimize media and create on-brand content efficiently with agentic AI workflows. This build, buy and partner approach that ensures that WPP Open remains at the forefront of cutting-edge technology innovation so that our clients always have state-of-the-art capability at their fingertips.

She adds:

These partnerships don't just give us access to new AI models and tools. They enable us to bring cutting-edge innovation resources to our clients and unlock important new routes to market, particularly important for our Enterprise Solutions business.

Enterprise opportunities

The performance of the Enterprise Solutions business will be one to watch as the AI transformation of WPP progresses. Rose positions it thus:

The hidden gem within WPP that we will now elevate to become the crown jewel. 

Why? Again, it’s down to increasing complexity faced by clients, argues Rose:

Today, every global business needs a partner that can help them build, run and evolve their core platforms and systems in a world where AI is part of everyday operations. Businesses are being forced to rethink how they establish competitive advantage and the potential to reinvent workflows has never been greater. For some of our clients, the need is clear and well articulated. For others, the need is completely unarticulated. They know there's a better way, but they don't know what it looks like.

Enterprise Solutions provides a complete enterprise transformation offer for clients that spans consulting, content, customer experience, commerce, CRM and platforms. We have a unique ability to fuse these capabilities with media intelligence and world-class creativity to build an AI-powered marketing operation end-to-end for our clients. WPP Enterprise Solutions benefits from multiple routes to market, including via our agency brands and both direct and partner-led go-to-markets as well. These multiple routes to market maximize our coverage and enhance our ability to cross-sell, capture white space, TAM growth opportunity within our installed client base.   

The plan is also that it should make a ton of money for WPP. Quackenbush estimates the enterprise transformation market as being worth $230 billion today, with the potential to grow seven percent over the next three years. At present, WPP’s share of that space is “small”, she admits, but the opportunity is significant:

Actually, we already have really solid foundations to build on. Today, our Enterprise Solutions business employs around 10,000 people and generates around $1.8 billion of revenue. It's about 13% of our overall group net revenue. This business has quietly built a book of exceptional clients and has already earned notable industry recognition from Gartner, Forrester and IDC.

My take

What would Don Draper make of it all? Actually he’d probably just light another cigarette, raise a quizzical eyebrow, and order another drink from the bar.

But in the real world, the ad industry is clearly one of those most susceptible to  seeing its established leaders disrupted and over-thrown if they don’t anticipate and move with the times.

Founded in 1971, WPP needs to navigate its second half-century playing against very different market rules to that of the first. There are many organizational reasons as to why WPP has seen decline in its financial performance in recent times and most of these can be addressed in conventional manner. What’s going to be more challenging is turning the media behemoth into an AI powerhouse.

Against that backdrop, appointing a savvy tech sector veteran like Rose rather than another creative type looks like a very smart move. We’re still at a very early stage in the game here, but the pitch is convincing and compelling. Watch this space!