Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just reshaping industries, it’s upending them. Nowhere is this more evident than in advertising, where AI is reshaping how brands create, deliver and optimise campaigns.
While many firms are still finding their feet with AI, WPP is claiming it has hit the ground running.
For the global communications giant, the AI arms race is not just a fad, but rather a high-stakes battle to regain its footing in an increasingly competitive landscape.
Once the undisputed global advertising leader, WPP faced a bruising few years financially.
It’s share price dropped to a four-year low last month, and the firm’s warning of flat revenue growth and profit margins for 2024 was a trenchant reflection of the challenges ahead.
Coupled with recent client losses like Coca-Cola in the US to French rival Publicis, WPP is scrambling to reestablish its superiority.
Responding to these setbacks, the company has deployed AI across its global operations at a rate more familiar to Silicon Valley than to Madison Avenue.
It has accelerated its AI roll-out at unprecedented speed, as it aims to regain its reigning position in the industry.
A fight to stay competitive
WPP’s push to integrate AI into its operations forms part of a broader industry-wide trend.
Publicis, WPP’s biggest competitor, committed a €300m investment to AI in 2024 to build its CoreAI platform which integrates data, AI and creativity into a seamless cross-agency system.
Publicis’s approach to implementation has earned the company a reputation as a leader in the space, while WPP, once the dominant titan in global advertising, is working to keep up.
Stephan Pretorius, WPP’s chief technology officer, spoke to CityAM about the company’s approach to AI.
“We are delivering software at the pace of Google or Meta”, he said, showing the firm’s eagerness to close the competitive gap.
WPP has embraced agility in its AI rollout, pushing up to 30 software releases a day in a bid to constantly evolve and innovate in real time.
“We have never shipped more technology faster, in WPP’s history, than we are right now”, said Pretorius.
The drive may be partly about reclaiming industry leadership, given the financial losses and increased competition from platforms like Meta and TikTok, which now control nearly half of global advertising budgets.
With generative AI allowing more brands to bypass traditional agencies to advertise directly on their own platforms, WPP’s efforts fight to maintain relevance.
Yet, the pace of its innovation isn’t just about catching up with peers.
The company is also creating an environment where AI is integrated into every aspect of the firm’s operations to accelerate each facet, from media optimisation to creative ideation.
“We’ve given the team a lot of space to execute because if you’re too rigid, things slow down massively. You need reliability and governance, but you also need to move fast,” the ad exec says.
The result is a fundamental shift in how marketing is conceived and delivered, ultimately changing how brands interact with their audiences.
AI as a creative ‘thought partner’
WPP claims approach to AI is not about replacing human creativity, but rather enhancing it.
The company approaches AI as a collaborative force, reshaping the creative process rather than automating it entirely.
Pretorius refers to AI as “thought partner” in creativity, allowing WPP’s team to push the boundaries of traditional thinking.
The integration of AI into WPP’s creative processes is already paying dividends, acting as a thought partner to expand the realm of possibility.
“It’s like the ultimate ‘What if?’ engine’ he says, as he describes how this technology accelerates the journey from idea to execution.
Integrating AI spans multiple steps within the creative process. For production, the focus is on automation, enabling vast scale content adaptation across languages, markets and channels.
Meanwhile, optimisation is the operative word in its integration in media planning, allowing brands to make smarter, more data-driven decisions on media spend and content performance.
Beyond internal efficiencies, WPP is also using AI for hyper-personalisation in marketing campaigns.
WPP has already experimented with the fledgling technology to power several high-profile campaigns.
In one instance it deployed AI to enable Bollywood’s biggest star Shah Rukh Khan to promote small businesses across India, using deepfakes to tailor messages to consumers based on their location.
Other high profile AI-driven campaigns include Virgin Cruises with J Lo, and a football-focused Snickers campaign starring José Mourinho , demonstrating the potential for brands to engage with customers in ways that were previously impossible.
WPP Open: a unified AI operating system
At the heart of the company’s pivot towards AI is ‘WPP Open’, an AI-driven marketing operating system.
This platform standardises tools, workflows, and data across the company’s extensive network, allowing all WPP agencies to work with standardised resources.
Pretorius describes it as “a full marketing operating system that allows all of our agencies to work in a consistent way, with all the same tools and data”.
It’s impact has been profound, both in accelerating internal adoption and boosting client engagement.
With $400m (£308m) allocated annually to AI and technology- roughly 3 per cent of the firm’s net sales- WPP’s investment in AI is no small wager.
Yet, Pretorius is adamant that this is just the beginning. “It’s not exhaustive when you consider our relative investment in technology versus revenue”, he notes, suggesting the current figure is likely to rise as AI becomes even more integral to the business.
“Marketing services will be a combination of human talent and artificial intelligence,” he says.
“Clients are evaluating our people, their expertise, and our AI platform together. They’re understanding how they work in tandem, and what that means for pricing and value.”
Democratising AI: the rise of AI agents
One of the WPP’ss most powerful AI initiatives is its agent-based framework.
Rather than opting for a cookie-cutter approach, the company has urged its employees to build bespoke AI agents tailored to specific needs.
“We launched the first version of our agent builder last September, and to date, people have built 28,000 agents across the company”, says Pretorius.
By decentralising AI development, WPP empowers its workers to create various agents across the board like effectiveness agents, pricing agents, or creative agents.
WPP is also rolling out an updated model that allows its employees to design AI workflows that blend automation with human oversight at every stage.
“Crucially”, Pretorius explains, “the user decides the balance between autonomy and control. We don’t want an AI black box making decisions that people should be making.”
“We want human judgement, taste, intuition, and emotional intelligence to come through in everything we do”.
Helping brands harness AI
WPP is also working closely with clients to help them harness AI for their own marketing strategies.
“All of our clients are running at this as hard as we are, trying to figure out how AI is going to change their business processes”, Pretorius says.
Even global tech giants like Google, which has built some of the world’s most sophisticated AI models, are looking to WPP for enterprise marketing AI.
“Many of them are digital marketing platforms, but they don’t have product teams that build software for marketing”, he explains.
“Google builds unbelievable foundational software, but they don’t build software for enterprise marketers. Even they, as an enterprise marketer themselves, don’t do it – because enterprise marketing is maybe 5 per cent of the addressable market”.
Pretorius believes this places WPP as a key differentiator in the space.
“I think all of our clients have realised that we are investing more, and that we have more of a focus on AI software for marketing and advertising, and therefore there’s a logic to working with us on that”, he says.
As businesses navigate increasingly waters with AI, they are increasingly turning to WPP for expertise in how its implementation can benefit their marketing strategies.
The future of AI at WPP
Looking ahead, the ad giant is doubling down on AI-powered ideation and automation tools.
Its new Canvas function allows teams to combine multiple AI models in collaborative workspace, where documents can be uploaded, insights extracted and creative concepts instantly visualised.
“Clients can invest in the best ideas and see what they look like immediately, rather than spending their resources on ideas that may never see the light of day”, Pretorius explains.
With 41,000 monthly active users already on its Open platform, WPP is pushing to have its entire workforce using AI daily, by the end of the year.
“Adoption drives investment, not the other way around”, Pretorius told CityAM.
You don’t get money for something in the hope it’s going to work. You get money because people are using it and getting value.
A growing arms race
But WPP is not the only ad giant pouring its resources into AI.
Another key rival, Omnicom, has taken bold steps of its own, acquiring data and AI companies to drive innovation. It even cited the AI arms race as one of the key reasons for its mega-acquisition of rival holding company IPG, arguing that their pooled resources would enable them to plough more capital into tech investment.
Meanwhile, Publicis has also centralised AI in its strategy with its CoreAI platform and €300m (£251m) investment in 2024, as it cements its place as leader in AI-driven marketing technology.
As leading ad agencies set out plans to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to embed AI into their businesses, tech is poised to become the foundation of a new era in advertising.
These tectonic moves are “completely transforming our industry as we speak”, says Pretorius.