How WPP Sees The AI Future for Agencies

Multiple pressures on marketers and enhanced capabilities demand a new approach to how marketing services are sold and delivered: a white paper from WPP outlines how it sees the industry developing.

Six principles 

In The AI-Empowered Agency, WPP sets out six “animating principles” that will most effectively blend tech, talent and creativity to deliver growth for clients:

• Beyond the pitch: clients will assess agencies on their tech stack and AI governance, people and workflows; agencies will need to demonstrate how using AI can deliver meaningful results.
• Everything is in scope: AI means far fewer limitations on creative ideas; with new commercial models, agencies can generate impactful concepts at scale.
• Deadlines redefined: linear workflows are replaced by more agile, iterative processes where always-on, brand-specific AI agents and shared platforms make work faster and collaborative.
• An end to silos: multiskilled talent teams will work fluidly with AI; fixed departments will give way to modular systems of autonomous teams and intelligent workflow.
• Personalisation without personal data: as ID-based solutions become less useful, agencies will use AI to predict and deliver relevant content
and creativity with a contextually rich approach.
• Marketing is a growth engine: technology-enabled agencies can offer clients a transformative and cost-effective value proposition, helping to shift the perception of marketing as a cost centre to a growth driver.

AI is ‘fundamental’ to the future

“There’s no doubt in my mind, or that of our board, that AI will be fundamental to WPP’s success in the future. We’ve been investing significantly in that,” outgoing CEO Mark Read told an earnings call. And he identified what he believes are the business’s particular strengths:

• “We’ve taken a very broad, strategic approach to AI,” he said. “We haven’t looked at it just as a data opportunity in our media or production business. We consider the impact of AI on the end-to-end marketing process.”
• “We’ve built into WPP Open a single AI-powered marketing platform that spans the whole of WPP,” he continued. “We have 69,000 people using AI in their work – I don’t believe there are many companies of our size that have deployed it at that [scale].”

Why it matters

“If we embrace it [AI] and we make our people use it, we add more value to our clients,” Read stated. “And if we can create more work more quickly, that will create additional value.”

Credit:  WPP, WARC

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