WPP’s Mark Read expects Generative AI to become a revenue contributor to the agency holding group in 2025, the CEO suggested in the company’s Q3 earnings call this morning. The firm is investing more than £250 million in WPP Open, the AI-driven marketing operating system (OS) used across the agency group.
Read called 2024 a “proof of concept” for AI, but expects to see it deliver more fundamental impact on business next year. “Broadly speaking, we will start to see more of an impact of GenAI on our revenues in the next year,” said Read. “I think there’s nothing to suggest so far that that will be negative, and certainly at the moment it’s contributing positively to our revenues.”
According to the company, WPP Open is already helping the group win new business, as clients increasingly look to the benefits of tech from their agency partners. “At the start of this year, client RFPs barely mentioned AI,” noted Read. “That’s starting to change as clients are looking for partners with strong capabilities and platforms powered by AI.”
“Higher quality and lower cost”
In addition to the client-facing side, Read noted steady growth in the internal use of WPP Open. Since the start of the year, the OS has seen monthly active users up 107 percent, and LLM usage up 300 percent. “So not only are more people using it, but they’re using it more often,” he said.
WPP Open is used to bring together creative, media and production activities across the company, according to WPP, seeking efficiencies in production, more effective media plans, and the integration of data into creative processes. Read said the ongoing investment aims to drive further adoption across WPP’s agencies.
“We do believe AI will be fundamental to WPP’s future,” he added. “We can see its potential to make our people more productive, to produce more work at higher quality and lower cost, and to make our work more effective by delivering campaigns that are more targeted and relevant to consumers, and drive higher ROI to our clients.”
“Safe and secure”
Asked on the call about the impact of GenAI on pricing, Read said it was too early to tell exactly how the technology would affect WPP’s model, but said he would expect it to lead to more output-based pricing. He added that AI could provide additional revenue streams by licensing out WPP’s GenAI tools.
He said clients look to WPP Open for AI tools they can use “in a safe and secure way”, as well as its adoption across WPP’s own workflows. “I think both of those things are important, and when we talk to clients they would say that our ability to deploy AI, and then the breadth of the vision would be the things they see as positive within WPP Open.”
The comments came as WPP reported 0.5 percent growth in like-for-like revenues less passthrough costs, with strong performance in the US and Europe offsetting declines in other markets; the UK was flat during the quarter, while China saw a 21.3 percent decline. But the holding company identified major client wins, including Amazon and Unilever, as key growth drivers.
