Strategic progress

We are one year into executing on the strategy we outlined in January 2024 - 'Innovating to Lead' - and have made significant progress on each of the four strategic pillars: leading through AI, data and technology, accelerating growth through the power of creative transformation, building world-class brands and executing efficiently to drive financial returns.

Lead through AI, data and technology

The past year in AI has been marked by significant advancements in AI technology with increasing capabilities, greater speed and lower cost. This acceleration in the pace of innovation is broadening the capabilities that we can deploy through WPP Open.

These developments reinforce our conviction that AI will be the single most transformational development in our industry since the internet. It will impact every element of how we work, freeing up our creative people to do better work, increasing the efficiency of our production teams to produce much greater volumes of high-quality work and empowering our media teams to develop and deploy more effective plans in a fraction of the time.

To deliver on this potential, we are accelerating our investment in WPP Open, our AI-powered marketing operating system, increasing cash investment to £300m in 2025 from £250m in 2024. We are making this investment to keep WPP Open at the forefront of our industry, enabling us to use AI more effectively in our work and delivering an end-to-end marketing platform that gets from ideas to results more efficiently and quickly.

WPP Open is being broadly adopted by our people and our clients are seeing tangible benefits. It is enabling our teams to generate insights more rapidly, move seamlessly from idea to near-finished executions and test these ideas on synthetic audiences. These are just some of the capabilities built into WPP Open in the past year and why 33,000 of our people are now active users.

As our people are increasingly embedding AI in the way that we work this is resulting in increasing client adoption with major clients including Google, IBM, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nestlé and The Coca-Cola Company seeing benefits both in how we work and the effectiveness of what we do together.

WPP Open Creative Studio has been rolling out a new user interface, Canvas, which is augmenting our strategic and creative teams with AI capabilities. Canvas empowers teams to leverage data insights and WPP's knowledge to generate effective campaign ideas, such as strategies to overcome audience barriers identified by AI models, which can then be instantly visualised for clients as storyboards and finished work.

WPP Open Media Studio continued its rollout to clients and was central to our successful pitch at Amazon in 2024. Media Studio provides an end-to-end media workflow solution accessing GroupM's scale and Choreograph data and technology.

GroupM and Choreograph's approach to data leverages AI-powered federated learning. Federated learning uses AI agents operating across client, WPP and third-party data sources to create new knowledge about customers. Establishing this data connectivity in place of a dependence on legacy ID-first solutions and lookalike models maintains data integrity and provides superior insight.

Accelerate growth through the power of creative transformation

We continue to see growing demand from clients for more integrated marketing solutions and WPP is moving quickly to be even more effective in bringing together our many capabilities around the world in teams to service clients. The reason for this is clear. Managing multiple agency partners is complex, leads to fragmentation of marketing efforts and smaller, more integrated teams promise greater agility and speed. In our view, AI will only accelerate this trend as clients face the challenge that complex agency rosters, spread across multiple companies and independent agencies, are unable to deliver the transformation required. The simplest analogy is that procuring marketing services is becoming more like procuring technology services, requiring greater strategic focus, technology due diligence and attention to long-term partnerships.

This trend has been reflected in the growth of WPP's top 25 clients in 2024 (+2.0%) and this demand for integration also aligns with WPP's position. We have a very well-balanced business with strong geographic positions in critical markets combined with strength in creativity, production commerce and influencer. When powered by AI, data and technology and a world-leading global media platform, this forms an unparalleled integrated offer to clients.

As well as the relatively stronger growth we delivered across WPP's largest clients in 2024, which included expanded scope for many top clients, the quality of our offer is evidenced by recent wins including creative assignments for Kimberly-Clark, media assignments for Amazon and Johnson & Johnson, and creative and commerce assignments for Unilever. 2024 net new billings were $4.5bn (2023: $4.5bn).

WPP's commitment to creative excellence continues to garner industry recognition, with the company being named 'Creative Company of the Year' for 2024 at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. Ogilvy took home 'Creative Network of the Year' at Cannes and The Coca-Cola Company, whose global marketing partner is WPP Open X, was named 'Creative Brand of the Year' for the first time in its history. These awards underscore WPP's ability to deliver innovative, integrated solutions that not only meet but exceed client expectations, driving both growth and expansion from across its client base.

Build world-class, market-leading brands

In 2024, we further simplified our structure making it easier for clients to access our talent and allowing us to build a more efficient operating model. WPP now has six powerful agency networks - GroupM, VML, Ogilvy, AKQA, Hogarth and Burson - which collectively account for around 92%of revenue less pass-through costs.

2025 will be the first full year of operation for our two newly created agencies: Burson, a leading global strategic communications agency formed through the consolidation of BCW and Hill & Knowlton, and VML, the world's largest integrated creative agency, bringing together VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson. The swift completion of these mergers in 2024 by the teams at VML and Burson has strategically aligned our brands for continued progress, leveraging their enhanced capabilities and global reach.

Brian Lesser joined as the Global CEO of GroupM, our media planning and buying business, in September 2024, and is focused on improving the competitiveness of our media offer, globally and in the US, leveraging WPP Open Media Studio and Choreograph.

Under Brian's leadership, GroupM will bring this differentiated strategy together with next-generation proprietary trading media products, WPP Open Media Studio and the power of WPP's broader integrated offer in creative, production and commerce to drive media effectiveness and performance for our clients.

Execute efficiently to drive financial returns

Integral to our strategy over the past year has been the imperative to execute more efficiently. Investing in AI through WPP Open will allow us to work faster and with more discipline. Integrating our offer for clients means that we can streamline the marketing process and take out duplicate roles. As a simpler company, with fewer brands, we are able to maximise our investments in client-facing roles and take out unnecessary overhead.

As well as our success in delivering, at an accelerated pace, the structural cost savings relating to the agency mergers and GroupM simplification, we continue to make good progress in our back-office efficiency programme across enterprise IT, finance, procurement and real estate. This success is reflected in the improved margin and cash conversion in 2024.

In enterprise IT, we successfully rolled out Maconomy ERP in certain markets in EMEA and South America during 2024 and will go live with Workday ERP in VML and Ogilvy in the UK in the first half of 2025.

We have a targeted programme of work around our enterprise IT to continue to modernise our estate, drive efficiencies and protect our business and are making good progress with costs reducing year-on-year in 2024. Our cloud migration continued to deliver benefits as we migrate workloads to the cloud and decommission legacy equipment and capacity.

Across IT and Finance, we continue to optimise our finance shared service centres, offshoring more back-office processes and driving further automation and efficiencies in the work we do.

WPP is also investing in Global Delivery Centres (GDCs) with a capability hub headquartered in India, accessible to all WPP agency teams around the world. Our GDCs play a critical role in WPP's business transformation and simplification strategy with capabilities from hyper-personalisation and composable commerce to cloud modernisation and product engineering. Prashant Mehta joined WPP in 2024 from Accenture as Managing Director to lead the GDCs.

Our category-led procurement model continues to consolidate spend by sub-category to drive further savings. We are digitalising our source-to-contract processes, enabling further automation as we consolidate our ERP landscape.

In real estate, our ongoing campus programme and consolidation of leases continues to deliver benefits. Seven new campuses opened during the year, including WPP's third London campus at One Southwark Bridge and our third campus in India, located in Chennai.

During 2024 we made further progress on the simplification of our specialist agencies with the disposal of our stake in Two Circles, the integration of BSG with Burson and other actions to rationalise and improve the performance of the tail of smaller agencies within WPP.

Purpose and ESG

WPP's purpose is to use the power of creativity to build better futures for our people, planet, clients and communities. Read more on the ways WPP is working to deliver against its purpose in our 2023 Sustainability Report.