You know a company is in a tough spot when the CEO goes on record calling the earnings “disappointing,” as WPP CEO Cindy Rose did in a statement released on Thursday.
For context, WPP’s 2025 revenue dropped by 8.1% from 2024 to £13,550 million (or about 18,306 million USD) for the year.
Rose, a former Microsoft executive who took over the agency group last September, didn’t mince words with investors regarding the just-closed quarter, acknowledging that the business is underperforming and lacked stability.
Rose was hired to turn around WPP at a challenging moment. In mid-2025, WPP downgraded its earnings forecast for the year, leading to the company’s lowest stock prices since 2009.
Rose’s plan is to entirely revamp the strategy, even to go so far as to shed its label as an “agency holdco.”
Letting go of the holdco
During Thursday’s earnings call, Rose announced a new plan called Elevate28, which, she said, will reposition WPP as a single company, streamlined into four operating units (WPP Media, WPP Creative, WPP Production and WPP Enterprise Solutions) in four regions.
The Elevate28 plan will unify the entire company under WPP Open, the agency’s agentic marketing platform.
The first stage of the plan, to be executed in 2026, is simply to stabilize the business and implement (sorely needed) cost-saving initiatives.
In 2027, Rose said, WPP will implement a new go-to-market strategy and should start to see organic growth.
“WPP will emerge as a simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business,” according to its written strategy update.
WPP predicts that the program will cost £400 million (approximately $540 million) to fully implement, phased over two years. But the cost-cutting and consolidation should result in £500 in gross savings (about $676 million).
The savings will be spent on areas where WPP anticipates continued growth, including media, commerce, production and enterprise solutions, new GTM solutions and continued investment in WPP Open.
Rose’s thorny path
The next year or so may not be smooth sailing for WPP.
Spend from WPP’s top 25 clients declined 4.1% compared to its top 25 the year before – and there have also been changes to WPP’s top-25 clientele.
The candy brand Mars, for instance, moved its business to Publicis last year. And Mars had previously been WPP’s sixth-biggest client, spending more than $515 million with the agency holdco’s media buying group in 2023.
How do we know that granular level of detail? That would be because WPP is currently embroiled in a lawsuit with a former employee, Richard Foster, who alleges he was fired as a whistleblower for reporting improper or even illegal rebate practices.
All in all, WPP is going through a period of turbulent change.
After all, the company pioneered the whole notion of a marketing and advertising agency services holdco. The Wire and Plastics Products plc, as it was once known, was taken over by Martin Sorrell and co-investors, who sold off the basket manufacturing business and started an M&A-fueled binge of agency acquisitions. The point of which was to have the greatest buying power and variety of services.
Now, Rose is reassembling the entire fleet into one megaship with AI at the helm.
That is, if WPP can manage to do so without crashing.
