Six months into its turnaround, WPP has slowed the bleeding. The headline from this earnings cycle, though, is that the company itself puts a return to positive growth at sometime during 2027.
Like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs — the standard measure of agency health — declined 2.8% in Q2, against a 6.7% drop in Q1.
WPP Media swung hardest: down 2.8% in Q2 versus 8.3% in Q1. The company still forecasts a low- to mid-single-digit decline in H2 on the same measure. Improvement, not recovery.
Elevate28 reorganizes WPP as a single company rather than a loose holding group of agencies. Marketing services are anchored around four areas — creative, production, media, and enterprise solutions — with expanded focus on WPP Open, its AI-powered operating system.
Recent wins include the Estée Lauder Companies, Jaguar Land Rover, Heineken, and Wendy's. The Wendy's decision in April to hand WPP its U.S. media duties built on a decade-plus creative partnership with VML. CEO Cindy Rose framed it directly on the earnings call: "That's a client choosing to consolidate with us because of the benefits of integration."
Heading into the back half of 2026 and into 2027, WPP's mandate is holding accounts, not just winning them. The stated levers: more data-driven performance tracking, a unified client view, and improved governance and client management. The broader shift toward integrated brand-agency structures echoes the "connection over adoption" theme from MAX SUMMIT 2026.
The most operationally useful moment came when Rose addressed AI and pricing. She expects short-term deflationary pressure on pricing as AI tooling drives productivity gains and reduces cost to serve — and expects clients to demand a share of those gains.
Her counterpoint: helping clients reinvest those savings into innovation and transformation opens an expansive opportunity to capture more addressable spend through service integration and cross-sell. That is a precise statement of AI's double edge for agencies — a cost lever and a rate-card threat at once.
Elevate28 also targets roughly £500 million (about $676 million) in annualized cost savings through 2028, with part of that reinvested into higher-growth segments like media and enterprise solutions.
Two checks are worth running now. First, the real cost of a fragmented agency roster — work split across many partners often generates coordination overhead that never shows up on an invoice. Second, how AI-driven effort reduction gets reflected in contracts. Once a holding company CEO says this publicly, it arrives at every renewal negotiation.
WPP has stopped the worst of the decline but has not started growing. How far AI pushes agency pricing down is the real variable in the next phase.
Like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs fell 2.8%, versus a 6.7% decline in Q1. WPP Media improved from an 8.3% drop to a 2.8% drop.
WPP's turnaround strategy, consolidating the group into a 'single company' across creative, production, media, and enterprise solutions, with expanded focus on the WPP Open AI operating system.
CEO Cindy Rose expects short-term deflationary pricing pressure as AI reduces cost to serve, while arguing the savings can be reinvested to expand addressable client spend.
Rose told investors positive growth is unlikely before sometime during 2027.
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