Brand Marketing
FMCG firms cut senior roles by 32%; Total headcount shrinks 9.26% in FY25
Mark Read bows out of WPP with AI vision, revenue slump, and a tough road ahead for successor
After seven years as CEO marked by falling share price, shrinking new business, and restructuring pains, Read leaves with optimism about AI’s transformative potential, but hands Cindy Rose a company still battling revenue decline and market headwinds.
If embraced to enhance human expertise, the outgoing CEO, Mark Read said, AI could make WPP stronger, open fresh business avenues, and deliver greater long-term value to clients and shareholders alike.
Mark Read’s 30-year journey at WPP is about to end, but his final earnings call as chief executive was less a farewell than a manifesto for the company’s AI-powered future. Speaking just weeks before he hands over the reins to Cindy Rose on September 1, Read struck an upbeat tone despite a sobering set of financials: first-half 2025 organic net sales fell 4.3%, second-quarter sales were down 5.8%, and new business wins were running at less than half their usual pace. The share price remains weak, and his tenure has seen growing pushback from employees over his back-to-office mandate.
Yet, Read described WPP as an “incredible organisation” with “tremendous assets”, particularly its people, clients, and now, its AI capabilities.
While the outgoing CEO talked about VML, Hogarth, Burson and influencer marketing, he also described AI as his “most important” piece of being positive.
“AI will fundamentally change what we do and how we do it… but if we embrace it fully, it will make us stronger, bring new business opportunities, and create more value for clients and shareholders,” he said.
Under his watch, 69,000 employees are now using AI tools through WPP Open, the group’s single marketing platform spanning creative, media, and production. Adoption is high, over 80% among client-facing staff, with millions of AI-generated images and videos produced monthly.
Read emphasised that the restructuring of GroupM into WPP Media, led by Brian Lesser, was “disruptive but necessary,” with AI-enabled systems like Open Intelligence poised to replace legacy infrastructure.
Hogarth, WPP’s production arm, is already experimenting with AI-generated commercials that rival traditional shoots in quality.
Still, the company’s challenges are clear.
Client decision-making has slowed amid macroeconomic pressures, delaying pitches and hurting new business conversion. Structural cost-cutting, including a 3.7% reduction in headcount this year, and margin pressure remain ongoing concerns.
The group revealed that the average number of employees during the first half of 2025 dropped to 106,000 (down from 113,000 a year earlier), while total headcount as of June 30 stood at 104,000, compared to 111,000 at the same time last year. The 3.7 percent decline in staff since the beginning of the year was largely aligned with a like-for-like revenue contraction, according to the company.
Reflecting on his tenure, Read admitted there were things he would have done “more quickly,” particularly the integration of analogue and digital operations and the push to put technology at WPP’s core. But he also pointed to successes such as the acquisition of AI specialist Satalia, which brought nearly 200 AI experts into the company.
Read’s final message was one of resilience and continuity:
“The past six months have been challenging, but if we approach the future with the same determination we did during COVID, we will succeed. It’s been a privilege to lead this great company.”
Cindy Rose inherits both the promise of an AI-driven future and the reality of a company that must win back growth in a fiercely competitive market. For WPP, the next chapter will test whether Read’s optimism can translate into a turnaround.
The AI-Empowered Agency
WARC summed up in its latest report how WPP has set 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.
“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,” Read told during the 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.”
Admitting he enjoyed the calls with analysts from investment banks, Read was upbeat about the future, describing WPP as an “incredible” organisation.
In his final earnings call, Read struck an optimistic tone despite its current challenges. He argued that the company’s role- from building brands and managing reputations to designing packaging and optimising retail and search visibility- remains critical to the world’s biggest businesses, including four of the top five by value.
“While I know well that we have immediate challenges, we also have tremendous assets, not least our people and our clients,” the executive said.
“And I thought it'd be helpful for me to end my last call, of many, with my reflections on where we are as an industry and as WPP and why I'm positive about the outlook, both for our industry and for WPP.
Taking a step back and looking at industry, I firmly believe that what we do collectively is critical to our clients, the world's largest companies, and in WPP case, four of the world's five most valuable businesses, these global organisations, rely on us to help them build their brands, manage their reputation, sell their product, get high rankings and search engines selling retail channels, design their packaging identities and produce their work,” he said.
“We said for more than two years that AI is no doubt going to fundamentally change what we do and how we do it. It's also going to give us new opportunities, as technology has always done in the past..
I'd say that at least half of the jobs in WPP today were not in the company 10 years ago, and that will be increasingly true in the future.
But I still believe our clients will need the creativity, the strategic judgment and objectivity and insights that we and our industry bring them if they're going to successfully differentiate themselves from competition and navigate an increasingly complex media and technology landscape.
That's what our industry does, what I believe it will continue to do in the future, even if it is in a very different form and with much more data and technology."
“And just as we've adapted in the past, we will adapt in the future.
So yes, AI will change how we work, but if we embrace it fully and use it to enhance our people and human expertise, then I believe, will make us stronger, bring new business opportunities and create more values for our clients, and in the long run, more value for our shareholders as well," Read said.
If embraced to enhance human expertise, the outgoing CEO said, AI could make WPP stronger, open fresh business avenues, and deliver greater long-term value to clients and shareholders alike.
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