WPP Creative: A Strategic Shift Towards a Unified Business Model
WPP has just executed one of those decisions that, in the advertising industry, are announced as modernization but are better understood as emergency surgery. The establishment of WPP Creative—under the umbrella of the Elevate28 plan—reorganizes the heart of the business: it merges its leading creative agencies into a single operational unit, retaining esteemed brands such as Ogilvy, VML, T&Pm, and AKQA, while changing the logic of governance and incentives. The leader of this new entity is Jon Cook, who also continues as CEO of VML. The structure is supported by a "light" management layer and is organized across four regions: North America, Latin America, EMEA, and APAC.
The financial context explains the urgency. WPP reported an 8.1% decline in revenues and a 71.2% plunge in reported operating profit in 2025. Against this backdrop, Elevate28 promises £500 million in gross annualized savings by 2028, accounting for around £400 million in restructuring costs, along with a reduction in headcount, reorganization, and a new talent framework tied to client outcomes and WPP's performance. The public message, as articulated by Cindy Rose, CEO of WPP, is to stabilize, return to organic growth, and create investment capacity, “transforming WPP into one single company” organized into four operational units, unified by the WPP Open platform.
Read without corporate romanticism, WPP Creative is not a new agency; it is a deliberate attempt to replace the holding company logic with a model of an integrated business where work, margin, and accountability are managed regionally and comparably with WPP Media. At the same time, this represents both a concession and a risk.
The Real Move: From Independent Brands to Regional Execution Discipline
The detail that reveals this intention is not simply that Ogilvy, VML, T&Pm, and AKQA retain their names. That’s the soothing part. What is structural is what Jon Cook described as the “biggest twist”: moving the creative P&L to a regional structure, mirroring WPP Media, to align incentives and shared resources. In advertising, P&L architecture defines behaviors more than any cultural manifesto.
This change shifts the center of gravity: from agency leaders optimizing their local P&L to regional teams required to make talent allocation, investment, and priority decisions with a broader perspective. In theory, this eliminates duplications and reduces internal friction; in practice, it necessitates that conflicts over resources are resolved at a level that previously did not exist or was less determinative.
The industry has seen decades where the “holding model” allowed scaling acquisitions, preserving creative identities, and selling specialization. However, it also created an internal economy of silos: multiple layers, multiple cost centers, multiple teams pursuing the same client with different proposals. Cindy Rose articulated this as “excessive organizational complexity,” a lack of an integrated operating model, and inconsistent execution. WPP Creative is the explicit response: less political architecture, more delivery architecture.
The significant nuance is that WPP is not saying it is giving up its brands; it is foregoing the idea that each brand governs the system as if it were a fiefdom. The new design seeks collaboration enforced by incentives. This may enhance speed and consistency but could also diminish real autonomy in pursuing creative differentiation when that pursuit does not align with regional targets.
Costs, Cash, and Credibility: The £500 Million Savings Comes with an Operational Price
Elevate28 sets a bold figure: £500 million in gross annualized savings by 2028. To achieve this, WPP acknowledges £400 million in restructuring costs. This arithmetic speaks volumes: the group is buying future optionality with immediate pain. This pain is not abstract; it includes staff reductions, reorganization, and the redesign of the talent framework.
Such transformations often fail for a simple reason: they are announced as simplifications, executed as cuts, and operated as if nothing essential has changed. Here WPP tries to avoid this by tying the reorganization to a fundamentally different governance of regional outcomes and a common technological platform, WPP Open, described as a marketing platform with agents and a data layer (Open Intelligence). The operational goal is for media, creativity, production, and business solutions to function as a system, not as competing internal suppliers.
The financial risk is not limited to restructuring costs. It lies in the productivity “valley” that accompanies any reorganization: loss of continuity, friction from new roles, uncertainty, and turnover of key talent. The promised savings may be achieved through fixed cost reductions, but the advertising business cannot rely solely on austerity; it requires revenue growth and margin protection through delivered value.
WPP appears to recognize this in its phased design: 2026 for stabilization and cost execution; 2027 for returning to organic growth and rebuilding margins; 2028 for acceleration with total integration and scaling of “agentic” work. This sequence is sensible. The issue is that the market does not wait for phase two to arrive: clients today compare speed, integration, and consistency.
Integrating PR and Creativity: Efficient Offering, Tension of Independence
A high-impact move, and one that has received little discussion outside the sector, is the integration of disciplines that previously lived more independently. Elevate28 unites PR, advertising, and design under WPP Creative, integrating PR from agencies like Burson and Hill & Knowlton alongside creative disciplines. This has a commercial efficiency angle: to sell an integrated solution where reputation, content, creativity, and data operate under the same plan.
However, it also involves organizational design costs: PR tends to require operational independence and different measurement criteria. When centralized, the temptation is to turn it into a campaign and performance appendage, degrading its usefulness in managing reputational risk. WPP can mitigate this if it defines clear mechanisms to preserve criteria, scaling, and roles; if not, integration can lead to dilution.
The element WPP introduces as compensation are the “Client Solution Architects,” a role designed to orchestrate integrated campaigns supported by media and data. It is a bet on a more coherent front-end towards clients: fewer handoffs, more integrated design. If it works, it reduces the invisible coordination tax clients pay when hiring multiple units within the same group. If it fails, it creates another layer of coordination that competes for authority with agencies.
Here lies a tacit concession: WPP is acknowledging that clients no longer buy “the best agency for X,” but rather a combination of capabilities that must operate as one. That recognition is necessary. The challenge is not to turn that integration into a standardization that undermines what creative brands still represent.
The Leadership Needed: Less Narrative, More Decision Rules
Jon Cook has stated that WPP “is not a holding company, it is a company,” celebrating the simplicity of four units. This statement sounds like positioning, but its proof is operational: who decides what, with which metrics, and at what pace. Leadership here is not charisma; it is governance.
A regional design with a shared P&L necessitates three types of tough decisions:
First, prioritization of clients and sectors. When the creative unit shares regional results, it becomes unsustainable to accept all kinds of work just to fill capacity. It imposes the necessity to choose where to excel and where to accept being functional or not competing at all.
Second, allocation of scarce talent. If the system continues to reward the loudest employee or the one who “owns” a historical account, integration turns into political warfare. If the system rewards demonstrable and repeatable impact, integration begins to yield productivity.
Third, standards for product and platforms. With WPP Open as the backbone, the group aims to unify data and workflows. This requires discipline: not every team with its own stack, not every agency with its incompatible methodology. In this case, technology is not modernization; it is a mechanism of control and scalability.
In parallel, there exists an inevitable human risk: the shift to a more “metrics-driven” culture and restructuring may reduce visibility and autonomy for mid-level leaders. This is not a moral judgment; it’s a typical organizational effect. If WPP does not redesign how creative leadership is recognized and how career paths are built within the new system, the promise to “maintain brands” becomes merely a facade while the muscle that made them distinct diminishes.
The Concession That Defines Whether WPP Creative Will Be an Advantage or Just Reorganization
WPP is already making consistent moves: WPP Media (from the merger of Essencemediacom, Mindshare, and Wavemaker), WPP Production (with Hogarth under Richard Glasson), and now WPP Creative, all aligned under Elevate28 and WPP Open. The direction is clear: less constellation of companies, more integrated machine.
The typical blind spot would be to confuse integration with unlimited breadth. Becoming “one single company” does not mean trying to cover every client need with the same intensity. It means designing a system where certain capabilities receive priority investment, and others are subcontracted, automated, or deemed non-strategic.
The test for the C-level will not be the organizational chart or the announcement of savings, but the capacity to uphold concrete concessions while the business traverses the restructuring valley. If WPP Creative ends up being an umbrella for continuing to sell everything to everyone, everywhere, only with fewer people and more pressure, the outcome will be a cheaper version of the same complexity.
Effective leadership in this moment chooses with pain: which clients to forgo, which offers to stop promising, which exceptions are no longer allowed, and which duplications are eliminated even if politically uncomfortable. Future relevance is not purchased with internal rebranding; it is earned with the relentless discipline of deciding what not to do and sustaining that decision until the market recognizes it.
