WPP plc (NYSE:WPP) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

WPP plc (NYSE:WPP) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript February 26, 2026

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Good morning, everyone. Good morning, and warm welcome to our 2025 preliminary results and strategy update. By the way, that’s our new brand refresh. I hope you like it, created by Landor AMP and Man versus Machine, WPP agencies, all powered by WPP Open. So look, I’m delighted to welcome you all here to One South Work Bridge to our campus here in London, which in many ways is symbolic of the future of WPP. It’s modern, it’s adaptive, it’s collaborative workspace for our talent, our clients and our partners. So the plan this morning is I’m going to start with some opening remarks, and then I’m going to hand over to Joanne Wilson, our Chief Financial Officer, to share our 2025 preliminary results. Then I’ll share our strategy update, and then we’ll open up to Q&A.

Before we start, I’d like to recommend that you take a moment to read this cautionary statement while I get out of your way. So Joanne and I will be joined on stage later by Brian Lesser, who’s CEO of WPP Media. When we get to the media section of the presentation, and most of my senior management team are here in the audience as well. Let me start by saying that WPP is an extraordinary company. We are built on agency brands with remarkable histories going all the way back to the 1800s. Some are still well known today. Others have evolved into new parts of WPP. But together, they have roots in creating iconic work that moves people and shapes culture. We serve some of the biggest, most demanding clients in the world, and we steward and grow some of the most well-known brands on the planet, several of whom you’ll hear from and see referenced throughout today’s presentation.

And our business model is actually very simple. We exist to make our clients successful. We help our clients build brands that matter, drive meaningful engagement with their consumers and drive outcomes for their business. It drives growth for them and growth for us. However, it’s really clear that what has made us successful in the past will not make us successful in the future. And as you can see from the numbers that we released this morning, our performance is not where it needs to be. Yes, of course, there are externalities we can point to market volatility, economic headwinds. But really, the results point to the need for us to embrace a single unified growth strategy to execute with increased rigor and evolve as the needs of our clients evolve.

After several years on the WPP Board of Directors, I took this role with a clear thesis in mind as to what we need to do differently. We’ve spent the past 6 months as a team validating this thesis through rigorous analysis and by speaking directly to our clients and actively listening to their feedback. And the good news is we haven’t been waiting for today’s presentation to take action. We’ve already made several decisive changes, and you can see the positive results in our recent new business success. In the fourth quarter of 2025, WPP was #1 in JPMorgan’s net new business rankings for the first time since 2020 with a series of excellent client wins across media, creative and our integrated offer. These include being appointed the U.K. government’s lead media agency, Reckitt and Henkel Media in Europe, Kenvue and Haleon Creative globally, TruGreen Media in the U.S., Norwegian Cruise Line Global Media, Suncor Media, just to name a few.

And I’m delighted to say we’ve maintained this strong momentum into 2026, winning Jaguar Land Rover, Global Media and Integrated Services. In fact, the impact from new business wins in 2026 already exceeds the impact of new business wins for all of 2025 combined, and it’s only February. So while the turnaround of our business will take time, our momentum is undeniable, and these wins give me huge confidence that we are firmly on the right path. My team is united, committed and hungry to win. Today’s session is the culmination of months of detailed work by our team. We have a bold plan to make WPP a simpler, more integrated company, one that’s fit for the future, relentlessly focused on growth and brilliant execution. Personally, I’m very excited to be here at a time of such revolutionary change, and I feel quite privileged to lead WPP as we play a defining role in shaping the future.

Q&A Session

So I’ll come back shortly and talk about our view on the evolving landscape and our growth plan for the new WPMP, which we’re calling Elevate28. But first, I’m going to hand over to Joanne to take you through our 2025 results. Joanne?

Joanne Wilson: So thank you, Cindy, and good morning, everybody. And can I add my warm welcome to you here today. So let me start by taking you through the main financial headlines for 2025. Our like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs fell 5.4% for the full year due to client assignment losses and spending cuts. Now this is slightly better than our most recent guidance for a decline of 5.5% to 6%, and it reflects a Q4 like-for-like decline of 6.9%, and that’s a deterioration from the third quarter decline of 5.9% — in the context of the weaker top line, we delivered a headline operating margin of 13%, in line with our expectations and down 180 basis points year-on-year on a like-for-like basis. Our fully diluted EPS was 63.2p, a decrease of 28.4% year-on-year, with the impact of reduced headline operating margin and a higher headline effective tax rate, partially offset by lower net finance costs and noncontrolling interests.

Turning to cash flow. Our adjusted operating cash flow before working capital was GBP 1.2 billion, down from GBP 1.3 billion in 2024 and at the top of our most recent guidance range and includes GBP 82 million of cash restructuring charges. On my next slide, I provided some color on our net sales performance, both for the fourth quarter and across the full year. And please note that we have included more detail in the appendix to this deck. Now you have some of the detail here on trends by business, by region and by client sector, but I thought it would be more useful to unpack some of those trends by theme to help give a sense of what is WPP specific and what is more market driven. And when we consider what is WPP specific, the major negative impact to call out both for the full year and for the fourth quarter is the impact of gross client losses, which deteriorated through the year.

Now this was driven by the impact of incremental losses in year in 2025. And by segment, this particularly weighed on media, by geography on the U.S. and the U.K. and by client sector on CPG and TME. Now against this, we had the positive impact of new business wins in 2024 and ’25, which indeed contributed progressively through the year. The aggregate level of in-year wins, however, was lower than we initially expected and significantly below what we have experienced over the past number of years. This was in part because of a lower win rate, but in EMEA, it was because of a lower level of aggregate new business activity. Industry estimates are that global pitch activity was down double digit in the year. While we saw an encouraging new business performance in the fourth quarter with the wins of Reckitt, Henkel, the U.K. government, Pizza Hut, NCL and JLR, the impact on our like-for-like performance is expected to take time to ramp up, and we expect the overall net new business headwind to sustain into the first half of 2026.

The final theme to call out is spend by existing clients. We characterize the year as one of more cautious spending from clients with a higher degree of volatility than we would typically expect to see. Now the impact was seen most strongly across the CPG, auto and the tech and digital services sectors. And while many of our businesses were impacted, it weighed most heavily on Ogilvy. The waterfall chart on this next slide bridges our headline operating margin from 15% in 2024 to 13% in 2025, a 1.8 percentage point deterioration on a like-for-like basis. There are a number of moving parts and starting with staff costs, including our severance and incentives on the left. Now these reduced by GBP 576 million on the back of lower permanent headcount, which ended the year down 8.7% and reduced use of freelancers, which was down 14% year-on-year.

However, due to that lower revenue, this resulted in 180 basis points drag on our margin. This was amplified by the impact of increased severance and other associated costs, which was up GBP 89 million in the year, taking a further 100 basis points of margin. And we did increase investment levels in WPP Open in AI and data, and this was more than funded by a reduction in back-office costs, leading to a net reduction in tech spend and other costs of GBP 128 million. Again, with the impact from those lower revenues, this translated into a 60 basis point drag on margin. These drags on margin were offset by a 50% reduction in staff incentive payments to GBP 182 million, providing a margin cushion of 140 basis points, which is equivalent to 120 basis points like-for-like if we exclude FGS.

And taken together, this resulted on that net margin move of 200 basis points on a reported basis and 180 basis points on a like-for-like basis, which includes 20% of the impact from the disposal of FGS and from FX. Now moving to my next slide, we show our headline income statement. Overall reported revenue less pass-through costs was GBP 10.2 billion, a decrease of 10.4% year-on-year on a reported basis. Our headline operating profit was GBP 1.3 billion, which was down 22.6% year-on-year on a reported basis and is consistent with that 13% operating profit margin. Our net finance costs of GBP 274 million were slightly down year-on-year on lower average net debt and lower interest rates. And our effective tax rate increased to 32% given that lower profit base and the impact of nondeductible fixed elements.

By contrast, noncontrolling interest of GBP 43 million was down year-on-year, partially driven by disposals. Our headline diluted EPS, as I said, was 63.2p and down 28.4% on a reported basis. The Board has recommended a final dividend of 7.5p, giving a total dividend of 15p for 2025. Now while this is a reduction year-on-year, it represents a stable dividend from the first half, and it underlines our commitment to maintaining shareholder returns. We include a full reconciliation between our headline and our reported financials in the appendix. And the main items I would call out are the impact of restructuring programs as well as further goodwill impairments of GBP 641 million, which primarily relate to our integrated creative agencies and property impairments of GBP 114 million, both of which are noncash in nature.

Now this next slide bridges the year-on-year movement in net debt, which ended 2025 at GBP 2.2 billion versus GBP 1.7 billion in 2024. Our adjusted operating cash flow before working capital was GBP 1.2 billion and reflects a lower level of cash profit, partially offset by a lower level of CapEx and a year-on-year decrease in cash restructuring costs, which came in at GBP 82 million. Our working capital saw an outflow of GBP 334 million, primarily driven by the temporary impact of reduced staff incentives, adverse FX movements and business mix. Within this, our trade working capital, excluding the impact from FX was broadly flat year-on-year. We remain disciplined on our working capital management and saw an improvement in underlying operating metrics year-on-year, including reduced overdues.

We saw an outflow of GBP 17 million from earnouts of GBP 65 million and the net impact of dividends to minorities and from associates and earn-outs have decreased year-on-year and are expected to continue to progressively fall in 2026. Our net interest and tax contributed to a total adjusted free cash flow of GBP 202 million and note that the tax payment includes GBP 43 million of one-off taxes related to the disposal of FGS Global. And turning to the uses of cash, M&A spend was GBP 147 million and largely related to the acquisition of Infrum, while cash dividends amounted to GBP 343 million. Adding in the impact of buybacks at GBP 97 million to offset the dilution from incentives and other factors, including FX, our spot net debt was GBP 2.2 billion, up GBP 500 million year-on-year.

Now my next slide provides more detail on our overall net debt and our leverage profile. As we’ve already said, we think it’s more prudent to look at average adjusted net debt through the year rather than the year-end level, which typically benefits from a favorable working capital position. Now our average adjusted net debt was slightly down year-on-year at GBP 3.4 billion compared to GBP 3.5 billion in 2024. However, given that lower headline EBITDA, the average adjusted net debt to headline EBITDA ratio for 2025 was 2.2x, which was up from 1.8x in 2024. While our average leverage ratio has increased, our maturity profile stands at 5.8 years and the average coupon on our net debt is 3.5%. We, of course, also completed a successful GBP 1 billion bond issue in December 2025, which more than covers our GBP 650 million bond maturity in September 2026.

We have no covenants. And as of December 2025, we had GBP 4.4 billion of liquidity, including an undrawn committed RCF of $2.5 billion, which does not mature until 2031. And furthermore, I’m very pleased to share that today, Fitch Ratings has assigned WPP a BBB rating with a stable outlook, reinforcing our investment-grade balance sheet. And on my final slide for now, I have shared guidance for 2026 across key financial metrics. Now we will talk about the impact of our strategy update later this morning. But for 2026, we’re setting the following parameters in terms of our headline guidance. Our like-for-like net revenue growth is the most important metric for judging our business, but it is a lagging indicator with account losses continuing to drag for around 12 months after they first start to impact.

And meanwhile, new account wins take time to bed in and move toward a steady state. For the year as a whole, we estimate that gross client losses will represent a 500 to 600 basis point drag, an increase from the 300 to 400 basis points in 2025. At the same time, the positive impact on like-for-like from gross client wins in 2026 already exceeds that for the full year 2025. Now while it is still early in the year to indicate the impact of new business in the full year, we do expect it to be a more significant drag in the first half in 2025. We are encouraged by the new business performance in the fourth quarter and the performance year-to-date and the nature of the pipeline. And as a result, we anticipate a progressively improving impact from net new business through the course of the year.

Now reflecting all of this, we are guiding to like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs down mid- to high single digits in the first half of 2026 with an improving trajectory in the second half. And we also anticipate that the first quarter will see the weakest like-for-like for the year. On profit, there are a number of moving parts that will impact our headline operating margin. On the positive side, we will benefit from the annualized impact of cost actions, which were taken in 2025, alongside a part year benefit from the cost initiatives we are implementing as part of our new strategy. We also expect a lower impact from headline severance costs. Against this, we will continue to invest in WPP Open in AI and in data as well as our growth drivers and also expect to rebuild our incentive pools.

Cindy and I will share greater detail on both the growth drivers and the cost initiatives as part of our strategy update. Taking all of that into account, we anticipate headline operating profit margin in the range of 12% to 13%. And turning to cash flow, we continue to focus on adjusted operating cash flow before working capital as the most important metric, reflecting the potential for volatility in the year-end working capital position, including both the anticipated costs associated with historical plans as well as the restructuring costs linked to the Elevate28 8 plan, we anticipate adjusted operating cash flow before working capital of GBP 800 million to GBP 900 million. This includes total anticipated cash restructuring charges of around GBP 250 million, of which around GBP 190 million are associated with the Elevate28 plan.

Excluding these charges, we would anticipate adjusted operating cash flow before working capital of GBP 1 billion to GBP 1.1 billion. And finally, in terms of leverage, given the expectation of a further moderation in headline EBITDA, we would anticipate our average leverage metrics to move up further in 2026. We do, however, expect average net debt to remain broadly stable, and we note that any proceeds from asset disposals during the year will be used to strengthen our balance sheet, providing a greater degree of financial flexibility. Now you will find more detail on other modeling assumptions for 2026 in our preliminary results press release. And that is it for me for now, and I will hand back to Cindy, who I know is very keen to share our strategic update.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Thank you, Joanne. Thank you. Look, the first thing I want to say to you is that I fully recognize that recent years have been disappointing from a shareholder perspective. I acknowledge our performance on core metrics like net sales margin, free cash flow. It’s disappointing. No one is more determined to turn that around than I am. And as I said in my opening remarks, I took this role with a clear thesis as to what we needed to do differently. We’ve spent the past 6 months as a team really validating that thesis with rigorous analysis and by actively listening to feedback from our clients. There are plenty of reasons for optimism, and I’m going to get to those in a moment. But first, I thought it’s just appropriate to share with you some of the feedback that we have received from clients.

It’s clear and consistent and not only supports my thesis, but provides us with an excellent blueprint for what we need to do differently going forward. Clients pointed to the fact that our complexity got in the way of true client obsession. We were siloed. We were hard to navigate. We haven’t been intentional enough about evolving our integrated proposition to adapt to the changing needs of our clients. It’s taken us too long to land our data proposition and our media business has suffered as a result. Now the good news from my perspective is that all of these issues are fixable. And as I said, we’ve already started to do so. So while it’s true that our performance hasn’t been where we want it to be, it’s also true that WPP is full of potential and has all the ingredients that we need to win.

We have incredibly talented, hard-working people with deep domain expertise who do amazing things for our clients, for some of the most demanding clients in the world, I might add, every single day. We have world-class capabilities that span the entire marketing workflow from media to commerce, creative, PR, production, digital experiences, software engineering, data, AI and more. We’ve made really smart investments over the years in technology that have now enabled us to build WPP Open into a powerful future-facing agentic marketing platform, giving us a real competitive advantage. We have a presence in over 100 countries around the world, which means we can serve the most complex multinational, multi-client brands in the world. We have a scaled media offer and partnerships with every relevant player in the ecosystem.

But maybe most importantly of all, we have an ambitious, competitive, high-energy team that is ready to embrace change and hungry to win. So notwithstanding the challenges, which are clear, I stand here with immense optimism because we’re at a really pivotal moment in WPP’s journey. We’re not just adapting to change. We’re actively shaping the future. We are building a WPP that is more agile, more connected, more powerful than ever before, a WPP that is simpler to work with, fit for the future and built to win. A WPP that is obsessed with the client — the success of our clients and as a result, that drives better returns for our shareholders. So our strategy starts with a new mission, to be the trusted partner for the world’s leading brands in the era of AI, valued for combining cutting-edge media intelligence, trusted data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production and transformative enterprise solutions to help our clients navigate change, capture growth and capture opportunity.

Now there’s 4 key objectives of our strategy, and we’re going to unpack these in some detail. But just to summarize, our objectives are to drive superior growth for our clients, to become a simpler, more integrated company, to leverage our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open for competitive advantage and to create firm financial foundations for the future. As I said earlier, this is going to take time, but we’ve already made a promising start. And to support our growth strategy, we’ve built a very detailed execution plan that broadly spans these 3 distinct phases. Our immediate priority is to stabilize the business, make the structural changes needed, strengthen our execution, win and retain clients to sustain our current market momentum. The next phase is about building on these foundations and returning the company to growth sometime during 2027.

And the third phase will be about accelerating our growth so we can capture our fair share of the market from 2028 and beyond. And just to summarize what you can expect from this plan in terms of outcomes, you can expect the stabilization of our performance in the near term, a return to growth sometime in 2027, gross cost savings of GBP 500 million over 3 years, a reallocation of investment against our key growth priorities and a more focused portfolio, an investment-grade balance sheet, as Joanne said, and greater financial flexibility. So that’s the basic framework, the time line of our growth strategy and what you can expect in terms of outcomes. We’re going to unpack all of this in more detail. But before we do, I would like to step back, if I may, and just do a bit of scene setting to offer some perspective on how we see the world changing, the needs of our clients evolving and the opportunity of AI.

So for some time now, we’ve known that our industry is experiencing dramatic transformation. With the rapid diffusion of AI, we’re not just seeing incremental shifts in consumer behavior, like this is a complete metamorphosis of the commercial ecosystem. Brands are now discovered in AI-driven conversational search. All the old barriers that protected established brands are gone. creators and influencers have reshaped consumer preference and can launch brands in an instant. Media is everywhere. It’s in everything. It’s no longer episodic and campaign-driven. It’s continuous, always on, a stream where social, search and physical spaces all blend together. Commerce is the new organizing principle. Every action, every interaction is shoppable, and we’re rapidly shifting to agented commerce where AI agents do the shopping on our behalf.

Trust is scarce, right? It must be earned every day in this world of synthetic content and deep fakes. Brands need to balance hyperpersonalization with personal privacy. And as the world is flooded with AI-generated content, the demand for verifiable human creativity, craft, empathy, taste is increasing as key brand differentiators. These changing dynamics are not fleeting trends. The acceleration of AI is unstoppable. And as I said, it’s driving a complete metamorphosis of the commercial ecosystem. And this is the reality our clients are navigating every day. The fragmentation, the complexity, the pace of change is dizzying for our clients and the paths to growth are much harder to find. He’s never been more urgent to build compelling trusted brands that endure for generations and provide competitive advantage and long-term enterprise value.

To cut through this noise and find new growth audiences in this environment, brands need to embrace new strategies grounded in deep data insights, real-time signals and AI that acts on these signals at the speed of light. In this perpetually changing environment, clients don’t need more traditional marketing agencies. What they need is a new playbook for growth and a trusted partner who can help them build it and operationalize it. A partner that operates as an intelligent orchestration layer across creativity, media, commerce, data and tech who fuses technical expertise with breakthrough creative thinking into one cohesive approach to modern brand building. At WPP, we work with some of the most consequential brands and clients on the planet, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Kenvue, Ford, so many more.

We know how to navigate disruption. We know how to find signal in noise and help clients build new paths to growth. Now for many clients, this new playbook for growth means real transformation at every level. So I spent the last decade delivering large-scale technology transformation to enterprise clients around the world. And I can tell you, it’s not easy. Clients need to have AI-ready data foundations and agentic tool and governance in place. They need to be trained and skilled. Processes need to be reimagined. There’s really no shortcut when it comes to AI transformation. Every client I meet is going through it, and they all need our help. So for WPP to seize this opportunity, we need to evolve from being a collection of traditional marketing agencies to being a trusted partner for growth and transformation, helping our clients build modern marketing capabilities and move boldly and confidently into the future.

A wonderful example of this kind of partnership in action is the Coca-Cola Company. Let’s hear from Manolo. [Presentation]

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Commerce and Retail media at 23% and high-velocity content production at 38%. These changes that we’re making at WPP to integrate our client proposition will enable us to cross-sell more effectively and grow our share in these fast-growing markets. So that’s my perspective on how the world is changing, what it means for our clients and the opportunity of AI. Thanks for indulging me in that. But I’d like to now unpack our growth strategy in a bit more detail. So as I mentioned earlier, we have 4 strategic objectives: to deliver superior growth for our clients by reorienting around an integrated proposition to become a simpler company moving to 4 operating units across 4 regions with common incentives across the company, to leverage the power of our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open for competitive advantage and to create firm financial foundations for the future.

We’ve built a detailed plan that sets out the actions we’re taking to deliver on these objectives, and the entire management team worked together to build this plan. This was the ultimate team collaboration. We’re all behind it. We’re all aligned and committed to its execution. There are 8 core pillars to the plan, which you can see on this slide, but I’m going to double click and I’m going to double-click briefly on each of them, but I do want to start with WPP Open, our pioneering agentic marketing platform because it sits at the center of everything we do. It’s where all of our capabilities come together into one integrated end-to-end platform. It’s the cornerstone of WPP’s own transformation, and it’s how we deliver services, transformation and growth to our clients.

WPP Open is a platform that we’ve been investing and building for a few years now. We recognized that we needed an end-to-end orchestration layer to connect workflow inside of WPP. And the platform enables us to scale intelligence and best practice across our group and reimagine business process and client solutions with the agentic capabilities that now live inside Agent Hub, an important recent addition to the platform. But let me show you an example of the power of the platform with a recent example from Google Pixel. Using WPP Open and AI personas, we analyzed millennial conversations from across social media, uncovering a shift towards romantasizing everyday life and reframing mundane moments as cinematic moments. Guided by this insight, our brand agent recommended focusing on Pixel’s camera coach feature to help users take control of their story.

Thanks to specialized agents, our workflow moved from social listening to creative concepts in just 1 hour. With Google’s advanced AI models within WPP Open, campaign assets were approved and live within 24 hours. And this delivered a 3% increase in brand uplift, demonstrating a new marketing flywheel where insight, creativity and production really move at the speed of culture. So recognizing the pace of technology change, we knew that the future of marketing would look very different than in the past. And to anticipate these changes, we’ve significantly enhanced the platform over the past 12 months. Open Intelligence is our foundational intelligence layer that securely connects trillions of live data points from clients, partners and WPP in a privacy-first way.

And it’s now integrated and powers the entire WPP platform end-to-end. We consolidated our technology and data solutions into one organization. We have one WPP development team, one integrated product road map and one set of design and portfolio management principles, which dramatically simplifies how we think about evolving this platform in the future. Our people work on WPP Open every day, and it features in every client pitch as the single unified agentic platform that clients need to deliver integrated marketing workflows and a collaborative workspace where humans and agents can work together to deliver a system of growth that clients can trust. There are many, many point solutions available in the market today that address pieces, fragments of the marketing workflow, and they’re often tied to specific platforms, leaving clients to manage costly complex tech stacks with fragmented workflows.

WPP Open solves this problem in a single end-to-end platform. It’s an agnostic system built on a common data model. It gives clients one source of truth to integrate operations, optimize investment and drive growth at scale. It’s really hard to explain technology, though. So let me show you how this works. [Presentation]

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Great. So I talked about the importance of partnerships because in today’s changing world, like no single company can go it alone. WPP Open, as the name indicates, is open by design. We will continue to enhance our own technology with the very best and latest AI models and agentic tool sets through our groundbreaking strategic technology and data partnerships with Google, Microsoft, TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Stability AI and more. These partnerships don’t just give us access to new AI models and tools. They enable us to bring cutting-edge innovation resources to our clients and unlock important new routes to market, particularly important for our Enterprise Solutions business. You might have seen earlier this week, we announced a significantly expanded partnership with Adobe, embedding their industry-leading AI marketing suite directly into WPP Open.

This is a powerful integration that delivers effective streamlined marketing operations for our clients, enabling them to scale personalization, optimize media and create on-brand content efficiently with agentic AI workflows. This build, buy and partner approach that ensures that WPP Open remains at the forefront of cutting-edge technology innovation so that our clients always have state-of-the-art capability at their fingertips. WPP Open is a significant source of competitive advantage for WPP. This platform puts AI to work to transform our clients’ marketing function and enable new outcome-based commercial models, tying our success directly to client growth. So that’s WPP Open. Now let’s go back to the strategic plan and briefly step through the actions we’re taking to deliver on our growth objectives.

Our first key action focuses on media and data and positioning these capabilities at the core of our integrated client proposition. Brian Lesser joined WPP 18 months ago and has done a fantastic job spearheading the transformation of WPP Media. He’s implemented structural change and led the acquisition and integration of InfoSum, which now underpins our differentiated data approach. We know there’s more work to do, but recent wins in WPP Media that Brian and his team have secured give us full confidence that we’re on the right path. So I’d like to invite Brian to the stage now to dive a bit deeper on WPP Media’s transformation. Brian?

Brian Lesser: Hi, everybody. Good morning. And thank you, Cindy, for the introduction and for leading the way at WPP. 12 months ago, I promised a transformation, and we delivered. We have united WPP Media, placing our clients at the heart of everything we do, ready to unlock limitless growth in a media everywhere future. Our foundation is built on our proprietary open intelligence, driving real-time predictive decision-making. Today, I’ll detail how we’re now perfectly set up for success with the client always at the core of a truly integrated WPP, powered by a differentiated platform that sets us apart. This is our winning recipe, and I’ll share tangible case studies proving this model is designed to win. From the outside, it might seem as if all marketers have the same basic needs.

The truth is that every client is unique with vastly different context, growth strategies and audiences. This is why we have restructured the way we work to ensure each client’s unique needs sit at the heart of our business. This radical client centrality is allowing us to unlock true integrated marketing across WPP. We have built a single financial and data ecosystem that eliminates siloed operations to bring the full power of WPP’s people and tech to life. This empowers us to deliver seamless connected solutions that cut across the traditional ways of doing business like customer experience, commerce and social and influencer that accelerate client growth. Whether it’s a media pitch, a creative pitch or a production pitch, more than ever, clients are looking for a single integrated solution.

This is what we’re now set up to deliver and why clients are choosing us. You can see the power of this integrated approach with Mazda. When creative is as intelligent as you’re targeting, you don’t just reach people, you move them. Mazda’s first to the finish was a groundbreaking branded content series. It spotlighted trailblazing female racecar drivers connecting on a human level beyond motorsport. This innovative program became the first branded content designated a prime video original. It showed how media intelligence fuels powerful storytelling. The series achieved 16 million minutes watched, drove 93% new website visits, increased purchase consideration by 23% and contributed to Mazda’s highest sales year ever. This is the type of results the new WPP media generates.

Our data approach isn’t merely an evolution. It’s a fundamental revolution. Traditional marketing with its static definition of identity and commoditized view of audiences is increasingly obsolete and constrained by privacy risks. We ask a different question, what signals truly matter to our audiences. We unlock intelligence from diverse live signals, context, interests and behaviors to find new patterns in the consumer journey. This identifies new growth audiences and predicts their future actions to accelerate business growth. Central to this is our market-leading solution, enhanced by InfoSum, which establishes private data networks directly within our clients’ environments. This enables secure multiparty data collaboration without any data ever moving.

This decentralized approach breaks down silos, creating comprehensive AI-ready consumer insights from previously inaccessible sources, far surpassing traditional ID matching alone to deliver truly predictive intelligence. For the first time, clients can harness the full potential of their first-party data from any cloud or warehouse environment. including Adobe, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Databricks and Snowflake. This proprietary intelligence can then be connected and enriched with our comprehensive identity data and robust network of over 350 integrated partners, giving us access to quadrillions of real-time signals. This allows us to produce faster, smarter and more effective marketing across all leading global platforms like Amazon, Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Snapchat and TikTok.

By synthesizing this vast data, we build predictive media strategies that deliver deeper engagement and superior client growth, moving beyond just reach and frequency and validating actual outcomes with historical performance data. To bring this to life, consider our work with Heineken. They needed a way to connect their first-party consumer data with ITV’s on-demand viewing audience and Tesco shoppers. Powered by InfoSum, Heineken was able to identify relevant audience segments based on age and real-time drinking preferences. Crucially, Tesco provided closed-loop measurement of sales impact, all without moving or sharing any customer data out of Heineken’s environment. In a world where measurable outcomes truly matter, the campaign success wasn’t measured in brand uplift or impressions, but in real sales data from Tesco stores, which increased by an impressive 189%.

Another real-life example of driving business results through our market-leading data and technology solution. Powered by Open Intelligence and enhanced by InfoSum’s federated learning infrastructure, WPP Open offers a unique agentic marketing platform. This gives our clients speed, simplicity, scale and AI innovation to modernize marketing, optimize media and accelerate their growth. Our differentiated approach to data is helping move marketing beyond legacy static databases by enabling more connected and intelligent ways of working. For Coca-Cola, this means bringing together creativity, technology and real-time insights to create more integrated marketing experiences. There’s no one better than Manolo to share how WPP Open and Open Intelligence are transforming marketing at the Coca-Cola Company.

[Presentation]

Brian Lesser: Our strong Q4 2025 momentum continued into 2026. with WPP Media achieving its best January in 4 years for net new business wins, leading all media holding companies. We have an inspired, dynamic market-leading team of winners leading this charge. The change in our culture has been palpable. Major integrated wins like JLR and Estee Lauder confirm our strategy works. Our winning client-centric proposition built on this future-proof integrated foundation rapidly meets evolving client demands and delivers truly predictive intelligence. With media at its core, WPP is now exceptionally positioned to drive continued growth, sustain client relationships and deliver significant value for our investors. Thank you, and now I’ll hand it back to Cindy.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Thank you, Brian. Thanks so much. So the next key action we’re taking is to establish next-generation production and creative capabilities. And I’m going to start briefly with production. Just last month, we announced the creation of WPP Production, our new production unit led by Richard Glasson. And of course, we marked the occasion with a video. [Presentation]

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: So as I think you can see, production is being pretty radically transformed, and we’re facing into this head on by fundamentally reimagining how it all works. WPP production, it’s a mouthful. It’s designed to solve for both volume and performance. We operate an end-to-end content orchestration through WPP Open as one unified content production engine. We’re establishing high -velocity studios deeply integrated into WPP Media for real-time measurement and content optimization. And we’re centralizing commissioning and supplier management to in-source more work where appropriate and create a more curated roster of external production partners. We’re investing. We’re investing in cutting-edge capabilities, high-velocity studios, as I mentioned, Gen AI studios, virtual production, video effect of virtual effects and digital twin pipelines.

With WPP production, we are well positioned to support our clients as they look to transform and often consolidate their content production activities. And we’re confident over time, we will take a greater share of this market. So next, I want to talk about creative. Like we know how critically important creativity is to our clients. I talked a bit earlier about the increasing demand for verifiable human creativity and craft in the era of AI. This is an important source of brand differentiation and value creation for our clients. And while the market for creative service is projecting limited growth over the medium term, creative capabilities are still a vital element of an integrated proposition, and there is significant opportunity for us to unlock white space across our client portfolio through joint propositions and cross-sell.

So recognizing these factors, today, we are formally announcing the launch of WPP Creative, led by John Cook, and this organization will be home to our most iconic agency brands, VML, Ogilvy, AKQA, Berson, Landor, Design Bridge and Partners. I want to be very, very clear on this one. We are not merging agency brands. We are not consolidating agency brands. We are not sunsetting agency brands, okay? On the contrary, John and our agency leaders will unite them in new ways and empower them like never before. I’ve spoken to many clients. They all share with me how much they value choice and the unique perspectives and cultures that our agency brands provide. However, they also want to make it easier for those agencies to collaborate and efficiently access the whole breadth of WPP’s capabilities.

A simplified structure also removes barriers for our global client leaders, creating a frictionless path to our top talent so we can put the right resource in front of the right client at the right time without the constraints of the past. With WPP Creative, all of our agency brands will have access to the full modern stack of commerce, customer experience, digital platforms, enhancing their client proposition and expanding the go-to-market channel for these services. Much greater alignment with WPP Media and WPP Production will ensure that creative ideas are instantly adaptable and executable across the whole customer funnel. While agency brands remain, WPP Creative will have a more competitive cost base from a simpler, more unified operating model and greater shared infrastructure.

I’m excited that WPP Creative will double down on our agency brands and arm them with the capability they need to make them more modern and more united than ever before. And we’re already seeing the power of bringing together our portfolio in recent successes securing, for example, the creative mandate for Kenvue, the parent company to well-known brands like Listerine LSTERIN, Sudafed, BAN-AD and more, a strength also recognized by our client there. Next, I’d like to spend a few minutes talking about enterprise solutions. Because today, every global business needs a partner that can help them build, run and evolve their core platforms and systems in a world where AI is part of everyday operations. Businesses are being forced to rethink how they establish competitive advantage and the potential to reinvent workflows has never been greater.

For some of our clients, the need is clear and well articulated. For others, the need is completely unarticulated. They know there’s a better way, but they don’t know what it looks like. To partner most effectively with our clients on their AI transformation, we are elevating our existing enterprise solutions capability into a new externally facing operated unit called WPP Enterprise Solutions, led by Jeff Geheb. Enterprise Solutions provides a complete enterprise transformation offer for clients that spans consulting, content, customer experience, commerce, CRM and platforms. We have a unique ability to fuse these capabilities with media intelligence and world-class creativity to build an AI-powered marketing operation end-to-end for our clients.

WPP Enterprise Solutions benefits from multiple routes to market, including via our agency brands and both direct and partner-led go-to-markets as well. These multiple routes to market maximize our coverage and enhance our ability to cross-sell, capture white space, TAM growth opportunity within our installed client base and will drive more direct and partner-influenced revenue. The enterprise transformation market is huge. It’s worth $230 billion and projected to grow cumulatively 7% over the next 3 years. Although our share of that market today is small, the opportunity is really significant. And actually, we already have really solid foundations to build on. Today, our Enterprise Solutions business employs around 10,000 people and generates around $1.8 billion of revenue.

It’s about 13% of our overall group net revenue. This business has quietly built a book of exceptional clients and has already earned notable industry recognition from Gartner, Forrester and IDC. In many ways, as I like to say, Enterprise Solutions is the hidden gem within WPP that we will now elevate to become the crown jewel. And if you ask our clients at Ford, it’s already the crown jewel. We have a partnership with Ford that started with J. Walter Thompson 80 years ago, and we’ve continued supporting them with cross-functional teams as their needs have evolved. Let’s hear directly from Ford. [Presentation]

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Great. Okay. So we have talked about how we’re going to deliver superior growth for our clients by reorienting around an integrated proposition that brings together media creative, production enterprise solutions, all powered by WPP Open. Now I want to talk about the organizational changes that we’re going to make to become a simpler, more integrated company because these are key enablers for our strategy. And as I mentioned earlier, we haven’t been waiting for today’s update to change how we engage with clients. We know that when we show up as the new WPP, as the best of WPP, we win. But to build on our current momentum and make it sustainable, we need to radically simplify our organization really to unlock true client centricity.

So to do that, WPP will no longer be a holding company. We will no longer be a shopping basket full of stand-alone businesses, hundreds of stand-alone businesses. We’re going to move to a single company model. with 4 operating units across 4 regions with incentives that closely align to the overall performance of WPP. Being a single company with a simpler structure and common incentives are critical enablers of our strategy. As part of these structural changes, we’ll also further simplify corporate functions, particularly in finance and people to reduce duplication, increase our use of shared services and redesign our processes, leveraging AI and Agenta capabilities. Alongside these structural changes, we’re also focused on significantly strengthening our execution, both in terms of client service delivery and new business growth.

At the heart of WPP’s relationship with our largest clients are our global client leaders, our GCLs — and our GCLs are already masters of creating value. But our existing operating model and our incentives and our internal processes have not always afforded them the agility needed to deliver seamless client-centric services that unlock new avenues for growth. I’m sure my GCLs in the room would agree. But we’re transforming our approach. We’re going to empower our GCLs with the authority and the resources to function as true leaders for their client portfolios, exercising strategic leadership rather than merely orchestrating a bunch of activities. This is going to include greater control over client P&Ls and the authority to make the best strategic decisions supported by streamlined internal processes designed to eliminate organizational friction and provide access to the right resource at the right time.

We’re also establishing a new team of client solution architects. This team will apply deep industry expertise to develop winning growth strategies for clients and then architect tailored solutions to deliver on those strategies, unifying technology, media data, all of our marketing capabilities to really drive successful execution. And finally, we’re establishing more integrated growth operations, creating a stronger network of growth talent across WPP with a shared hunger to win. These changes will enable us to build on our current momentum, all of our recent wins as we strengthen our new business engine and champion a stronger winning mindset. And speaking of winning mindset, the next core priority for us, perhaps the most important of all, is to embed a high-performance culture to attract and retain the world’s best talent, grounded in collaboration, client obsession, humility, accountability and a hunger to win.

I know from experience that culture can be the biggest differentiator and competitive advantage of them all. Talented people choose to join companies and stay at companies that have strong cultures where they can thrive in their careers and be their authentic selves. I also know that changing culture takes time and persistence, and it’s about both winning hearts and minds. I think winning hearts is about inspiring people with a new mission that feels fresh and relevant and clear. It’s also about creating an environment that feels safe and inclusive, where creativity, where intelligent risk-taking are valued, where failure is treated as a path to learning and continuous improvement is celebrated. Now winning minds is about getting the basics right.

So that’s about clear communication and active listening to people, investments in learning and development. We’ve got to ensure that our people are building new capabilities with a focus on AI so they can deliver what our clients need from us. It’s about common incentives across the company that just unlock collaboration and frictionless resource sharing. It’s about performance management and feedback to allow us to build that culture of accountability and greater talent mobility and career progression opportunities. But what I really want is for people to have a world-class employee experience and feel proud to be on a winning team and proud to be part of WPP. Now the final pillar of our Elevate28 execution plan is about creating firm financial foundations for the future.

And that’s about creating capacity to invest in growth and building a WPP that’s fully optimized to deliver for our clients. I’m going to hand over to Joanne now to step through the financial aspects of our plan. Joanne?

Joanne Wilson: So thank you, Cindy. And okay, let me share the financial framework, which underpins our Elevate28 8 plan, including our approach to capital allocation. Elevate28 8 is first and foremost about getting WPP back to growth, and our financial priorities underpin that. In the near term, our focus will be on stabilizing the business, and that means improving our net new business performance and our client retention. As I mentioned earlier, net sales like-for-like is a lagging indicator, and that will take time to recover as we cycle through historic client losses. Now as we progress through the 3 years of our plan and we deliver strongly against the core growth building blocks, which I will talk to in a later slide, we anticipate a return to taking our fair share of the market.

And in some areas and over time, we will seek to outperform the market. And to support this, we will unlock GBP 500 million of gross annual cost savings between now and 2028, enabling a reallocation of investment towards our growth drivers. And this will, in turn, support a rebuild of margins. And finally, we are setting out to make WPP a simpler and more focused business reducing the perimeter of the group and then still doing strengthening the balance sheet and providing a greater degree of financial flexibility. As you’ve heard today, we are already implementing many parts of our plan. However, it will take time to deliver and to realize the full benefits in our operational and in our financial outcomes. As Cindy indicated, we see delivery across 3 phases.

In 2026, we will stabilize the operational performance of the business, leveraging the improved competitiveness of our media and our data proposition and our production consolidation. We will action our cost saving plans, and we will prioritize investment into the parts of our business, which represent the largest growth opportunities. In parallel, we will take a more proactive approach to our portfolio, unlocking embedded value and operating with a tighter and a more focused perimeter. This will require focused execution and a rigorous reallocation of resources to support our growth plans. Now as a lagging indicator, we expect organic growth to remain subdued in 2026, and we also anticipate margins to remain below historic levels as we reinvest savings to support growth.

Alongside this, we expect an elevated average leverage ratio. From 2027, we expect to start to see a progressive ramp-up of the benefits from both our operating model changes and the investments we are making to enhance our new go-to-market, our integrated proposition and from scaling capabilities, including our full service enterprise solutions and production. It is our ambition for the group to return to growth during 2027 for margins to start to rebuild and for our leverage to start to come down. And from 2028, our plan assumes a significantly improved operational performance characterized by accelerating growth and improving margin and strong cash conversion. While we are not providing specific medium-term guidance today, rest assured, we are relentlessly focused on immediate stabilization and disciplined execution of the building blocks to return WPP to growth.

And let me spend some time on those building blocks of growth, which we are, of course, aligning our investment priorities against. And I’ll start with media. Now the market for Media Services is around $40 billion and is forecast to grow at a 4% CAGR from ’24 to ’28. And within this, commerce and retail media is a high-growth market, expected to deliver a CAGR of 23%. As you heard from Brian, we have been busy transforming our media and our data proposition and improving our execution. And this not only supports our ambition to improve new business and retention across our media business, but it will also enable us to deliver that improved integrated proposition for our clients with media at the heart. And our recent win with JLR is a great example of that.

Now taking back our fair share of the media market is the most significant growth opportunity for WPP at a group level, and it’s a core tenet of Elevate28. Now the second area is our next-generation production offer. Now while the overall production market is seeing muted growth, we are seizing the opportunity to take share, internalizing third-party production spend by our agencies, which is estimated at hundreds of millions over the course of Elevate28. We have also identified significant incremental opportunities from new ways of originating creative work, leveraging GenAI and BFX pipelines, which enable us to build next-generation studio capability and make much more of our client work directly. High-velocity content production is a great example of this, which despite being a relatively small proportion of the overall production market today is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 38% over the next 3 years.

As the largest production agency globally and with our investment in dedicated capabilities, including content studios, we are well placed to take more than our fair share of this opportunity. We are working with a number of our large clients already in these areas, and we’ve leveraged innovative content opportunities in some of our recent new business wins. And finally, scaling our enterprise solutions proposition. The enterprise solutions market, as we define it, is forecast to deliver a CAGR of 7%. We play in this space already, but as part of a fragmented offering, existing within agency silos and as such, our current share of the market is low single digit. Now scaling our enterprise solutions across all of our creative brands as well as establishing it as a distinct pillar and investing in direct go-to-market capability, we believe will enable us to significantly grow our market share over the course of Elevate28.

The strength of our capability in this area has been recognized by Forrester, amongst others. And with many recent client wins, we are confident we will see an improving growth trajectory. For 2026, the focus will be on consolidating these capabilities under one leader, establishing a strong direct go-to-market team and leveraging partnership opportunities such as the one announced this week with Adobe. Now cumulatively, these opportunities represent a significant white space gross revenue opportunity estimated at up to $900 million over the term of Elevate28 8. And delivering against our growth priorities will, of course, require investment, which will be self-funded from our cost initiatives. Our shift to a new operating model will yield significant efficiencies, building on what we have already done.

Since 2024, we have removed GBP 300 million of gross cost savings and our Elevate28 operational plan unlocks a further GBP 500 million of gross annualized cost savings by 2028. Now we expect the associated cash restructuring costs to be around GBP 400 million and for those to be incurred across ’26 and ’27. It’s important to emphasize that our cost actions are targeted at improving our execution and supporting our growth priorities as much as they are about simply removing costs from our business, and they will come from 3 key areas. The first area is that shift to a new operating model. It will drive a more simplified, more integrated way of working. It will enable us to scale our capabilities across the organization and support a stronger and a more effective client proposition.

We will consolidate leadership at a global, at regional and at market levels, providing clear roles and responsibilities for our people. We will optimize spans and layers. We will remove duplication across our creative assets, driving a more aligned model, enabling a more effective cross-selling and providing a more holistic view of client success and outcomes. The second bucket focuses on structural cost savings. And as a result of our new operating model, we will deduplicate corporate functions, particularly across our finance and our people teams. We’ll further leverage our shared service centers and create centers of excellence. This will set us up to unlock more scaled productivity savings from greater automation and the use of AI across our corporate functions.

And the third bucket will come from rationalization opportunities. We will deliver savings from our real estate footprint and from across our long tail of markets and agency operations. In 2026, we expect to realize at least GBP 100 million of in-year P&L savings and GBP 250 million of annualized savings. The estimated restructuring costs associated with these savings in 2026 is around GBP 190 million. Now these targeted actions will improve our execution as well as enable a reallocation of investment into the highest growth opportunities across our business, supporting a rebuild of our margins over time. We will prioritize investment across 3 key areas. Firstly, we are bolstering the main engines of the Elevate28 plan, which you’ve heard about today.

We are directing investments specifically into media and commerce into high-velocity production and enterprise solutions to ensure we capture demand in those high-growth areas. This will include investment in commerce and influencer and analytics talent and in content studios. Second, we are investing to upgrade our go-to-market approach with a focus on our client needs and our new business capabilities. Alongside this, we will rebuild our incentive pool, and we have redesigned our incentive model to align it to our new operating model and with the aim of disincentivizing the past siloed way of working. Third, we are sustaining our commitment to WPP open to data and to AI. To give you a sense of scale, in 2025, we invested more than GBP 300 million in this area, and we will protect this investment to ensure continued enhancements to our technology platform and our AI capability.

In 2026, we are expecting to reinvest all of the in-year savings from the cost initiatives into the first 2 priorities, and this is reflected in our margin guidance for the year. Now these investments will be made in a disciplined manner, and we will fully leverage our more integrated approach to benefit from scaled capabilities and a rigorous prioritization in the areas that will drive the highest growth opportunities and returns for WPP. And let me move on to talk about our portfolio review. In recent months, we have conducted this review aimed at assessing opportunities to unlock embedded value and refocus our perimeter. Now this review has covered all assets that we own, whether an operating unit or a minority investment. We’ve evaluated how each strengthen our proposition and fit our future integrated offer.

While we have many great assets within our portfolio, it may not be optimal for us to remain owners either in whole or in part of some of those in the future, and we’ve applied that best owner assessment to identify the assets where value is potentially maximized outside the group alongside a plan for continuing to rationalize noncore passive investments. Now this has also been an exercise in determining the areas we want to prioritize investment in and being rigorously disciplined in our allocation of capital. And of course, underpinning this is a disciplined approach to M&A with a focus on organic execution in the near term. With the review now complete, we are moving directly to action. And while we don’t have specific transactions to announce today, the work is underway, and we will update you in due course.

And that leads me to our approach to capital allocation, which is framed across 3 clear priorities. First, we are committed to our investment-grade balance sheet. This is our foundation. Our primary focus here is retaining strong liquidity, reducing our gross debt and improving our leverage ratios over time. As shared earlier, Fitch Ratings has assigned WPP, a BBB rating with a stable outlook, further solidifying our investment-grade balance sheet. Our second priority is funding organic growth. As you heard, we are prioritizing investment in the highest growth and the highest returning areas of the business. And crucially, we are funding this through our cost initiatives I shared today with a strict focus on scaling capabilities that support growth across the entire group rather than in silos.

And third, we will share the proceeds of growth. We aim to balance consistent, sustainable shareholder returns over the medium term with inorganic investment. Reflecting this, the Board have proposed a full year dividend of 15p for 2025. We will apply a focused approach to M&A, deploying capital only when an acquisition is clearly more efficient than building that capability internally. And beyond that and as appropriate, any excess capital will be returned to shareholders. And finally, for me, a brief note on how we — how our reporting is going to evolve to reflect this new structure. Now the current structure is shown here, and our ultimate objective is for our financial reporting to map directly onto our new organizational model. For segmental reporting purposes, the 4 operating units, which are the engines of our business will be included in an enlarged global integrated agencies reportable segment, which will now include public relations and our design agencies.

For regional reporting, results will be broken down by North America, EMEA, Latin America and APAC. And over time, we want to give you better visibility into the engines of our business. And therefore, within global integrated agencies, we will provide specific disclosures on net revenue and organic growth for our key capabilities, media, production, creative and enterprise solutions. So that’s all for me, and I will hand you back to Cindy to wrap up.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Amazing. Thank you, Joanne. Home stretch folks. So before we conclude and open up to questions, I just want to spend a minute on how my team and I will hold ourselves accountable and measure success. As Joanne mentioned, our primary focus is to return our business to growth. Organic growth is our most important success metric and getting back to consistent organic growth is our North Star as a management team. But as you know, organic growth is a lag indicator and will take us some time to deliver. So beyond the lag indicators, you can see on the right-hand side of the slide behind me, we’ve also included on the left a few leading indicators and success metrics that my team and I have as part of our own scorecard.

— that will provide tangible evidence along the way that the actions we’re taking are working. I won’t read them to you, but you can see there are things like new business wins, client retention, cost savings, asset disposals. These are the types of lead indicators we’ll be rigorously managing, and we’re confident that these will drive the outcomes that matter the most over time, consistent organic growth, supported by a solid financial foundation. I also want to reassure you that we’re not going to just simply disappear and report back on KPIs in a year’s time. We really want you to see the execution of the strategy in real time. We want to invite more frequent engagement with our investor community. So over the coming months, we’ll be hosting a series of deep dive webinars to take you further under the hood of our key growth engines, specifically in the areas of media, next-gen production and enterprise solutions.

So I know we’ve shared a lot of information with you today, and thank you for listening. But I have to say our mission has never been clearer to be the trusted growth partner to the world’s leading brands in the era of AI. Elevate28 is a bold plan for a simpler, more integrated WPP. We will stabilize the business, return to organic growth, create capacity to invest and deliver attractive returns for our shareholders. And we’ll do that by delivering growth for our clients by being a simpler, more integrated company by leveraging our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open for competitive advantage and creating firm financial foundations for the future. I am very confident that WPP has a bright future ahead. This is a WPP that is fit for the future and built to win.

Now we’re going to draw this strategy update to a close. We’re going to invite questions from the audience for me, Joanne, Brian or any members of the senior leadership team. And I want to thank you. Thank you very much.

Thomas Singlehurst: Thank you very much, Cindy. My name is Tom Singlehurst. I head up Investor Relations for WPP. We’re going to go to questions. We’ll — before we dive in, a couple of quick parish notices. For those in the room, we’re going to bring a mic to you. So if you can just be patient. If you could state your name and which firm you represent, that would be fantastic. And to make sure we’ve got enough time for everyone, it would be hugely appreciated if you could ration yourself to maybe 2 questions and a follow-up. [Operator Instructions] But let’s start with questions in the room. Laura, maybe start with you.

Laura Metayer: Laura Metayer from Morgan Stanley. Three questions today, please. First question on differentiation and competitive advantage. I’m curious, what do you think is the single differentiation of WPP. Obviously, we’ve heard from peers need to like have an integrated offering, a focus on data, driving leading with AI. So I’m just wondering what do you think is the single differentiating factor of WPP. Second question is when you talked about the JLR win, you said you pitched it as an outcome-based revenue model. Do you mind providing a little bit more details here, like any KPIs that — and if you can also say maybe like telling us a little bit more generally, like how you think the revenue model will evolve and what sort of KPIs will be used to measure performance?

And then lastly, on the Enterprise Solutions business, could you give us an example of a typical project of WPP here and how it differs from leading IT services consultants because obviously, it’s part of an agency.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Sure. Thank you for your questions, Laura. They’re great. I’ll have a go at the first one and then maybe invite Johnny Horny to talk about JLR. He led the pitch and maybe Jeff Geheb to give an example of an enterprise solution engagement, if that’s okay. So I think Brian was incredibly articulate on this. I tried to paint a picture of WPP Open as a very different proposition, right? And it’s — because it’s integrated, it’s not a point solution. It transforms the entire end-to-end marketing workflow. It’s powered by Open Intelligence, which is our foundational data layer. And we’ve integrated InfoSum’s distributed data collaboration capabilities, which means it’s built for the future of marketing, not the past.

And that is an incredible competitive advantage. Like we have all the ingredients we need to win. And what we really needed to do is pull it all together into an integrated proposition and then power it with this incredible platform that we have. And frankly, when clients see that, they see the power of it and its ability to drive growth without compromising on data ownership. We win in head-to-head competition. That’s what you’re seeing happen. But I don’t know, Brian, do you — is there anything you want to add?

Brian Lesser: I think one of the things I said was that every client is different. And there is no one approach to driving business results for clients. We’ve built a platform in WPP Open that is flexible that includes our own proprietary technology, but also partners effectively with other companies. So we’re always ready for what’s next. And we built a data model that similarly doesn’t rely on a static data asset that is a legacy CRM solution. Instead, it relies on the ability to connect any and all data sources so that we can be more intelligent and more dynamic in understanding consumer behavior and driving those business results for our clients. So it’s different for every client. But as Cindy said, it’s really an integrated approach across all parts of our business grounded in that data and technology strategy.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Thank you. I would just add, we are still contracting with JLR. So there’s a limit to what we can share. But Johnny, why don’t you say a few words?

Johnny Horny: Yes, sure. Yes. Thanks for mentioning that. We haven’t officially been appointed by JLR. We pitched throughout last year, went into a period of exclusivity with them through January, and we’re now contracting and hoping that by March will be live. But at the core of our pitch to your question, I guess, what’s our secret sauce? I think our secret sauce is where you put everything you’ve seen this morning together. So starting with Open Intelligence to be able to build cohorts and understand audiences in a way that doesn’t require us to do simply old-fashioned ID matching, but to keep the data where it is, keep it safe and secure and then put that into a team that we’re going to build with JLR, where we and they are all together on the open platform end-to-end.

And it’s the end-to-end integrated nature of this offer that I think then allows us to make what I think are becoming genuinely competitive offers when it comes to outcomes. So those outcomes aren’t do you like the agency you work with, those outcomes are, are we selling more product? And will we get paid on being able to sell more product by being able to build their brands and measurably show that there’s greater levels of desire for their products and the crown jewels of brands that they’ve got. So we haven’t finished contracting, but those are the defining and that pitch was against all the major holding companies. I think those are going to be the integrated propositions that will see us win JLR and hopefully many more JLRs pulling these ingredients together.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Thanks, Johnny.

Joanne Wilson: Can I just build on that because Laura, I think stepping back a little bit, your question is around what happens with a time and materials model with AI. And the story is really moving on. Hopefully, you picked it up today. Our clients are using us and it’s for the industry really. They need brand safety. They need to know that they have got cultural nuances. They have the best creative and strategy talent, working with them on their brands to really differentiate. And also that they’ve got the access to the best talent. And navigating through what is an incredibly and ever more complex ecosystem is incredibly challenging for CMOs. It’s getting tougher and tougher. And that’s what they’re paying us for. It’s no longer they’re paying for us to create 5 ads.

In fact, we can create 1,000 ads, but it’s how do you get those ads into the right audiences. And that’s really what they’re paying for, which is really enabling this output-based pricing, it’s outcome-based pricing, and it’s also shifting more to tech fees and licensing fees as well. So this will be an evolution, but we’re making lots of progress in this area.

Unknown Executive: To answer your question about enterprise solution scaling. So let’s just stay with automotive. This could be JLR. It’s certainly true with Ford. So when you begin to solve a marketing problem around content transformation or a customer experience challenge for marketing and you start with the CMO, you quickly evolve that conversation and realize that’s an enterprise problem you’re solving. Content doesn’t live in marketing. It lives as an asset of the entire company. Customer experience lives as an asset of service, brand of product development. And so the nature of our work usually begins with the marketer and then it expands further and further and further. And soon, we’re in rooms with IT leaders, procurement leaders, service leaders.

And instead of using their silos to define how we work, we’re pulling them together. And with AI, that’s collapsing at an even more increased rate of change. So AI platforms right now are — they’re collapsing the buying patterns with IT buyers used to buy a platform, implement it for years and then draw the business in. Nowadays, there’s a really fast iteration cycle. So we’re finding ourselves in rooms now starting with marketing, but really extends to all the stakeholder groups.

Thomas Singlehurst: Can we go to Nico.

Nicolas Langlet: Nicolas Langlet from BNP Paribas. I’ve got 3 questions. The first one on the existing business with clients. which was definitely a weak part in the 2025 performance. Can you tell us a bit more about what happened? Is it related to scope reduction, pricing pressure? Or can you give us more detail about that? And what are the concrete actions you have already implemented to stabilize the business with the existing clients? The second question on WPP Open Pro. Can you give us an update regarding the rollout, the first feedback and what sort of opportunity you see in the mid- to long term? And finally, of the GBP 500 million gross cost reduction, have you included any benefit from generative AI tools in that GBP 500 million? And if you can share that? And of the GBP 500 million, how much do you plan to reinvest in the business?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Yes, why don’t you take the first?

Joanne Wilson: Okay. So look, Nico, it’s absolutely the right question. If you look at our performance in 2025, we talked about a drag from net new business of about 150 basis points. So that points to just under 400 basis points from the underlying business. And the majority of the cuts that we saw really came from the creative part of our business. And as I said in my prepared remarks, it was really an overview, and we did see significant spending cuts, particularly from the start of Q2. Look, we can point to different reasons for it, but there was an awful lot of uncertainty, and we saw heightened volatility across clients. We’ve talked about the polarization. Many clients, we saw very strong growth during the year, but others cut significantly and at very short notice as well.

And effective, we tend to have more project-based spend in our business. And of course, that’s often the first places that get cut when we see that volatility. And I would also just add that as you heard from Brian today, Brian and the team have been incredibly busy in the last 18 months really setting up our competitive proposition for the future, redesigning how we deliver for clients. And that undoubtedly has had some disruption in the business and the underlying business. And we’ve been very deliberate in Elevate28 that Brian and the team have done a lot of the heavy lift and their focus is now on execution. So it sort of brings you on to the second part, what are we doing about it. So if you think about that for media. And then with the creative part of the business, we are building an incredible powerhouse within WPP Creative.

We did get in our own way a lot of the time in the past with our silos. WPP Creative will enable scaled capabilities across all of our agencies. WPP Open as well will enable our creative teams to work in a standardized way, and that’s everything from big large clients to smaller clients. So it will improve what we’re delivering, and that will help both with our larger clients and that tail of clients where we’ve seen more reductions in spend. And I think that’s really important with creative. Sometimes we get very focused on the headline cost saving, but it really is about creating a more agile organization with fewer silos. And just on the GBP 500 million of growth savings and how much we’re going to reinvest. I talked about the in-year savings in ’26 being GBP 100 million annualized savings will be GBP 250 million.

All of that we’re going to reinvest in 2026. I talked about this priority to stabilize and invest in the growth drivers, we will do that. Look, it’s too early to say how much of the remainder we will invest, but I would assume that we will invest as much as we need of that to support our growth ambitions.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: I’m happy to say a few words about WPP Open Pro. It’s early days, right? We only launched a few months ago. But what we did was basically productize or SaaS-ified certain capabilities from within the WPP Open platform. And we did it to target the mid-market SMB kind of end of the client segment. The clients that would largely look to self-service that kind of capability. I’m very encouraged actually. We’ve got a number of deals with clients. We’ve got a very healthy pipeline against this, albeit it’s small in absolute terms. I think the interesting learning from my perspective is our top 100 clients, say, are looking at WPP Open Pro as a way to software enable the long tail of markets that they service. So rather than having full teams on the ground, you can start to see a world where they can software enable their long tail. And that’s kind of interesting.

Thomas Singlehurst: Perfect. Maybe we can go to Adrien.

Adrien de Saint Hilaire: Cindy, this is Adrien from Bank of America. So I’ve got maybe 2 questions maybe for Brian and maybe one for you, Cindy. John, I know we’re talking this afternoon. So I’ll leave the financial questions maybe for later. But maybe, Brian, on — you talked about all the business wins in Q4 and Q1 and well done on that. Can you tell us like what was the factor or what were the factors behind those wins? And how much of a factor price was behind those wins? And then secondly, I know we’ve talked about this before, but you put data at the core of your strategy. But how do you solve for the fact that you don’t really have, as far as I know, at least a proprietary identity graph compared to competitors? And maybe more for Cindy.

So today, we heard a lot about the opportunities. Sorry to come back on the risk. How much like revenue attrition would you expect in maybe in creative because of AI deflation around the revenue per head, for example, how much would you anticipate for the next couple of years?

Brian Lesser: Adrien, in terms of the new business wins, everything that I showed in terms of our proposition contributed to those wins. And without going client by client, what I said about every client being different applies to how we pitch business and then how we ultimately service business. So whether that was winning JLR or NCL or the various other wins, each one of those solutions was different. And the great thing about our platform is it allows that and it enables us to go in and do things differently for clients. So selling cars is different than selling cruises is different than various other clients that we have. So I think that contributed to it. The way that we’re structured also helps quite a bit. So we’re not going into these pitches as Mindshare or Wavemaker or one of our other agencies, we’re going to these pitches as WPP media.

And increasingly, we’re going into these pitches as WPP. So we get a lot of help from our colleagues at VML and Ogilvy and AKQA and from WPP production. And the clients see that, and they know that while we’re pitching one thing, we’re going to offer a full breadth of services over time. All these pitches are competitive, so price is always a factor, but that wasn’t a defining factor in any of these pitches. We have a proprietary identity asset. One of the things that you have to understand is that identity is pretty ubiquitous in the market. So there are lots of companies that provide identity solutions. And it’s really an old-fashioned notion of what we need to do to join up disparate data points. So we also have an identity asset called MerLink.

We see every adult in the United States and we use that. We also use other partners like Experian when we want to augment that. And because we have a solution that allows us to access any identity asset, it’s really not a problem for us. Having identity is such a small part of what you have to do to understand consumer behavior. What we do have is InfoSum, which allows us to connect to hundreds of other data sources. And instead of those being household addresses or e-mail addresses, these are what are people consuming on TikTok? How are they interacting with creators on YouTube. Those signals are much more important than having a traditional identity asset, which again, is a legacy system and fairly ubiquitous and accessible in the market.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Yes. I would just build — thanks for your question, Adrien. I would just build on what Brian said. I mean, I’ve never met a client that doesn’t want more for less. That’s not a new dynamic. We operate in a very highly competitive market and price pressure is a constant feature, right? But I would say that we probably accept on some level some downward pricing pressure from AI productivity, if you will. But what we’re doing here is creating an organization that can cross-sell more effectively to address the white space within our installed client base and be more effective at converting new business. If you take our top 25 clients, for example, we probably capture at best 1/3 of addressable spend. When we unlock this collaboration and cross-sell opportunity for WPP, we have massive opportunity to offset and grow in those areas.

Thomas Singlehurst: Why don’t you pass it on to Steve, given he’s right next to you.

Steven Craig Liechti: Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis. Just on the — some numbers, sorry. You said 5% to 6% gross hit from losses. Can you quantify the ’25 and ’26 to date wins to kind of give us some idea of a net number to work off as we stand today? So that’s the first question. Second, Brian, in the new setup and the new kind of pitch that you’re doing to clients, where you haven’t won, why was that? I know things is different, but it would just be useful to hear some insights there. And you also said you had some more work to do as well in your comments. I just wonder from my perspective, how much is the pitch that you’re going with the clients now absolutely the right pitch? And what more is there that you do have to do?

Brian Lesser: It’s a very dynamic business. So it’s very rare that the right pitch today is the right pitch a week from now or a month from now. So when I say we have more work to do, it’s that we’re on a constant quest to meet the needs of our clients in a rapidly evolving world, and that’s never going to change. Structurally, we’re set up to win, and we have been winning. From a data and technology standpoint, I feel great about where we are. We have the building blocks in place to evolve, not just win today, but evolve as the market evolves. So I feel great about that. In terms of why we didn’t win, I say all the time to the team, you can be the best in a pitch, you can be the best on the day and you can still lose a pitch.

And there are lots of factors that go into it. Sometimes it’s price. Sometimes we don’t feel comfortable with where a prospect is taking us in terms of commercial negotiations. Sometimes it’s an affinity for one of our competitors between a CMO that knows a certain team. So there are lots of different factors that go into it. And we’re not going to win every pitch, but we need to go into every pitch with the right solution for clients. And then I feel great about getting our fair share and actually exceeding our fair share and starting to win back the market share that we’ve lost.

Joanne Wilson: Thanks for the question, Steve. I’m always hesitant at this time of the year to give a net new business because there’s a whole year to play for, there’s a pipeline, et cetera. But let me share some of the data that we’ve already shared and you’ll be able to kind of broadly figure it out. And then I’ll just give you some context around the pipeline. So last year, we said that our gross wins were 300 to 400 basis points of drag, and then we ended up at the top end of that. And we said that the net new business impact was about 150 basis points for 2025. Really encouraging, the gross win impact for 2026 exceeds and that gross win impact in 2025, and that really reflects in recent months, the new business, the better business performance that we’ve seen, and that’s really encouraging.

2025 was a much lower activity year for new business. What we have seen in recent months is the pipeline activity building up again, which is also encouraging. And I would also often get asked, what’s defensive and what’s offensive? And it’s very interesting when you look at the pipeline and the opportunities, it’s less black and white than that. It’s oftentimes you’re defending some scope, but you also have an opportunity to win more. And so it’s getting much more nuanced. But as I said, encouraged by the activity, the pickup in the pipeline and of course, the momentum that we’ve seen in recent months.

Thomas Singlehurst: Perfect. I’m just going to do a couple of questions from the webcast, and then I will get back to the room. First one is on the broader strategic shift at WPP to become a more holistic partner to solve challenges for clients. Does this increasingly take WPP into competition with different competitors? And how well do you think you are positioned to win against them?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Yes, that’s for me, right? Look, I think we have all the ingredients we need to win. Like we have, as I said, amazing talent, incredible capabilities, fantastic technology and technology partnerships. We have scale. We have the trust of our clients, which is super important. What we need to do now is pull it all together into an integrated proposition and lead with our agentic marketing platform. And when we do that, I think what you’re seeing is we’re pretty hard to beat for clients that are ready for that. Like all of our clients are on a journey. Some are really at the very beginning, some are way down the line and most are somewhere in between. But when you see the power of that, turn up in your office and the growth that we can deliver, again, without compromising on data ownership, it’s a very strong proposition. So I feel very confident that we’re going to be in a great position to deliver this on a repeatable sustained basis.

Thomas Singlehurst: Perfect. And one more from the webcast before coming back to the room. It’s on a very important topic, which is leverage. So I presume for Joanne. A question here about clarifying the leverage framework. You previously guided to a net leverage target of 1.5 to 1.75x. Has this target been withdrawn? And how do you manage the process with the rating agencies regarding an investment-grade rating?

Joanne Wilson: Okay. What we’ve clearly shared today in our capital allocation framework is our commitment to an investment grade balance sheet and that feels more relevant as we progress through Elevate28 plan feels more relevant than the historic range that we had and we are very committed to that investment-grade balance sheet. And I think, as I said in my remarks, and that’s reinforced with the Fitch rating. I want to spend a bit of time on leverage as well. Leverage is really driven by, obviously, EBITDA and net debt. And our net debt — our average net debt through ’25 has actually come down slightly. And so our elevated leverage as a result of that lower EBITDA. And hopefully, as you’ve heard today, and we presented a plan that is going to get us back to growth.

And obviously, with that, we’ll follow improved margin, profitability, improved cash generation and we’ll help that out. We also talked about the importance of reducing our gross debt. We talked about the role that the portfolio review will play on that. And over the course of Elevate28 we expect our leverage to come down. We do have liquidity at the end of the year of GBP 4.4 billion. Our maturity profile is 5.8 years. We recently refinanced our bond, et cetera. So we’re in a very strong position. In terms of the rating agencies, I mean, many of them are here today. And we have a very strong relationship with the rating agencies. We engage with the rating agencies, we listen to what’s important from their perspective. And like all stakeholders, we take that into consideration as we ensure that we’re making the right decisions and taking the right actions to ultimately deliver long-term returns for all of those stakeholders.

Thomas Singlehurst: Let’s come back to the room. Can we go to Julien at the back. Sorry, yes, when you get the microphone back. Sorry.

Julien Roch: Julien Roch with Barclays. Looking at Page 41, you have a production CAGR over ’24, ’28 of minus 1% for the industry. I thought it was a growing part of agency services. So why the decline for the industry? And what can WP production can grow at? That’s my first question. Then on organic, accelerate organic growth in 2028, previous CEO had a 3% plus organic guidance. So if everything goes according to plan, what’s your cruising altitude? What is your ambition? And then lastly, moving from holding company to a single company, does that mean one P&L per country? Or will you still have separate P&L for the new 4 entities? Or will you still have separate P&L per agencies?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Sorry, Joanne, I think you’re on.

Joanne Wilson: I might need to repeat your second question, but let me answer the first and the third first, and we can come back to that. Yes, look, on production, and I shared this in my remarks — prepared remarks that there’s subdued growth in production overall. That’s not the way to look at what production can mean for our business and how that can contribute to our growth. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that our clients spend and their production today goes outside of WPP. It goes to a variety of third-party providers. And hopefully, as you saw today as well, production is being completely revolutionized and transformed by AI. We talked about particular parts of production, high-velocity production, which is growing at 38%.

That’s a very small part of the production market today, but it is a huge opportunity. And as the largest agency globally and with the investment that we’re making in content studios and with our team, we’re incredibly well placed to take advantage of that. And also with the WPP production consolidation, we are much fit for purpose to really internalize a lot of that client spend, which we can, in an integrated proposition, make it more efficient for our clients. So it’s really, really a win-win and our clients are getting the very best of production capability in the market and that AI investment as well. In terms of the P&Ls, so how we will operate and maybe I’ll start with WPP Creative and then look at it overall. So the WPP Creative will run on P&Ls. The regional and market models will mirror media.

And in certain markets as well, actually, those media and creative and production operations and teams will be even more integrated. But we will have one P&L for WPP Creative for the markets. For the agencies, we will still measure them on their revenues and their contributions, but that will not be the lead P&L. And then across the other 4 areas, of course, they will each have their P&Ls that will roll up to WPP overall. I think the most important thing is as we talk today about the incentives, we have redesigned our incentive model so that it’s much more aligned — everybody is much more aligned on a WPP outcome, and we struck that balance right where it’s still incentives that people can really influence as well. So a much simpler P&L structure even if I did.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Just to build on that because I’m trying to see what’s behind your question. Please don’t underestimate the enormity of the change that we’re making. We’re moving from hundreds of stand-alone operating companies to 4 operating units across 4 regions. And this common incentive that is linked to WPP’s overall performance is going to change behavior in very dramatic ways. It’s going to take all the friction out of the organization. It’s going to make us much more client obsessed. It’s going to enable us to put the right resource in front of the right client at the right time. So I just wanted to say — please don’t underestimate what’s involved in making these changes that we’re proposing.

Joanne Wilson: And then, Julien, I think your second question was around our ambition on organic growth, if that’s right.

Julien Roch: That’s right.

Joanne Wilson: And I said we weren’t going to give specific medium-term targets, and that was quite intentional. We talked about the 3 phases. The job that we have to do as a management team in ’26 is to stabilize the business, continue to build on that new business momentum and improve our client retention. And that will get us back to growth at some point during 2027, and then we will accelerate from there. So I’m intentionally not putting a number on it, but you can — that will give you a sense of what we’re expecting in terms of the trajectory.

Julien Roch: No, I understand that you don’t want to give us like a ’28 numbers, but it’s more — actually, it’s probably more a question for Cindy, right, is what’s your ambition in terms of growth rate in 5 years, in 10 years? What would you consider a success for WPP is achieving the previous target of 3% or you actually have more ambition than that? — without giving us a year or whatever, but what’s the…

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: I’d like to get to the end of Elevate28 capturing our fair share of the market and then go beyond. But look, we’re — in the short term, I’m absolutely focused on delivering growth for clients, building on our market momentum and stabilizing our performance. And that will remain our short-term focus.

Thomas Singlehurst: Can we go with Annick?

Annick Maas: Annick Maas from Bernstein. And first question is, as a company which is employing 100,000 people in a world where change is becoming more and more — it’s accelerating basically, how can you stay nimble and keep up with this pace? Or what are the challenges here? The second one is on AI, and this is probably for and it’s more conceptually. I guess AI is leading to staff efficiencies in terms of absolute numbers of stuff, but you also have an unprecedented industry structure with one less players. So how do you think conceptually about number of staff and absolute and staff cost inflation in the next years? And then you spoke about the rationalization of the portfolio. I suspect you speak with a few players. Who are these potential buyers?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Good. Well, look, I’ll say in terms of staying nimble, like that’s a continuous process, right? We invest in skilling and building new capabilities in our employees on a continuous basis. We have creative technology apprenticeships. We have all kinds of formal AI coaching and training that we put our people through. But I think it also — it’s about also staying close to our partners. We have what we call forward deployed engineers. So we take resources from our technology partners. We put them into our organization. We train them on our platform. And then we send them into clients to co-innovate on new solutions. So I think just being in and around this environment creates a very, as I said, very AI native mindset where we can just continuously build these capabilities.

These aren’t capabilities you build through formal online training. You have to get your hands on it and actually put it to work for clients. And that’s — that’s really how we’re staying nimble and in front of things. But do you want to take the question on…

Joanne Wilson: Yes. And exactly through the questions, I think. Nico, I think it was you asked me about AI efficiencies and I didn’t answer. Look, as we look at the business going forward, undoubtedly, if nothing else changed, we can do more with less. So we can do a lot more with a lot fewer people, but it’s never just as simple as that. What we’re able to do now for our clients is before we might have created 5 ads and we were managing that. Now it might be 1,000 ads and they’re very different how those ads need to be used to target audiences and drive returns. That’s requiring different skills and different talent in the organization. Now some of that, we are upskilling our people, some of that we’re bringing new talent into the organization.

And if you think about the plan that we shared today, we will be reallocating talent around the business. So yes, we will be delivering cost savings. And in people — in a business where most of our cost savings are people, that will mean a reduction of certain heads, but we will be reinvesting back into talent, different types of talent, commerce talent, influencer talent, much more analytics talent. We already have that at scale today, but really, those are the areas that we will be investing in and with that will come a different profile. In terms of how we measure it, the most important metric will be revenue per head, and that will reflect also our ambition to grow and do more with people, decouple our revenue model from our FTEs. And that’s really all around our client delivery.

In the back office, there’s an opportunity, and we’re already doing it in pockets. How do we leverage open, how do we leverage AI to drive productivity savings in our back office. And with the plans over Elevate28, we will do much more of that, much more at scale and on a standardized level. Just in terms of the question, is there AI productivity you asked built into the GBP 500 million. There is on the back office side. But on the front office, the way we think about it is we are creating productivity efficiencies in how we do things, but we’re reinvesting that back into delivering even more value, even more outcomes for our clients. And then that feeds into the evolution of our commercial model as well. So that’s all built into our plans.

But we don’t pull out and say we’re going to deliver productivity savings from that delivery. We think about it much more holistic. There was a third…

Thomas Singlehurst: Portfolio.

Joanne Wilson: The buyers. Well, look, as I — as we shared and particularly in the people business, incredibly sensitive, and we don’t — we’re not at a point where we’re ready to share externally. What is important is that we’ve seen an opportunity where we have embedded value of great assets that we have, and that will give us greater degree of financial flexibility and enable us to target our capital allocation more. And for some of these assets, there are many buyers, some of them are attractive assets.

Thomas Singlehurst: We go with Ciaran.

Ciaran Donnelly: A couple left for me. Joanne, maybe just on your comments on 2027. Can you clarify how we should understand the comments of growth during 2027? Should we think about that as implying a positive exit rate on like-for-likes rather than necessarily positive like-for-like growth for FY ’27 in total? And then maybe, Cindy, could you just give us a bit more color on the new incentives? I guess, how do you kind of balance it between individual remit and kind of growth targets? And I guess, just in terms of what they look like versus the legacy incentive structures, how different are they? And then just finally, I mean, on the legacy structures, do they roll off over a period of time? Or what is that phasing period between the new structures and the old structures going at?

Joanne Wilson: Very quick answer to your first, it’s the latter. So it’s during 2027. So you should think about it as a positive exit rate rather than for 2027 as a whole.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: So on the incentives, basically, if you’re sitting in an operating unit, your incentives are 50% tied to your operating unit and 50% tied to WPP. If you’re in WPP as part of a corporate function, you’re 100% WPP. If you’re a GCL, you’re paid on your client growth. It’s that simple. And it’s dramatically different from where we are today, where if you’re in an agency, you’re paid on your agency results primarily. So that is very, very different. And that’s why I think it’s going to unlock very different behavior, much different collaboration. In the past, our agencies competed with each other. That was the model. Today, when we go into a pitch, we cast the right resource for the right client at the right time and — it enables that. It enables a much more client-centric approach to the business. Just to add, we’re implementing that in 2026.

Thomas Singlehurst: I got a couple of people in the wings. I’m going to start with Anna, I think, at the back, and then we’ll come to you, sir.

Anna Patrice: Anna Patrice from Berenberg. A couple of questions from my side. So you were talking about the evolving remuneration part from time and material to project-based. So maybe how it has evolved in the past over the last couple of years? Like what’s the share of time and material overall? And where do you see that going into the future? And what could be the impact on your profitability? That’s the first question. The second question on the capital allocation, you were also referring to M&A. So just quickly, maybe what are you looking for? What are the things that are still kind of white spots for you that you would like to enforce within the overall WPP?

Joanne Wilson: Shall I take the first one?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Yes.

Joanne Wilson: So just in terms of that evolution, and it’s — that’s the way you should think about it. This will be an evolution in our commercial model. And this is an evolution for the industry and for our clients as well. So there’s 3 key areas that we look at. One is output-based pricing and where we see more and more of that is in our production business today. We then have performance or outcome based pricing. We’ve talked a little bit about that. I mean we’ve always had an element of that in our fee structures with clients, but that’s becoming increasingly important, particularly as Brian had shared today how we can measure that outcome more. And the third element is just tech and labor fees as well. That can be through licensing fees, through bundles, through subscriptions, et cetera.

And all 3 of those we have in our business today. So with many of our clients for parts of work that we do for them, we’re working with our clients to understand what works best, what aligns structures. clients we have going much more major outcome and others, it’s more of an evolution of it. So really that’s the way to think about it. So — but very, very much encouraged by the shift that we’re seeing. And as we are more and more confident in what we can deliver for our clients, of course, that creates more stickiness with clients. We see a big opportunity to enlarge the scope of what we do for clients. And you asked specific on margin on a per unit basis, we often say, of course, if you just look at it and everything else is the same, it would be deflationary in revenue because we can produce units at a lower cost.

But actually what’s more important, what clients are paying a premium for is all of that brand safety, the culture strategic input that we’re bringing and how we can drive more growth. We’re able to do that in a much more efficient way. And so we’re looking at this to be ultimately over time, margin enhancing for us.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Yes. On your question on M&A, again, I would just repeat that Phase 1 of our plan, we are really deeply focused on stabilizing our performance, delivering growth for our clients and building on the current market momentum that we have. As we get into later stage and free up capacity to invest in growth, we certainly will. And I would — I stand by the statement we have everything we need to win. But as we create capacity to invest, I’ll be looking to enhance in those growth areas that we mentioned, media, data, commerce, social influencer and the growth areas. But that’s not the short-term focus. Short-term focus is on stabilizing our performance.

Thomas Singlehurst: Gentlemen over here has been by patient.

Jérôme Bodin: Jerome Bodin from ODDO BHF. Two questions. The first one on the WPP creative. So just to make sure I have properly understood. Will the idea be to pitch from WPP creative or from at the network level? That’s my first question. And then also still on WPP Creative. So I have understood that the idea is to improve the mobility in terms of talent between all the networks. So how do you plan to make the improvements from a pure HR perspective in terms of systems and HR architecture? I think it’s not so easy. Second question on disposal. So I fully understood that you can’t give any names, but could you maybe explain what could be the idea in terms of disposal? Will it be an asset disposal at 100%? Or could you partner with someone with a minority stake? And then linked to that, could we have an update on Kantar on the stake in Kantar, where you are? And what do you plan?

Brian Lesser: What was the last question?

Joanne Wilson: Kantar.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: John? You want to say a word on WPP Creative, our CEO of WPP Creative.

John Seifert: You can see where it came from. Thank you. Yes, first of all, on WPP Trade, it’s — after being at some of these investor meetings in the past, it’s nice not to come and talk about a big merger that we’re going through in the creative agencies. I’ve done that before. We all know that game. We’ve got — in the analysis we’ve done in the last 6 months, we’ve got really powerful agencies. We’ve done that work in these last 5 years. And I saw that just this week, the drum creative rankings, #1, Ogilvy, #2 VML. It’s not a super power we want to walk away from. So that’s thing number one. And so I’m really excited about the strategy of not merging things, but getting behind our agencies. So that’s a precursor to your first question, which is — we’re not using WPP Creative as a brand or an agency.

It’s not an agency. It’s an operating system lets those great agencies, those very creative agencies operate together because we have a couple of beliefs, and we heard this from our clients. Our clients love our agencies. They love the choice. They love the creativity, they love the diversity, but they found it hard to work with them and found that either the clients or our GCLs, our global client leaders had to do the navigation, and that was difficult. So we’re doing what we think is the best of both worlds, build around these great agencies, highly recognized, very creative agencies that make it easier to navigate. So WPP Creative is simply a way to navigate. It’s an operating system. It’s not an agency with a very light layer of infrastructure between them to make that happen.

And if we do that, we will grow better than we ever have before as WPP and as creative agency. So if we unite them in the right way, which we are, — we have the second part of your question, which is the ability for talent to move around between those agencies or to team up for client assignments. That’s something we haven’t had as well as we should have in the past. So that mobility, the second part of your question is key, and that’s one of the reasons for the group. If we do this, we can also put better capability across all our creative agencies. Cindy talked about enterprise solutions. Jeff talked about it. This will be different than other holding companies creative agency groups, if you will, because of the embedment of everything Jeff and Cindy talked about with Enterprise Solutions.

So to your point, WP Creative is not an agency. It’s an operating system lets the great agencies. The creative agencies of WPP be great individually and be great together; and two, it allows for talent mobility.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Jerome, thanks for your question, and I hope you’ll forgive me for not answering it. We’re not going to name any assets or give any further guidance today. We’ve carried out a complete strategic review of our group. We’ve identified assets that we feel we’re probably not the best owners for in the long term. We’ve started a formal process. And as soon as we have anything to report, we will. But thanks for the question.

Joanne Wilson: And I’ll just follow up with Kantar, which you asked specifically about. I mean, Kantar, obviously, they sold the media part of the business last year. And they now have 2 divisions, Numerator Worldpanel and Kantar Brands. And those 2 divisions, they’ve done a big lift in terms of those 2 setting them up to operate independently, and that will be completed in the next few months. Obviously, that gives more flexibility in terms of realizing value from that business for both ourselves and BN, and we’re very aligned with BN on the time lines for that, but nothing really more to add. I mean I think just specifically to your question on could this look like minority sales? Yes, it could. So there may be some assets that we bring majority owners into as well.

Thomas Singlehurst: And Richard.

Richard Kramer: I will keep it to 2 questions. Richard Kramer from Arete Research. Cindy, you mentioned productizing WPP Open and Pro and for the mid-market in particular, do you see offerings like Meta, Andromeda and Google Pomelli as fundamentally competing with WPP? Or do you see them as somehow complementary? And my question for Brian, there’s been a lot of recent discussion and disclosure around principal trading and rebates. How are you going to address this question of transparency going forward? And is this an opportunity in the market for you to take some more share?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Thanks for your question, Richard. As I said, there’s a lot of point solutions out there. Some are tied to specific platforms. I think when companies start to stack all these up, — it becomes expensive, complex and you break the workflow. So I don’t — I think what we have is fundamentally different. It’s an end-to-end platform. We are agnostic and independent in terms of how we invest our clients’ media budgets. And we have relationships with all the major platforms anyway. So I think what’s behind your question is, are we going to be disintermediated by the big tech players? I don’t think it’s that easy to just turn on a solution in a client environment and watch the magic happen. And this involves real transformation and our clients need help.

As I suggested, their data is not always ready. Their people aren’t always ready. Their systems aren’t always ready. So I see a real opportunity in being that intelligent orchestration layer. I don’t see — we’re not seeing a disintermediation dynamic play out in any way.

Brian Lesser: In terms of principal Trading, building compelling performance-oriented products has always been a part of our business, Richard, as you know. In fact, WPP was really a pioneer in building products that drive value for clients. In many cases, those are part and parcel of the services that we provide our clients. And in other cases, it requires us to invest, invest in technology, invest in our trading partners, invest in sources of data and then pull all of that together on behalf of our clients to drive performance. In a lot of markets for a lot of different channels that we service, we do sell principal media products to our clients. And those products are actually built with our clients. And they are asking us for more, frankly.

Both Cindy and Joanne touched on the fact that our clients, in many cases, are CMOs, CMOs are under tremendous pressure to prove the value of marketing and grow their business. And so in many cases, they come to us and they say, how can you help us navigate addressable television? How can you help us navigate social media or commerce or retail media. And with our clients, we design products where, in many cases, we have to invest in those products. So it’s a part of our business, and it’s a growing part of our business, and I continue — I expect it to continue to grow over time. In terms of us taking share, I do think that we can take share through our investment in those products. Again, if you come back to our strategy with respect to technology, we’re not trying to sell assets that we acquired for billions of dollars.

We’re trying to work with technology companies, data companies, media companies to connect these things to build products that drive better performance. So in many ways, we are more impartial, more objective in how we construct our principal-based media products, and therefore, they’re more compelling to our clients, and I expect they’ll buy more of them over time.

Thomas Singlehurst: Now we promised to get you out by midday. I’ve got a couple of questions, 3 from the webcast, and then we’ll draw a line under it. But first one for Joanne, once again on leverage and the balance sheet. Could you please let us know if you intend to refinance the September ’26 bond out of cash or by issuing another bond? That was the first question.

Joanne Wilson: That’s easy. We’ve done that. We refinanced in December, our GBP 1 billion bond, which covers that September maturity and our next maturity after that isn’t until May ’27.

Thomas Singlehurst: Perfect. Second question, we’ve had a couple of these, and so I’m synthesizing them, but it’s — for you, Cindy, it’s about the transition from moving from the Board to being a CEO. Can you talk about the challenges and surprises during that process?

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Gosh, how long do we have? Well, look, I think on balance, it was a strategic advantage because I knew the team, I knew the business, I knew many of the clients. So I think I avoided the 6-month onboarding experience that perhaps an outsider would. And actually, I had — as I said, I had a thesis even before I arrived in the role. And so I just think it was a strategic advantage and helped me get to where I wanted to get to faster and actually started making changes relatively quickly. So — but there’s always surprises along the way, right? We’ll save that for another day.

Thomas Singlehurst: Final question. A couple of people have mentioned the Enterprise Solutions capability, the fact that it’s 13% of revenue, and that feels high. Where does it come from? Is it — where are the assets based? And what’s their genesis? It might be one for John and Jeff.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Jeff, do you want to take it?

Jeff Geheb: Sure.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: Okay. Go forward.

Jeff Geheb: Yes. So the nature of where it came from is 10 years of acquiring companies, 10 years of building capability inside of our creative agencies inside of really every company inside of WPP to be relevant was expanding into new asks. So they were expanding into CRM. They were expanding into technology because their value proposition required them to do it. And so what it happened over the years is that we had distributed capability all over the company. And through the acquisitions, integrations, as John mentioned, specifically when VML and Wunderman Thompson came together, we began to pool all of these assets together, and we could bring them to clients in new ways that didn’t require them to, I think Cindy said, shop.

They could come together in a holistic offering. So where would you have found it? You would have found it in all the different P&Ls, all the different regions, all the different markets. And so really, what we’re doing now is just we’re bringing them together, and we’re putting under a framework where not every company or a capability is competing on to itself. And so for the first time, you’re going to find it seen outside of the context. This isn’t a start-up. I mean we’ve been doing this for a while. We’ve been competing on this for a while, but you’ll just find it under VML. You would find it in Ogilvy, you would find it distributed throughout the network. So that’s where it came from.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: So we’re strapping rocket boosters to…

Jeff Geheb: Yes. That’s right.

Cindy Rose Quackenbush: WPP Enterprise Solutions. Good. Shall I wrap? Okay. Super. Look, I want to thank you all for joining us today. I mean I’ve met many of our shareholders individually over the past few months, and I’m genuinely always grateful for your insights and for your support. And thank you. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your trust in us. And we really look forward to sharing our journey as we move forward. So thank you all for coming and for listening. Thank you.