Published June 23
WPP CEO Cindy Rose said that the group’s agencies have stopped using LiveRamp “as of recently,” adding fuel to the industry’s skepticism that LiveRamp will stay neutral post-Publicis’ acquisition.
The comments came during an interview at the Campaign House at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity on Monday, where Rose sat with Campaign UK Editor-in-Chief Gideon Spanier to discuss the future of WPP and the agency model.
When asked whether the move to ditch LiveRamp was due to the Publicis acquisition, Rose replied, “What do you think?”
It may not be surprising that WPP is bowing out of using a platform that will soon be owned by one of its biggest competitors. But the move also draws a line in the sand between two diverging philosophies driving the world’s biggest agencies.
On one side, Publicis betting that whoever controls the data infrastructure controls the future of advertising. On the other, WPP is betting that brands will want to retain full ownership of their data as they recognize its value in the era of AI.
“We spend our clients’ media budgets in a way that maximizes growth for them,” Rose said. “That is a core principle, with total independence, with total platform elasticism. It’s not for our benefit, it’s not for a platform’s benefit; it’s client money, and it has to be optimized to deliver client growth.”
“Ultimately, I want clients to stay with us because we’re delivering superior growth, not because we’ve created friction or switching costs or lock-in,” Rose added. “In a world where data and AI are becoming so important, that’s a really big deal.”
Rose said WPP Open, the group’s agentic marketing platform, is architected to be open by design, and that WPP would never ask brands to send, move or share data “so there’s nothing to lock into.” Rose called a client’s data the source of a brand’s “asymmetric competitive advantage” said that she believed it should stay that way.
“We have fundamentally different philosophies on certain things, and that’s OK,” she said.
Moving away from time and materials
Rose believes the traditional agency billing model of time and materials was “dead.”
“This idea that we have to produce a staff plan with a number of humans and their hourly rates, in the world of AI, where things get done faster and cheaper with hybrid human-to-agent work teams, that’s just not a model that’s sustainable,” she said.
So the group is experimenting with new commercial models. “If I think about what my clients want most, it’s growth. Why wouldn’t I create perfect strategic alignment with my clients by tying my remuneration to their success?” Rose added.
She said WPP’s work model with Jaguar Land Rover was the group’s “first big push into this space.”
“Will I lose money? I can’t go into the details of the commercials, but we’ve made sure that there’s ceilings and floors … there’s risk on both sides,” Rose said. “What if we blow it out of the park? What if we sell more Land Rovers than they’ve ever sold? I think it’s a fabulous model, and I think the market will flip pretty quickly, is my prediction.”
That doesn’t mean human touch is out of the picture. While Rose said WPP is not getting requests from clients for additional human staffing, she still saw the most breakthrough creative ideas as coming from “human experience, empathy, judgment and taste.”
Ultimately, Rose appears to have settled on a specific vision of the future and is restructuring WPP accordingly.
“Everything we do has to be in service of our clients and their growth, full stop. … What’s relentless is the pace of change. The tech alone is mind-blowing, but then you look at the fragmentation of media, changes in consumer behavior, the commerce ecosystem, the whole art and science of brand buildings being rewired, that’s what’s relentless.”
