WPP’s Elevate28 is only a week old and has already been called many things by many people but, at heart, it’s a reset. Year one is about stabilising the machine; growth and acceleration are pushed into later years. And that’s not unusual, large organisations often have to fix the plumbing before the real work can begin. The question – other than “wasn’t that what the last CEO was doing?” – is what they do with the time they’re asking clients, team and – crucially – the markets to give them.
On paper, the move from ‘holding company’ to ‘single operating company’ sounds decisive. Echoes of Publicis announcing two years ago that it was now a ‘platform’ without saying what it had stopped being. The real test is whether the new divisions change how the agencies operate, or whether this ends up being a cosmetic rebrand of the same structure. Calling it ‘one’ company doesn’t mean much if the agency brands still control budgets and client relationships, and on that, the detail is thin. Perhaps a bold reset would have completed the collapse of brands under divisional banners that seemed to be behind the previous strategy under Mark Read. Is Elevate28 a measured step in that same direction? It isn’t there yet. From another angle, it’s four smaller and more coherent HoldCos under a WPP umbrella.
WPP has talked about £500m of annual savings without much clarity on where they will come from, especially after major headcount reductions already. Back office efficiencies are the only area specifically identified and this will help at the margin, but they will not get you to half a billion £ if the individual agencies brands are going to be truly left to their own devices.
For clients, most of this is invisible, until it isn’t. Integration promises do not change delivery overnight, clients still buy the agencies they trust, and the brand architecture still holds the real commercial relationships. The early effects are felt at the edges; teams move, senior roles shift, and decision paths clients rely on start to look different. When the centre turns inward, clients feel it, and that is when they reassess what they need.
We all know the whole sector is shifting, IPG and Omnicom are trying to merge, Publicis has spent years tightening its model through acquisitions and tech, and everyone is dealing with the same pressures that have been ramping up over the last decade. And AI. The loosely connected holding company era is out of road. But Elevate28 doesn’t rip up the model entirely, instead it creates four divisions each housing kindred agencies. Sufficiently radical? It would be great to see a copy of the McKinsey report.
Instead, the biggest players are reworking their models at the same time, the ripple effects do not stay contained, and the agencies that will tend to gain are the ones that stay outward-facing while the networks look inward. The firms with a clear point of view, a joined up operating model and leadership who can articulate it usually move early, and historically, they are the ones who benefit most.
Elevate28 is the start of a long internal job, and while the internal work continues, the market moves forward around WPP.
This is not really a story about WPP. It is a story about what everyone else does while WPP rebuilds.
