WPP Launches 'Elevate28' AI Overhaul

The "Elevate28" strategy is WPP's response to significant financial headwinds, including a 71.2% decline in reported operating profit in 2025, down to £382 million from £1.321 billion the prior year. The plan will transition WPP from a holding company to a single, unified entity, a model that competitor Publicis Groupe adopted in 2019, which has since become the most profitable large advertising group. The goal is to achieve £500 million ($676 million) in gross annual savings by 2028 to fund investments in AI and technology. At the heart of the AI strategy is WPP Open, an "agentic marketing platform" that integrates proprietary data with tools from partners like Adobe, Google, and Stability AI to automate workflows from planning to production. A new self-service tier, WPP Open Pro, now allows clients to directly access these AI tools for planning, creating, and publishing campaigns, expanding WPP's market to include smaller, agile brands and e-commerce-focused marketers. For a campaign for Hawkstone, the platform enabled a 33x increase in the volume of content produced. The deepened Adobe partnership provides WPP clients with access to Adobe Firefly Foundry, an enterprise-level solution for creating bespoke generative AI models. This allows for the generation of commercially-safe, on-brand content at scale because the models are trained on a company's specific intellectual property and brand guidelines, integrating directly into Creative Cloud and Adobe Express workflows. This addresses a key CMO priority for 2026: leveraging AI for efficiency without losing brand authenticity. For creative teams, AI workflow automation is moving beyond simple asset generation. Prompt engineering is becoming a core creative skill, with techniques like "Chain of Thought" prompting—where the AI is asked to reveal its reasoning before delivering the final output—allowing for greater creative control. Case studies are emerging of AI's impact on scaled production; Cadbury's "Not a Cadbury Ad" campaign used AI to create thousands of hyper-localized video ads featuring a Bollywood star, resulting in a 32% engagement spike. While AI scales up production, a parallel trend toward "anti-polish" content is defining social media success. Brands are finding that raw, authentic, and lo-fi content, often in the form of employee-generated or user-generated clips, builds trust and community more effectively than highly-produced campaigns. The 2026 playbook prioritizes this authentic, "always-on" content engine for daily engagement, reserving higher production for major brand launches. CMOs are under intense pressure to connect marketing activity directly to revenue growth, with 78% citing it as their top priority for 2026. While AI adoption is widespread—79% of marketers now use generative AI—only 6% of organizations report significant business impact, creating a gap between tool adoption and value creation. The C-suite is now looking for leaders who can move beyond experimentation to demonstrate clear ROI from their AI investments. For creative leaders, the age of AI elevates human-centric skills like strategic judgment, fostering creativity, and building resilient teams. The consensus among leadership experts is that AI should augment human creativity, not replace it, handling complex production tasks so that creative talent can focus on uniquely human strengths: empathy, emotional resonance, and groundbreaking ideas. Beyond advertising, AI is reshaping culture and personal interests. In the entertainment sector, generative AI startups are attracting millions in VC funding to develop tools for dubbing, de-aging, and creating CGI characters for major studios like Marvel and Netflix. For cyclists, AI is being integrated into smart bikes and wearables to provide real-time feedback on posture, analyze ride data for personalized training plans, and even enhance safety by detecting traffic hazards.