WPP: When the Target Decides the Strategy

This is episode 20 of Making Moves, a weekly mini-podcast where Ne-Lo co-founders Ross Hastings and Kieran Antill pick a company making an interesting strategic move and interrogate it. Unscripted, unedited, under 15 minutes. The WPP episode was recorded on 4 September 2026.

This week: WPP.

The name says growth, the target says cost

Cindy Rose has confirmed another thousand roles going by the end of the year. That takes the total to around 11,000 since the start of 2025. It sits inside a programme called Elevate28, which is built around roughly 500 million pounds of gross annualised cost savings by 2028.

The name says growth. The target says something else. And from what has been reported, a substantial incentive package is tied to delivering it. We have not seen the full detail, and there may well be other components in there, so take that with the appropriate caution.

Still, the shape of it is worth sitting with. Repositioning efforts almost always start with the end in mind, which is fine. What is rare is a repositioning where the future target is so precisely defined that an incentive package can be attached to it. Once that happens, you have decided the end before the means have been worked out. It also makes it hard to read the decisions that follow, and harder still to read the messaging around them, because the number is public and everyone knows what it is measuring. This looks like value capture wearing the language of value creation.

To be fair, the holding companies got here the same way, just pointed in the other direction. Grow topline revenue and global market share as fast as possible. M&A is the quickest route to that number, so M&A is what happened, and the business model formed around the target. Same mechanism, opposite sign.

What the holding company model actually delivers

The model has never fully made sense to us, because the assumption underneath it is that scale benefits the client. Sometimes it does. Build a multinational network of media buying agencies and you get real buying power. It genuinely does not matter whether you are buying in Thailand, Spain, or Sweden. That advantage is passed on, and while you are scaling it holds up.

The trouble starts at the decision making end. Ideas do not work like that. Nobody cares what was bought in Thailand and worked there. Some clients want a global idea, but a global idea does not need on the ground support in every market to exist.

What you get instead is duplication. Executive creative directors, chief creative officers, heads of strategy, general managers, managing directors, all sitting in the same markets, carrying heavy salaries, and largely competing against each other. In a small market that means competing against yourself while clients move back and forth between your own agencies. That tension is old. It is a good part of why Martin Sorrell left and started S4 in the first place.

Global scale, local relevance, and the missing half

The direction of travel looks like P&G. Efficiencies of scale globally, real autonomy and relevance locally, right down to product development and go to market.

The scale half is clear enough. Why fund back office systems, admin, and payroll separately in every market when you could run it once. That is plainly where this is heading, and it is defensible.

The half we cannot find is local relevance. P&G's version is concrete. Designers living in Indian homes for months to understand how people brush their teeth before launching a toothbrush. What is WPP's equivalent? There does not appear to have been any deliberate curation of locally relevant services. It looks random, which makes sense, because the portfolio was assembled on market share and revenue growth rather than on what any particular market needed.

There is a delivery problem too. The promise to clients is experts in every discipline, everywhere. The structure makes that promise hard to keep. Separate P&Ls, different employment structures. You can pull a creative team or a technologist from another market, but someone has to wear the cost of doing it, and that argument never quite goes away.

The model they are copying has not worked yet

If WPP is no longer a holding company, what is it? On the press releases, the answer sounds a lot like what Sorrell built at S4. Centralised back end, local expertise on top. A holding company that says it is not a holding company.

Which is the awkward part. S4 was heavily hyped and has not delivered. The value destruction has been severe, and it sits well outside the top five. So the template being copied is not yet proof of anything.

That leaves the bigger question open. Who still needs the multinational agency network? There is a place for them. The problem is there are probably too many, and demand is shrinking. That is what is being felt right now, and why everyone is cutting a cost base built for a larger market. Not all of them survive, which is why consolidation among the holding companies is already underway.

So this is likely the right move, and everyone will end up somewhere similar: a centralised back end, increasingly built around AI and operations, with whatever local expertise can justify itself sitting on top. The takeaway is the one worth carrying into your own business. Be very clear about what your target is, and what behaviour it will elicit, because the target will shape the strategy whether you intend it to or not.

Making Moves is a weekly mini-podcast from Ne-Lo, Australia's repositioning consultancy. New episodes every Friday.