WPP’s Mark Read on AI threat to agency model: ‘Worst thing we can do is be scared’

But the potential implications of generative AI on advertising are unpredictable, and pole position in this race could turn out to be more Mario Kart (blue shells are unkind to early pack leaders) than Formula One.

The responsibility for guiding the British agency group through this moment falls ultimately on Mark Read, its chief executive officer. Speaking in Manchester at the launch of its latest campus, he tells The Drum that WPP is better placed than any other firm in the sector to capitalize on AI – but that its impact on staff is still unclear.

If AI generates efficiencies, who keeps the savings?

WPP expects that AI will make its workers more productive and more efficient. But if the group is able to leverage the tech to significantly reduce its costs, or take on more clients with fewer resources, customers might soon start expecting some of those savings to be passed on in the form of lower client fees.

Read says that even if WPP’s core services fall in price, it’ll be able to replace them with other products. “What we do for clients today will probably cost less money in the future. But there'll be many more things to do for clients that we don't do today. That will mean that we can expand our relationships,” he says.

“The need for clients to differentiate their brands, talk to consumers, to innovate, that's not going to go away. Think about marketing as a percentage of GDP. Do you think that's going to decline? I don't think so. It’s going to increase because of the need to differentiate, the need to innovate.”

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Production is one area that might provide low-hanging fruit. Other than its subsidiary Hogarth, Read says WPP outsources most of the production work associated with ad creative. “We do virtually no production for our clients; with these AI tools the creative process and the production process become one,” he says. “There's an opportunity for us to capture more value for clients in many things today that we do outside WPP.”

Staking a claim on unclaimed ground might mean re-imagining core propositions behind some of WPP’s businesses, he concedes, referring to the evolution of media house GroupM as an example.

He says: “Our media business was built on the notion of scale through volume. We’ve migrated that to scale through data and technology in the past; in the future, there’ll be scale from ideas and insights and how brands get built and what they stand for.”

Such a reorientation would be necessary, if gen AI reduces the core offerings of WPP’s agencies to a value proposition. Though it’s early days for the implementation of AI tools in advertising, recent moves by the group – its alliance with Nvidia or Ogilvy’s AI labs in Paris – offer clues as to how it might sharpen that client offer. The former is working with the group to build a creative production software engine that combines 3D design and imagery from Adobe and Getty.

Read says the team-up should reassure clients concerned with copyright landmines: “Generative AI is not great at representing brands accurately or products. What we’re working on with Nvidia is a system where clients know that we own the copyright of the work that we’re doing.”

The complication is that WPP’s alliance with Nvidia isn’t the only one of its kind in the industry. Omnicom has been touting the benefits of its own partnership with Adobe, for example. And unless bespoke, proprietary software displaces Midjourney, Stable Diffusion or OpenAI’s products, other rival groups will, sooner or later, end up with a very similar AI toolbox to WPP’s creatives.

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If that happens – what will distinguish Grey or Design Bridge & Partners from BBDO, R/GA or Saatchi & Saatchi? For Read, it’s quality – and combined brain power.

“I think that's about having better tools. What does WPP collectively sit on? We sit on the world's largest set of collective intelligence around brands, marketing, media, products, innovation,” he says.

“That’s knowledge that sits inside the company. If anyone can build a really powerful system for codifying that knowledge, it should be WPP.”

For Read’s colleague Karen Blackett, president of WPP in the UK, better tools and better knowledge return the firm to the meat and potatoes of its business, or as she puts it, “better advertising experiences.”

“If we continue to focus on creating better advertising experiences for consumers I think we’re always going to be attractive to clients.”

Will AI mean WPP employs fewer in the future?

The promise that generative AI will enable ad agency workers to become more productive – producing more work, faster – is a tempting for a group with such a large payroll.

Read says he “simply doesn’t know” if, in the long term, WPP’s huge workforce will end up shrinking. Experience, he and Blackett say, suggests the opposite is likely.

“To date, the more technology we've used, the more people we employ. At GroupM, the digital and programmatic parts have really expanded. Technology makes you more efficient but actually, we need many more people to buy a programmatic media campaign than we did to negotiate a deal with ITV,” he says.

“Now, this new explosion of generative AI is a little bit different, because it can start to do things that we thought only humans can do. One of the challenges is that it’s easier to identify the jobs that it will automate or change, than it is to find the jobs it will create.

"If I look at WPP, half the jobs we have inside the company would not have existed 20 years ago. We didn’t have search, we didn’t have programmatic. Virtually every person I’ve met [in Manchester] wouldn’t have been in the building 20 years ago,” he adds. “I think we're going to find a massive explosion of jobs that AI creates, that we'd never even thought of before.”

Blackett notes that “when the mainframe computer was invented, there was talk that we’d all be doing four hour working days because it meant that we’ll be doing other things. I don't think it’s meant any of us have done less. So, there’ll be opportunity because of more roles that we didn't anticipate”.

Principally, Read expects those positions to emerge in the gaps between AI capabilities. “What are the things that machines can't do? They’re not curious. They don’t necessarily have judgment. They’re not creative. They don’t really innovate. They don’t know a good idea from a bad idea.”

Despite that uncertainty, Read is adamant that “if we embrace it, WPP will grow.”

He continues: “We will be able to do many more things for our clients. I think that clients really need help understanding AI, what it means. I don't think anyone's going let a machine do all its marketing for it without any form or sort of human supervision.

“The worst thing we can do is to be scared of it, and not embrace it. That's the thing that's going to guarantee we employ fewer people in the future.”