WPP posts 0.5% growth in Q3; GroupM in India and other regions shine

Agency holding network WPP reported a 0.5% rise in like-for-like organic revenue in the third quarter, with a strong performance from GroupM in North America, western continental Europe, and India, though trading in China remains difficult.

“We returned to form in new business, winning Amazon’s media account outside the Americas and securing our media relationship with Unilever, including taking back the retail media and activation business in the United States. Our success with two of the world’s top ten advertisers demonstrates the renewed competitiveness of our offer. We are also proud to be supporting the new Starbucks leadership team with our recent creative win in the United States,” said WPP CEO Mark Read. 

In Q3, the network’s client wins included Amazon (media ex Americas), Unilever (media, retail media and activation, and creative) and Henkel (media). It enjoyed a strong start to Q4 with Starbucks (US creative) and Honor (global media including China). 

The company said its top 10 clients grew by 7% in Q3, CPG, automotive, travel & leisure and financial services client sectors grew well in the quarter. 

Artificial intelligence (AI) remains a strong pillar of growth for WPP. “Our people are increasingly embedding AI in the way that we work and deliver creative and media campaigns to clients, with usage of WPP Open up 107% since the beginning of the year. Supporting this, the creation of VML and Burson, and the simplification of GroupM, are delivering a stronger business and structural cost savings,” said Read.

WPP Open is the network’s marketing operating system powered by AI, integrating all of WPP's service offerings, technology, applications and data in one place.

Since the start of the year, WPP has seen monthly active users up 107%, LLM usage up 300% and image generation up 349% as it works to drive increased adoption across its network. We are also seeing growing adoption by clients, with key clients using the platform including Google, IBM, L'Oréal, LVMH, Nestlé and The Coca-Cola Company. 

In particular, clients are seeing significant value in using WPP Open to streamline how they work with WPP, using the workflow elements of the platform to standardise processes.