What happened
WPP CEO Cindy Rose launched Elevate28, an 18-month restructuring plan that scraps the holding-company model for four units (creative, media, production, enterprise solutions) and aims to save £500 million by 2028, though the overhaul will cost £400 million upfront and trigger further job cuts. The company has already reduced headcount from 108,044 in 2024 to 98,655 at end of 2025.
Why it matters
WPP inherited a business in decline—it lost major clients including Coca-Cola's North American business and Mars' snacking and pet care accounts, and dropped out of the FTSE 100 after nearly 30 years. The deeper challenge is cultural: the company operated as a loose federation of agencies with separate identities for decades, and now must unify 90,000 employees around a single set of values while a mandatory four-day-a-week office policy faced an online petition with over 20,000 signatures from employees citing commute burden and impact on disabled and neurodivergent staff.
What to watch
WPP is deploying AI training across its WPP Open platform, with 12,000 employees already completing 120,000 hours of learning through tiered courses (apprenticeship, fundamentals, executive diploma). Additional job cuts are expected by end of year, primarily in HR and finance as back-office automation accelerates. CEO Rose is sending monthly video updates to the global workforce to explain the restructure's rationale—a signal that leadership sees internal communication as critical to success.
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WPP's decline was sharp and concrete. The company lost marquee clients—Coca-Cola's North American business and Mars' snacking and pet care accounts—and its 30-year tenure on the FTSE 100 ended in 2024. Into this turnaround stepped Cindy Rose, who diagnosed a structural problem: WPP operated as a loose federation of independent agencies, each with its own identity, values, and culture. That decentralized model once made sense but now blocks the coordination and shared capability Rose needs to restore profitability and client trust.
Elevate28 attacks this problem on three fronts. First, operational: collapsing the holding-company layer and regrouping into four functional units will strip out duplication and bureaucracy, targeting £500 million in savings by 2028. Second, technological: WPP is pushing AI adoption not as a cost-reduction tool (though back-office automation will cut HR and finance roles) but as a unifying skill. By funneling all 90,000 employees through the same WPP Open platform and tiered curriculum, the company is creating what Marie-Claire Barker, the chief people officer for performance and culture, calls "a shared knowledge" where previously siloed agencies begin to see common ground. Third, and most difficult, cultural: Barker must convince a workforce used to strong subsidiary identities to embrace a single WPP set of values and to see the four-day office mandate not as an arbitrary edict but as purposeful community-building.
The friction is real. A petition with over 20,000 signatures demonstrates that employees do not yet buy the pitch. Barker's data shows that employees with daily office attendance score higher on satisfaction, but the Gallup benchmark (only 10% of workers want to work onsite) suggests she is fighting a broader tide. Her response—reframing the office as a designed space for cross-agency connection rather than a control mechanism—is plausible but untested at scale. Whether culture can become a measurable, leadership-accountable growth lever, as Barker intends, or whether it remains aspirational rhetoric, will determine whether the £500 million in operational savings translate into a genuine turnaround.
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