If Don Draper strolled into WPP’s London HQ today, he wouldn’t make it past reception without a Google Cloud certification. The company once powered by charm, cigars, and client cocktails now talks like a Stanford lab in a Savile Row suit—“federated ecosystems,” “deduplicated reach,” “predictive performance.”

Somewhere between those buzzwords, WPP stopped being an agency and started becoming a machine whisperer—and, remarkably, it’s getting terrifyingly good at it.

Cindy Rose didn’t just inherit the CEO title—she detonated it.

Her opening act? A $400 million partnership with Google AI that fused WPP’s creative DNA with Gemini, Vertex, and DeepMind. This isn’t a pilot or an R&D flirtation—it’s a full-blown marriage of art and algorithm.

Every one of WPP’s 100,000 employees now has access to Google’s AI suite, covering creative concepting, audience planning, and campaign analytics. The company claims 80% operational efficiency, which sounds impressive until you realize much of that comes from automating the middle class of advertising jobs.

Rose calls it “a total transformation of the creative process.” Translation: the brainstorm just got replaced by an API call.

I’ll be honest—this stuff fascinates me.

The people building it are some of the most interesting minds I’ve ever come across. It feels, in a strange way, like the Camelot of the ad industry—a rare moment when intelligence, ambition, and technology all align before the inevitable corporate weather sets in.

And I’ll say it: I once wanted Brian Lesser running the whole shabang.

Not because I didn’t like Cindy—I just didn’t know she was even an option. Clearly, no complaints here.

Lesser, the quiet operator steering WPP Media, likes to remind anyone who’ll listen that WPP now reaches “five billion consumers.” That line belongs in marble—elegant, ambitious, and slightly impossible. Five billion is two-thirds of the planet. It’s reach as mythology, modeled through probabilistic data, device graphs, and federated identity systems. It’s not omniscience—it’s statistical poetry. And yet, it works.

Inside WPP, AI is no longer a sidekick—it’s part of the payroll. Gemini drafts. Vertex predicts. DeepMind optimizes. These are the new interns, only they don’t need lunch breaks or creative direction. Living inside WPP Open, the company’s AI-powered operating system, they’re reshaping everything from client briefs to campaign postmortems.

The results are dazzling: faster production cycles, richer audience data, smoother execution. But they also raise the question—when machines generate a thousand banner variations in under a minute, what’s left for human imagination? The modern title isn’t copywriter—it’s prompt engineer.

WPP’s crown jewel, AKQA, has become the proving ground for Rose’s machine-first vision. Its flagship innovation, The Generative Store, rewrites e-commerce content in real time for each visitor. For B2B, the same framework powers Generative UI, a self-adjusting interface that learns from every click and scroll.

Every moment of engagement becomes training data, teaching systems to anticipate moods and intent faster than any strategist could. It’s personalization turned psychological mirror, with a user experience so seamless it’s almost unsettling.

Here’s the new truth: WPP doesn’t sell stories anymore—it sells systems. Just a fact.

The holding company that once worshiped Cannes Lions now worships latency, inference speed, and model precision. Creativity hasn’t died—it’s evolved, digitized, and recompiled into an architecture of influence.

And standing here watching it unfold, I can’t help but feel privileged to witness this era—to be part of an industry on the edge of rewriting itself. The old Mad Men built brands from emotion; the new ones are building empires from algorithms.

Cindy Rose calls it “the golden age of marketing.” Maybe. But it’s also the automation of artistry, sorta a pivot from Mad Men to machine whisperers, where creativity is less about ideas and more about data orchestration.

The PR deck says this is about empowerment. The subtext says otherwise: WPP’s true client now isn’t the brand—it’s the algorithm.

When WPP bought InfoSum in 2025, it wasn’t just a tech acquisition — it was a conversion. I’ve loved this purchase since the start.

Under Brian Lesser and Lauren Wetzel, WPP traded in its old religion of more data, faster for something closer to data Zen.

The holding company that once bragged about owning the biggest lakes of information is now preaching about not touching the water at all.

In plain English: WPP doesn’t collect data anymore — it collaborates with it.

The company’s new mantra, “Intelligence Beyond Identity,” redefines marketing’s old math. It’s no longer about how much data you have, but how intelligently you can connect what you don’t. The whole thing runs on InfoSum’s “no data movement” architecture, which lets WPP’s AI talk to other companies’ AI without anyone handing over their homework.

And that, in corporate-speak, makes WPP the first global ad company to turn privacy into a business model.

For years, ad executives have treated privacy laws like bad weather — unavoidable, inconvenient, and best ignored. Wetzel and Lesser flipped that script. InfoSum’s “federated” framework allows advertisers to train AI on data they don’t own — and still stay compliant.

This isn’t a moral stance; it’s strategy. Every new privacy regulation is another reason for brands to plug into WPP’s Open Intelligence system — the company’s proprietary “Large Marketing Model” (LMM). Instead of text or images, this model trains on human behavior: purchases, preferences, and context. It now connects 350+ partners, from Netflix and Samsung Ads to Experian, and churns out what WPP calls “privacy-by-default marketing.”

Internally, executives treat this less like infrastructure and more like dogma. Data sovereignty has become creative freedom — the idea that respecting privacy can actually make insights smarter, not smaller. Cindy Rose, WPP’s CEO, frames it as moral progress; her teams talk about it like a system upgrade.

The pitch to clients? “You don’t need to move data to move markets.”

Of course, every religion has a miracle — and a math problem.

Federated data sounds clean on a slide deck, but in practice, it’s a logistical headache. Data still lives on separate clouds — Google, AWS, Microsoft — and every query has to make a global road trip before returning an answer. Engineers call this “the latency loop” — a polite term for it’s slow.

When you’re running billions of signals through encrypted bunkers, milliseconds become seconds, and seconds kill real-time optimization. WPP’s engineers have spent months building pre-cached queries and shard-level parallelization just to shave off the lag.

The irony? The price of privacy is patience.

Some insiders shrug it off as “necessary friction.” Others, particularly veterans from the GroupM era, are less zen about it. “We used to have instant feedback loops,” one planner said. “Now we have federated delay.”

Still, for WPP, latency is a moral tax worth paying — proof that performance and compliance can coexist, even if they don’t move at the same speed.

The real drama isn’t between WPP and regulators — it’s inside WPP itself.

On one side are the privacy purists, led by Wetzel’s federated disciples who believe data sharing itself is a security flaw. On the other, the data pragmatists, veterans of the old GroupM days, who miss the speed and certainty of deterministic targeting.

The clash has all the tension of a startup acquisition inside a 100,000-person company. “It’s campaign engineers versus compliance monks,” one insider joked.

The divide is philosophical: precision versus probability. The old guard wants clear clickstreams and attribution; the new guard wants trustless intelligence — models that can predict behavior without seeing the person behind it.

Inside WPP Media, this has become the defining cultural split. But under Lesser’s leadership, the company isn’t choosing sides — it’s codifying both into one machine.

If Brian Lesser is the architect, Lauren Wetzel is the structural engineer — the one who made the vision scalable.

In recent remarks and posts, Wetzel has doubled down on “people-first, client-obsessed” leadership while quietly making WPP’s federated tech stack actually work. Her Town Halls and global roadshows have become internal rallying points for a system that — let’s be honest — isn’t always easy to understand.

Her message is simple: AI doesn’t replace people; it depends on them.

When she talks about WPP’s wins — Mastercard, Maersk, Suncorp — she’s making a larger point: the federated model isn’t just about compliance or code. It’s about creating confidence for clients who’ve had a decade of trust issues with their agencies.

As she put it in one recent company-wide address, “We have all the ingredients — and the people — to keep driving forward.” Translation: the tech is impressive, but the culture still matters.

By 2026, WPP expects 90% of client modeling to run through federated pipelines, not data lakes. That’s a remarkable reversal for an industry that used to treat centralization as sacred.

The new world trades completeness for compliance, speed for sovereignty, and ownership for interoperability. And in that trade, WPP has discovered something the rest of the industry hasn’t: trust sells.

Because when every company is one breach away from public humiliation, confidence is the real product.

Brian Lesser didn’t just buy InfoSum.
He bought its theology — and buried the data lake right next to the cookie jar.

Key Takeaway:
WPP is not just rebranding — it’s rewriting the agency business model. What was once bespoke creative service is now a subscription ecosystem of modular AI tools.

➡️ More about the architecture, financial mechanics, and early client metrics inside the ADOTAT+ sections.