'Even With AI, You Still Need Traditional Storytelling Skills' - WPP's Mark Read

Prior to announcing his resignation as CEO of WPP after seven years, Mark Read discussed the role artificial intelligence was playing across the business as part of a series of interviews with agency network leaders.

Remaining in role until the end of 2025 while the search for his successor takes place, Read will continue to steer the business he has led since 2018. Before that, he was the global CEO of Wunderman, and has built his credentials as an expert in digital marketing.

Here, he discusses some of the work that he believes wouldn't have been possible without the involvement of AI, and some of the insights he's learned in the last few years from its integration within WPP, not least with the development of its internal platform WPP Open.

The business also recently launched a marketing campaign to promote its AI services - “Transforming How We Create”. Produced by a cross-agency WPP team led by WPP chief creative officer Rob Reilly, it was developed within WPP Open, its AI-enabled marketing services platform.

Creative Salon: How has AI already accelerated WPP, and what are the standout examples, so far?

Mark Read: We're currently using AI across the whole business. We've currently got 50,000 people every month using WPP Open, and they're using it for everything to find insights, test creative ideas against audiences, produce work, and plan media. No part of our business will remain untouched by AI.

Some of the standout examples are the José Mourinho work we did with Snickers and, going back two years, to working with Shah Rukh Khan for Mondelez and with Jennifer Lopez work for Virgin Voyages.

I mean, that's work where we're using AI to improve the customer experience, but we're increasingly using AI on how we produce work, which we've done with Coca-Cola. We just did a campaign through AKQA where the whole of the creative production of the ad was done using AI.

We're just starting to see the beginning of this impact in our industry. And what's interesting is how today is like a glimpse into the future of what will be possible in one or two years, and it is going to be completely transformative.

CS: What would you say about the quality of the output that you're getting from the AI that you're using?

MR: In the early days, it was all about people with six fingers and that sort of thing, but those issues have been fixed. We recently took a television ad that was professionally reproduced and remade it using Google’s Veo 2 video engine, and people found it hard to work out which was professionally shot, or which was made using AI. And so, the quality of the video output is exceptional. I think the quality of the writing of the text output is also amazing. It's not going to replace the copywriter on Super Bowl ads, but for writing social media posts, it's extremely effective.

What's starting to impress me is how we are increasingly using agents in our business to understand brands, roles, and personas, and feel the ability to interact with those. It really shows the potential for this technology to accelerate the strategy created in the production process.

CS: What new roles are emerging, or what are the roles that are going to be crucial in terms of how you continue to adopt AI, but also how it evolves within WPP? Are there new jobs that you're seeing, or are there specific roles that you're seeking to hire more of?

MR: We see AI very much as something that augments human creativity or brings more power to our people. So, I'd say the most effective strategists become better. The best creatives generate more ideas. It's not going to replace human judgment, but I think that it is going to expand the funnel, if you like, at the beginning of the process, more ideas, and allow people to test them and find them more quickly.

Certainly, as we use it in our production business, we're seeing that many of the traditional skills that we use to produce work to tell a story, you still need those, even when you're working with AI, and some of the classic engineering skills. Yes, they're more important, but so are all of the traditional skills around editing and storytelling. I think the same is true in media. We still need people to think through the impact of the media plan. But lots of the basic process of planning a plan and re-planning could get done by AI.

The other thing I'd say is that AI is very well adapted to understanding brands. You think about what a brand is. A brand is a colour, a logo, a series of rules, things that it stands for, things that it does, things that it wouldn't do. Those are all things that AI intuitively understands, and that's what makes it so powerful in the creative industry. So part of what we need to do is to harness that power in our work. And that's what we're doing. The same rules remain, but the skill sets grow.

The question is going to be; how much more work do we do for clients? Do we come up with more creative ideas? More personalised work? More assets that sit across more platforms?  Parts of the business will be more effective or more efficient, but actually, there's going to be a lot more to be done in the future, and work that maybe would not have been done by a WPP agency could now be done. So we wouldn't necessarily produce the television ad, but using AI, we can now make one. So, there's more work. The type of work that we can do will expand. One of the challenges of AI is that it's seen as a productivity efficiency tool. We need to show how it's not just about efficiency, it's about effectiveness.

CS: What are clients asking when they come to WPP, and what are you hearing from them now?

MR: The biggest difference is that the way clients are buying marketing, or engaging with marketing partners, is becoming more strategic in many ways. One analogy, I think, is that buying marketing services is becoming more like buying IT services. There are many clients that have hundreds and hundreds of marketing partners, a publishing company that had 900 agencies, a consumer goods company that had 1,400 people in one department - they worked with 14,150 agencies. And I think that clients realized that to drive change, to drive consistency, to adopt technology, those types of very complex partner relationships are very hard to manage. So, clients are looking for what we've been working on the past few years at WPP, simpler partners who are more integrated. Yes, we're strong creatively, with media and production capabilities, but they need to have more simplicity. And as the networks and agencies all adopt AI, they're bringing in similar partners.

CS: What do you think will be the main differentiator between the agency networks going forward? Won’t they all be very similar if they all have the same partnerships and services?

MR: I don't think so, because everyone's taking a very different approach to AI. We've really pushed it very ambitiously. Looking at the end-to-end workflow, how can we use AI at every stage of the process? Others are viewing it much more as personalization or a content/data engine. But I'd say, actually, AI, to me, is like the internet. Back in 1992, those companies that invested the most, stuck with it and really tried to drive it across the whole business, embraced it over the long term, and succeeded. AI will come in and out of fashion.

But I believe that if we stay committed to our investments and build our business around it, we will have the best platform to serve our clients. Of course, they want world-class creativity and smart media plans, but those people have to be empowered by technology, and increasingly, we need to integrate the activities along the marketing process. What will benefit clients is, quality of talent, the ability to integrate, and how quickly and how fast they're adopting the technology.

CS: How much does the quality of talent as a differentiator remain? Do people remain the main differentiator for networks?

MR: Yes, I think that people have always been our biggest asset. They will remain our most powerful asset, but what clients look for in pitches has changed. Clients choosing agencies based on “the Big Idea” has changed. Yes, the ability to produce great work is important, but they're also looking for many other things when they evaluate partners: where they're investing, how powerful the platforms are, all of those things. So, talent is critical, and we need talent who are open to embracing AI because we need people who are open-minded and positive about the future. I think that is also critical.

We ran 150,000 training sessions across WPP on AI in the last year, but the reality is that not everybody is embracing it at the same speed, and what we have to do is encourage our people to use it and see the potential. If we have a workforce that has the tools available to them, we want them to use those tools and see how powerful they are. I think that's important as well.

CS: About WPP Open - What is the vision for that longer term, and what will that mean for WPP once it's fully integrated?

MR: So I think it will mean that we will be able to apply the power of AI at every stage of the marketing process, ideas will flow seamlessly from creative people through production out into media, so we have to work faster in a more agile way. It's a platform that puts these tools in the hands of our people and our clients. And by managing the workflow enables ideas to flow much more quickly, allowing clients to react to business and marketing situations much more quickly, and get work out onto the market more quickly. It's really a tool to help our clients be more competitive in their marketing. We want clients to use WPP Open to be able to get ideas into market faster than their competition, with better ideas than their competition, to be able to choose more of them more quickly, and to have stronger media plans, better informed by data, with more personalised work. No part of what we do in marketing will AI not touch. What's important is that we have one system that integrates everything, because it’s too complicated to have two different systems.

CS: Is WPP Open now accessed by every member of staff?

MR: We built studios that support people in their primary work functions, from people in our creative agencies to people in our media agencies. There are specialist tools for production and media, but behind the studios, the platform's completely integrated. So today, we have about 50,000 people using the facets available to all of our people. It’s even being used by the legal department and our procurement department and the finance department… But broadly speaking, we want people to do their work on WPP Open, not to turn to it for help in a particular situation, but really to manage their work. WPP Open will be the first thing they log into when they come into the office.

And here is Read's resignation statement, in full:

Mark Read, Chief Executive Officer of WPP, said:

WPP is an incredible company with over 100,000 talented and creative people, wonderful clients and partners, and an unmatched presence around the world. It has been an immense privilege to serve as its CEO for the past seven years.

When I took on this role our mission was to build a simpler, stronger business, and put structure and new energy behind our creativity and performance, powered by world-leading technology. I am proud that our teams across the business have delivered that exceptionally well. Our clients today rate us more highly than ever before, we now work with four of the world’s five most valuable companies, and our revenues with our biggest clients have grown consistently.

Our business starts with creativity, and I was delighted for our teams that last year we were once again named Creative Company of the Year at Cannes Lions. We have also positioned WPP at the forefront of the industry with our investments in AI and, with the full launch of WPP Open this year, we are now leading the way as AI transforms marketing. We have an exceptional leadership team and a secure financial position that allows us to face the future confidently and capture the opportunities ahead.

After seven years in the role, and with the foundations in place for WPP’s continued success, I feel it is the right time to hand over the leadership of this amazing company. I am excited to explore the next chapter in my life and can only thank all the brilliant people I have been lucky enough to work with over the last 30 years, and who have made possible the enormous progress we have achieved together. I would also like to thank Phil and the rest of the Board for their steadfast support for me and the wider executive team, and I look forward to supporting them in the transition to my successor in the coming months.