Winning Jaguar Land Rover is a pivotal moment for WPP’s reinvention

It’s no secret that in 2025 WPP endured a bruising year, with its share price falling by more than half in just 12 months. Its incoming client Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Tata Motors, didn't fare much better, grappling with a major cyber‑attack and US tariffs that have contributed to a global sales slump, and the enduring fallout from its ‘Copy Nothing’ campaign from the previous year - which even drew Elon Musk to publicly joke “Do you sell cars anymore?”.

Now, working together across the near‑$500m creative and media contract, the two businesses will look to rebuild their fortunes, and WPP has already enjoyed a lift to its previously ailing reputation from the win.

The contract will cover the four main car brands: Defender, Discovery, Jaguar and Range Rover.

And, like buses, just the week before WPP Media was also named as lead media agency for the UK Government, which helped lift the WPP share price.

So, for WPP the year ended on a more positive note than most - even its own leaders - might have expected.

JLR - A Tentpole Moment

It was always going to be a major feat for incumbent Accenture Song to retain the account, even though it was included in the statutory review against WPP, Publicis and Omnicom.

In the end, an official statement announced: “JLR can confirm that it has chosen WPP to enter into a period of exclusivity and contract negotiations in the final phase of its global agency review. The pitch covered JLR’s ‘end to end’ marketing communications and services, across all channels globally."

Accenture Song’s contract remains in place through to early summer, however WPP will now have to figure out what that “period of exclusivity” means for its other car brand clients. It’s possibly here that potential signs of what the future looks like for the advertising business emerge. How does it handle issues of client confidentiality and build to compete in the new agency landscape? Of course, that is a challenge WPP's competitors are also working to overcome.

The WPP Proposition

Like Omnicom and Publicis, WPP chose to pitch for the JLR media and creative contracts using a cross company approach in order to show a scale that could potentially match that of Accenture Song.

Winning just one part of contract after the nine month review would in itself have felt a significant achievement for the embattled British holding company - but picking up the whole shebang is a definite coup. And it couldn’t have come at a better moment for WPP and its CEO Cindy Rose who is still bedding into her role.

WPP is readying itself for the new world in which agencies increasingly find themselves - with a shift to more project-based opportunities that can be handled by its individual agency brands and its new self serve offer, whilst bolstering the global scale it still needs in order to compete for the biggest brand work out there.

WPP has been preparing its integrated offering to closer align its creative, media, data, commerce and technology services through bespoke client teams that can be created at scale when desired - see WPP Open X, created to service Coca-Cola.

Meanwhile, the introduction of the self serve offer through WPP Open Pro, announced in October, is a clear indication that the business realises the old ways of working with clients are no longer sustainable. “This is about transforming how marketing is delivered, expanding our total addressable market, and giving more brands the tools they need to lead in the AI era,” Rose explained at the time.

And while WPP has undertaken plenty of consolidation in the last decade - not least in forming VML as the largest creative agency - the JLR success underlines its ability to put together cross company creative and media teams that can compete at the highest level.

Expect more movement to develop this strategy built around existing agency brands in the coming months. Rose has already been talking about simplifying the group structure as she continues to build AI systems to automate much of “the ordinary” she told Samafor at the end of last year.

“WPP has not gone far enough or fast enough to keep pace with the evolving needs of our clients. Clients tell me very consistently they want us to be easier to work with. All of the friction in our model comes from the fact that we have multiple P&Ls, a very complex operating model where it’s unclear who’s making decisions. And, fundamentally, we need to pivot from being a holding company to an operating company. Our clients want the best of WPP. They don’t want to be constrained by whatever agency door they happen to walk through,” she also explained in the same interview.

The likeliest route would see something similar to the Omnicom (post IPG takeover) structure with WPP client servicing units cherry picking from across the company for both creative and media specialisms; WPP certainly needs to show its shareholders and stakeholders that it does have a plan, and quickly.

Whether that goes far enough to turn the tide is still hard to say, but that’s why JLR’s vote of confidence in what they have heard from Rose and the WPP team is such a positive sign. Now it needs to build on this new business momentum; there will certainly be plenty of opportunities with pitches predicted to abound this year as marketers continue to figure out what they need in this AI-centric world.