WPP plc (WPP): ANSOFF MATRIX [Dec-2025 Updated]

You're staring down WPP plc's revised 2025 guidance, which projects a tough like-for-like revenue decline between -5.5% and -6.0%, and frankly, hoping for a market rebound isn't a strategy. So, I've mapped out the clear, actionable growth paths using the Ansoff Matrix, distilling complex moves into four concrete lanes: we must double down on our top 25 clients for stability, aggressively deploy talent in high-growth India, monetize that £300 million annual AI investment through new product modules, and even explore selling enterprise tech solutions outside the traditional agency space. This isn't abstract theory; it's a direct response to the Q3 numbers, showing exactly where WPP plc needs to focus its energy right now. Dive into the details below to see the specific moves tied to each quadrant.

WPP plc (WPP) - Ansoff Matrix: Market Penetration

Drive adoption of WPP Open across 90% of client-facing staff to increase cross-selling. As of March 2025, usage of the platform reached approximately 60% of client-facing staff, with 48,000 people actively using it monthly, up from 33,000 in December 2024. By the first half of 2025, usage was reported at over 80% of client-facing employees.

Focus on winning back market share in North America, which saw a like-for-like (LFL) decline of 6.0% in Q3 2025. This compares to a 2.4% decline in H1 2025 for the region. The Q3 decline was attributed to client assignment losses and spending cuts, particularly impacting Ogilvy and WPP Media.

Leverage structural cost savings of £85 million achieved in 2024 to offer more competitive, integrated pricing. These savings stemmed from initiatives like the creation of VML and Burson, and the simplification of GroupM.

Deepen relationships with the top 25 clients, whose Year-to-Date (YTD) LFL revenue decline was only -2.0% as of Q3 2025. This performance was better than the Group LFL decline of -4.8% YTD. For the full year 2024, these top 25 clients actually saw growth of 2.0% in revenue less pass-through costs.

Consolidate media spend for existing clients, exemplified by the Henkel European media business win. WPP Media secured the consolidated media business for Henkel Consumer Brands across 30 European markets, adding 13 new markets to the 17 markets awarded in late 2024. This expanded remit, covering brands like Persil and Schwarzkopf, was valued at $825 million or £630 million.

Key metrics supporting the Market Penetration strategy include:

• WPP Open investment target for 2025: £300 million.
• Structural cost savings delivered in 2024: £85 million.
• North America LFL revenue decline in Q3 2025: 6.0%.
• Top 25 Clients YTD LFL revenue decline (Q3 2025): -2.0%.
• Henkel European media mandate size: 30 markets.

The scale of the Henkel win, driven by WPP Open, is a clear indicator of deepening existing client relationships:

Focusing on internal efficiency to support external competitiveness:

• Headline operating margin guidance for FY 2025: around 13%.
• Adjusted operating cash flow forecast for FY 2025: £1.1 billion to £1.2 billion.
• GroupM LFL revenue less pass-through costs in Q3 2024: grew 4.8%.
• GroupM LFL revenue less pass-through costs in Q3 2025: declined 5.7%.

WPP plc (WPP) - Ansoff Matrix: Market Development

You're looking at where WPP plc is taking its existing services into new geographic territories, which is the essence of Market Development in the Ansoff Matrix. This isn't about inventing new things; it's about planting established flags in fertile new ground, or re-cultivating ground that's gone fallow for a bit.

The data from the Third Quarter of 2025 definitely shows where the immediate focus needs to be. India is clearly a bright spot, showing a 6.7% like-for-like growth in Q3. That kind of momentum demands priority for investment and talent deployment; you simply can't afford to under-resource a market performing that well. Conversely, China's Q3 performance was a -10.6% decline, which signals that the existing approach there needs a serious localized rethink to re-engage clients effectively.

Here's a quick look at how some key regions stacked up in Q3 2025, which helps frame the market development priorities:

For Central and Eastern Europe, which posted growth of 1.3% in Q3, the strategy is about aggressive pursuit. It's a market showing positive momentum, so you want to push harder for new client assignments there before competitors solidify their positions. It's a smaller gain than India, but it's positive territory that warrants a targeted sales push.

To expand the addressable market beyond the traditional large client base, WPP plc launched WPP Open Pro in October 2025. This self-serve AI marketing platform is designed to be an entry point for businesses that might not have the resources for a full agency engagement. This move aims to capture revenue from smaller, emerging brands, effectively widening the net. This initiative is backed by a significant technology investment, including a $400 million partnership with Google for AI technologies baked into the platform.

The structural simplification in media operations is also a key lever for market development. The new WPP Media structure, which replaced GroupM, is designed to offer a unified, simplified media offer, especially across the Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa (APMEA) region. This new structure manages over $60 billion in media investments across 80+ markets.

The new WPP Media structure facilitates market entry through clear regional leadership:

• APMEA is divided into six sub-regions for streamlined operations.
• India and Sri Lanka are now under a unified leadership structure led by Prasanth Kumar.
• China has dedicated leadership under Rupert McPetrie for a localized re-engagement.
• Nexus and Investment functions were folded into a new Media Management and Delivery (MMD) organization.
• This simplified offer helps WPP enter new regional markets with a consistent proposition.

The re-engagement in China following the -10.6% Q3 decline must be localized; you can't just apply a Western playbook there. The fact that the decline moderated from the first half suggests some stabilization efforts are working, but a deeper, market-specific strategy is defintely needed to return to growth.

Finance: draft 13-week cash view by Friday.

WPP plc (WPP) - Ansoff Matrix: Product Development

You're looking at how WPP plc is developing entirely new offerings, moving beyond just selling existing services in existing markets. This is all about creating new products, which, in WPP's case, means new technology-enabled services, often built on massive investments in AI.

The foundation for these new products is the commitment to technology. WPP plc increased its annual cash investment in its AI-powered marketing operating system, WPP Open, to £300 million in 2025, up from £250 million in 2024. By the end of 2024, WPP Open had reached 33,000 monthly active users, and its advanced capabilities were central to winning major account reviews, including those with Amazon and Unilever.

Monetizing this platform involves launching new modules that package these capabilities for clients. This is where the product development focus sharpens, moving from internal tool adoption to external, billable services.

The extended partnership with Google is a key driver for introducing bespoke AI solutions. WPP plc committed $400 million over five years for Google technologies as part of this expanded agreement. This collaboration is specifically designed to enable the rapid development of tailored AI services for clients, such as bespoke AI solutions built with Gemini. Early pilot results showed efficiency gains of up to 70 per cent and a 2.5 times higher acceleration in asset utilisation when using early access to models like Veo and Imagen integrated into WPP Open. This rapid, bespoke AI model development is a new product category in itself.

The acquisition of InfoSum, a data collaboration platform, on April 3, 2025, directly feeds into new privacy-safe product development. While the financial terms were not disclosed, the company was valued at $300 million in 2021. This technology is being embedded within WPP Open to create an AI-enabled, secure infrastructure. The product goal is to allow clients to maximize their first-party data value through privacy-enhancing connections, using federated learning techniques to generate new marketing intelligence without moving or exposing underlying data.

New commerce and experience offerings are being developed by leveraging the production scale of VML and Hogarth. VML, which combined VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, is positioned as the world's largest integrated creative agency. WPP was recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave Commerce Services Q2 2024, receiving the highest score attainable in the data, analytics and AI criterion. Furthermore, WPP Media, which replaced GroupM, unites media, data, and production capabilities to deliver creative personalization at scale.

The launch of AI-powered studios is a tangible new product for hyper-personalized content creation. The AI Production Studio, co-developed with Hogarth and powered by NVIDIA Omniverse and OpenUSD, is integrated into WPP Open. This studio is projected to cut content production time by 70-80% and allow teams to produce 3-5x more assets with the same headcount. Brands like Ford and L'Oréal are already using this capability.

Here's a quick look at the scale and integration of these new product pillars:

The goal is to move beyond just efficiency gains; the new products aim to unlock growth by delivering hyper-relevant campaigns at unprecedented scale and speed.

The new product suite includes capabilities such as:

• Streamlining 3D product model creation and content updates.
• Generating consistent, on-brand multilingual copy using AI.
• Delivering precisely targeted, personalised communications through relevant channels.
• Enabling marketers to use 100% of their business intelligence via privacy-safe connections.
• Training client AI models on a larger corpus of high-quality, privacy-compliant data.

Finance: draft the Q4 2025 forecast update to reflect revenue projections from the new WPP Open module rollouts by next Tuesday.

WPP plc (WPP) - Ansoff Matrix: Diversification

You're looking at WPP plc's push into new markets and services, which is the heart of the Diversification quadrant in the Ansoff Matrix. This is about moving beyond traditional agency services and into technology platforms and adjacent business models. The company is making concrete financial commitments to this strategy.

WPP plc is actively developing its proprietary technology, WPP Open, and transitioning parts of it, like WPP Open Pro, into a self-serve enterprise technology solution. This targets non-traditional marketing buyers by offering direct control over campaign execution. A pilot program using WPP Open demonstrated significant efficiency gains: four-person teams reclaimed 14 hours weekly, and creative and strategy development time dropped from four weeks to three hours. Adoption is growing, with WPP Open monthly active users reaching 33,000 in 2024. To keep this platform competitive, WPP plans to increase its annual investment in WPP Open from £250 million in 2024 to £300 million in 2025.

To bolster its data capabilities, which are foundational to its technology push, WPP plc acquired InfoSum, a data collaboration platform, to integrate with WPP Open. This move is critical for unlocking customer data across various systems securely. While a direct acquisition of a specialized B2B technology consulting firm for enterprise transformation wasn't explicitly detailed in the latest reports, WPP did merge two communications agencies, Hill & Knowlton and BCW, to form Burson, which will offer specialized technology communications expertise.

Moving into new revenue streams in gaming and the metaverse shows a clear diversification effort beyond traditional media buys. WPP plc has a strategic partnership with Roblox specifically to unlock the potential of immersive media and gaming for global brands. While specific revenue from this segment isn't broken out, WPP Media forecasts creator-generated revenue, which includes brand deals in these spaces, to reach $184.9 billion in 2025, marking a 20% increase from 2024.

Targeting new client sectors for technology solutions is evidenced by recent major wins, though not exclusively in enterprise software or specialized finance yet. WPP secured new assignments in 2024 with major clients like Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark, and Unilever. The company also announced a strategic partnership and investment in Stability AI, a generative AI pioneer, to integrate its models into WPP Open, which is a clear move into deep technology enablement. This partnership is one of over 30 strategic agreements WPP holds with leading technology companies.

The partnership with Stability AI, which is backed by investors like Greycroft and Lightspeed Venture Partners, helps WPP leverage visual media models across image, video, 3D, and audio. This is part of a broader strategy to move beyond time-and-services revenue, as seen by the launch of WPP Open Pro to attract smaller clients who only need self-serve solutions. For context on the overall business, WPP plc reported a total revenue of £14.7 billion in 2024, with an operating profit increase of 149.5% to £1,325 million. For 2025, the guidance projects like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs to be flat to -2%.

• WPP plc sold its majority stake in FGS Global in December 2024, receiving $767 million in cash proceeds.
• WPP's global workforce was approximately 100,000 in 2025.
• The company's H1 2025 reported revenue was £6,663m, a decrease of 7.8% year-over-year.
• The H1 2025 headline operating profit margin stood at 8.2%.