WPP expects to grow again at some point in 2027, but the arithmetic its finance chief set out on October 30, 2026 shows how much ground the group still has to recover. On the third-quarter trading update call, chief financial officer Joanne Wilson said clients lost in earlier periods will weigh on growth by about 600 basis points this year, while new business wins, though "significantly better" than the 250 basis points of 2025, will not be enough to offset them. Net new business will remain a drag in the fourth quarter, the group's largest, and WPP will not give formal guidance for 2027 until late February.

In Short

WPP, one of the world's biggest advertising groups, told investors its business is still shrinking, but more slowly, and that it expects to grow again sometime in 2027. The catch is that the clients it lost took away more work than the new clients it has won so far, and the last months of 2026 are clouded by uncertain economies and conflict in the Middle East. For the rest of the industry, the call showed clients reviewing their agencies more often, spending very unevenly, and judging agencies on AI, data and production as much as on ideas.

The call and the quarter

WPP published its third-quarter trading update on October 30, 2026 and held a call with analysts the same morning. Chief executive Cindy Rose and Wilson presented. Thomas Singlehurst, group director of investor relations, ran the session, and analysts from Citi, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Berenberg, Deutsche Numis and Bernstein asked questions. This article is based on a transcript of the call published by Investing.com, which says it "was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor." It is not WPP's own transcript, and a few passages appear to contain transcription errors, flagged below where they affect the meaning.

The quarter itself takes little space. WPP reported revenue up 0.5%, both reported and like-for-like, while revenue less pass-through costs, the measure the group calls net sales, fell 2.1% like-for-like. "Like-for-like revenue, less pass-through costs, fell 2.1% in the third quarter, while organic revenue growth, a metric which may ease comparability across our peer set, was up 0.5%," Wilson said. Both figures improved on the second quarter. WPP Media grew 0.3%, after declines of 8.3% in the first quarter and 2.8% in the second. WPP Production grew 2.5%. WPP Creative fell 5.1%, worse than the 3.5% decline of the second quarter. According to Investing.com, WPP's American depositary shares rose 0.78% in premarket trading to $26.

One detail in those numbers matters beyond WPP. For total revenue to rise 0.5% while revenue less pass-through costs fell 2.1%, the pass-through costs themselves must have grown, a calculation by PPC Land rather than a figure WPP gave. The call did not say which costs rose. Across the sector, the share of client money flowing through agencies as media or third-party costs has become a live question: according to the ANA figures cited in PPC Land's holding company explainer, 58% of marketers used principal media in the prior year, up from 47% in the association's 2024 study. Wilson's new "organic revenue growth" figure, which includes those costs, is the one that rose.

2027, without a number

The outlook is where the call spent most of its time, and the central statement came from Wilson. "Looking to 2027, we will not set formal guidance until the prelims in February. That said, consistent with the guidance we gave at the launch of the Elevate28 strategy earlier this year, we do continue to expect a return to growth during the course of the year," she said.

That strategy was unveiled with the 2025 results on February 26, 2026, when WPP collapsed the group into four divisions - WPP Media, WPP Production, WPP Enterprise Solutions and WPP Creative - and its shares opened nearly 10% lower. Rose, who became chief executive in September 2025, framed the third quarter as early evidence. "We are less than a year into our three-year Elevate28 plan to return WPP to consistent and sustainable growth," she said. WPP Media began its transformation a year before Elevate28 and WPP Production followed, she said, "which gives me confidence that the rest of the business will follow a similar trajectory."

She also hedged. "Look, transformation at this scale isn't easy, and the benefits do not materialize overnight. It takes time, and progress may not always be linear," Rose said.

The near-term guidance is unchanged. WPP expects like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs to fall by low to mid-single digits in the second half, with the fourth quarter "towards the better end of this range." The headline operating profit margin is guided at 12% to 13% for the full year, which Wilson said is consistent with second-half margins falling by up to 200 basis points year on year. "Q4 is obviously always our biggest quarter, so an important one," she said, adding: "We do expect to exit 2026 where we were hoping to."

Steve Liechti of Deutsche Numis asked whether the fourth quarter could turn positive, given a comparison about one percentage point easier than in the second and third quarters. Wilson accepted the easier comparison but did not move the guidance, repeating the expectation of a "low to mid-single digit decline in Q4."

Wins, losses and the time it takes to ramp

The new business numbers explain why. At the start of the year and again in August, WPP said gross client losses would cost 500 to 600 basis points of growth in 2026, and that it was at or near the top of that range. "So on the net new business, look, the gross losses, let us say 600 basis points," Wilson told Julien Roch of Barclays. Gross wins came to 250 basis points in 2025. "As a result of that, the gross wins will be significantly better than they were last year, but not enough to offset that gross loss," she said. "So I am still expecting in Q4 that the net new business is a drag, albeit an easing drag, versus H1 in the final quarter of the year, but still negative."

Timing is part of the problem, and Wilson described it as an industry-wide feature rather than a WPP one. "In our industry, as you are ramping up new business wins, of course, you have all of the costs sometimes even before day one, and it takes time, often three, six, nine months in some cases, to ramp up to the full revenue from those wins," she said. That lag sits inside the margin guidance. She said the ramp-up accelerated in the third quarter and expects the net new business impact to be "similar across Q3 and Q4."

What follows into 2027 is lighter, on her account. "There were some losses Q2, Q3, that, of course, we will carry into 2027. That is not unusual at all. I would not expect to see anywhere near the level of losses that we were carrying into 2026," she said.

The top 25 clients show the same split. Like-for-like revenue from that group fell 2.7% in the third quarter, including the specific losses; excluding them, Wilson said, the group was "back in growth" at a rate "around low to mid-single digit."

The pipeline is fuller than a year ago, though not all of it is new money. "The pipeline is slightly higher than it was this time last year," Wilson said, noting that 2025 offered fewer opportunities. Some of it is defence. "We are seeing more and more opportunities within the pipeline being a little bit defensive, but also big opportunities to expand," she said. Asked by Anna Patrice of Berenberg about accounts under review, she named one. "Look, IKEA, we are defending some revenues, but there is also an opportunity for us to expand revenues," she said, adding that "a couple of others" combine defence and expansion. On retention, she was direct: "There is a bit more that we need to do in that area."

Rose's explanation for the better win rate was structural. "Because we are showing up as one unified company, and we are able to present the best of WPP, not hundreds of different agencies," she said. "Now that the vast majority of our pitches are integrated, the old WPP just wasn't set up to keep pace with the evolving needs of clients in that way, and now we are."

The quarter's named wins and retentions were broad. WPP renewed Coca-Cola for global media, data, tech and creator marketing "in every market we competed for," and remains its global creative partner. It expanded its global media work for DoorDash, an eight-year relationship now covering more than 40 markets. It became media partner for Alphabet's Waymo across North America and EMEA, "including for the driverless car brand's Super Bowl debut." Other assignments included Nestlé in Greater China through WPP Open | China, AKQA's work for TurboTax, Godrej Consumer Products' international media across seven markets from Indonesia to Chile, and the UK Electoral Commission's voter communications.

The rivals' scoreboard

WPP's turnaround is happening while competitors move in other directions. Publicis overtook WPP as the largest agency group by revenue in 2024, and in March 2025 Coca-Cola moved its $700 million US media account from WPP to Publicis, three months before Mark Read announced his departure as chief executive. In May 2026, when Publicis agreed to buy LiveRamp for $2.5 billion, it raised its net revenue growth targets for 2027 and 2028 to 7% to 8%.

Omnicom closed its acquisition of Interpublic under an FTC order that bars steering ad spend on political grounds, finalised in September 2025, and reported 3.9% organic growth for the first quarter of 2026, its first full quarter including IPG. Dentsu went the other way: in February 2026 it abandoned the sale of its international business after a ¥327.6 billion net loss and appointed its Japan chief as global CEO. In April, the FTC and eight states sued WPP, Publicis and Dentsu over brand safety coordination, alongside a proposed consent order.

The call also exposed a gap between the market and the agencies serving it. WPP Media's own midyear forecast, released in June, projected 4.4% growth in global advertising revenue in 2026 to $1.3 trillion, with the United States up 11.9%. WPP's net sales, by contrast, are still declining in the second half. One explanation PPC Land has examined is that the ad market is two markets: a fast-growing, performance-led layer of smaller advertisers buying directly from platforms, outside agency revenue data, and a large-advertiser layer where agencies compete for a slower-growing pool. Analyst Ian Whittaker has argued that this is a structural problem for holding companies rather than a cyclical one. Nothing on the call addressed that split directly.

Pitching costs more, and some clients skip it

Coca-Cola shows how the pitch market has changed. The company opened a global media, data and technology review in June 2026, run by the consultancy MediaSense, pitting WPP Open X against Publicis. WPP kept every market it pitched for, but did not pitch for North America. Adrien de Saint Hilaire of Bank of America asked why.

"I had many people pitching for many weeks over the summer. I was with them myself in London and Shanghai and Mexico City," Rose said. "We made a tough call between spending yet another six weeks pitching for North America versus delivering against what we had already won. It was a fine judgment call, which I made, and it is as simple as that, really."

The same analyst noted that some of WPP's peers talk about winning assignments without pitching. Rose was blunt about what she called "this pitchless CEO handshake thing that I keep getting asked about." "What can I say here? Nobody loves pitching," she said. "The cost and burden of the process seems to be increasing." She argued for the review process anyway: "These are really high-stakes decisions with material business consequences, and they deserve careful consideration. I do not think we do ourselves any favor as an industry of professionals by encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence."

Rose did not name the peers. Her answer frames a tension that marketers have reported from the client side. A European study by EACA and Kantar found that CMOs say they trust agencies but still switch them anyway: nearly half of the 141 companies surveyed had run a pitch in the past year, 65% of those pitches ended in an agency change, and six in ten winning ideas were never implemented. A process that costs agencies weeks of senior time, and frequently ends in a move, is exactly what a handshake deal avoids. Which of the two produces better outcomes for advertisers, the call did not settle.

Spending splits by sector and by region

Client demand is uneven, and Wilson said so repeatedly. Consumer packaged goods and technology clients are still affected by WPP's own assignment losses, though both improved quarter on quarter. "Excluding this, we continue to see a high degree of polarization between and within sectors," she said, with continuing growth in healthcare and auto.

Regionally, the gross account losses weigh most on North America, down 1.8%, and the UK, down 0.2%, though both improved on the second quarter. Germany and India returned to growth. China fell by high single digits, though Wilson said the year-to-date trend "represents a stabilization relative to the last couple of years."

The Middle East is the outlier. The region, "just under 2% of our business," fell about 13% in the quarter, a deterioration on the second quarter, and Wilson said it "continues to be a source of uncertainty into the fourth quarter." It matters more for Burson, the PR network, where the Middle East is a larger share of revenue. Asked about the fourth quarter more broadly, Wilson set out the risk: "If the macro environment remains very uncertain, the geopolitical environment, I think is increasingly uncertain. Therefore, our outlook is balanced, reflecting those dynamics."

Project work, which peers have flagged as a fourth-quarter swing factor, looks calmer. "We are probably seeing a stabilization in that this year versus what we saw, perhaps, in the last couple of years," Wilson said. Many client arrangements are multiyear, she added, but she declined to say how much of the fourth quarter is already committed.

Media back to growth, creative still falling

The return to growth at WPP Media was led by the US operation, which Rose called "strategically significant and really wonderful to see." Wilson put the benefit of easier comparisons at about 1% and said timing benefits also helped. "I do expect all of that timing benefit to unwind in Q4. It was important enough to call out, but not material in terms of WPP Media's overall performance in Q3," she said. She steered analysts towards the second half as a whole rather than single quarters, and attributed the growth to new business wins and to existing clients, "particularly in the U.S." The unit is still lapping losses: the net impact of new business at WPP Media remains a drag on like-for-like performance, according to Wilson.

WPP Creative is the weak spot. The 5.1% decline was "primarily driven by lower client spending, partially offset by the ramp-up of new business," Wilson said. The unit redesigned its operating model this year, with the heaviest changes in the third quarter, and she acknowledged the cost: "that is a distraction for the leadership team, away from the top line." Within Creative, brand and design agencies including Landor kept growing, and Burson returned to growth at low to mid-single digits; PR is about 7% of WPP's net sales. "Most of that hard work is done now, and then we will be back to being 150% focused on that top line," Wilson said.

Her description of where creative goes next matched the integration pitch. "Increasingly, we are seeing opportunities to sell creative as part of a much broader integrated proposition with media, production, commerce, et cetera," she said.

That sits against wider pressure on how creative work is bought and priced. A BCG survey covered in August found holding company agencies ranked last in each of four growth areas, with outcome-based or performance-linked fees the most preferred pricing model at 66%; Rose had told analysts that such pay was years away. An April survey of 213 agency professionals by Basis found that 87% say the traditional agency model is broken now or will be within three to five years, and 65.3% said at least some clients had moved work in-house in the previous 12 months.

WPP Enterprise Solutions, stood up this year as a standalone unit, will report like-for-like results separately from January 1, 2027. Wilson would not give its performance but said it was "slightly better than overall Creative." WPP plans an investor webinar on the unit in early December.

AI studios, agents and 400 data partners

Rose used the call to describe where WPP is putting money. In September the group opened Devon's Point, which she called "our new state-of-the-art AI-powered global flagship production facility in East London." It offers large-scale virtual production sets, dedicated creator facilities including live streaming studios, rapid shoot and edit facilities, and "multiple AI-enabled post-production technology suites." Production is the unit growing fastest, with like-for-like growth accelerating from 1.3% in the second quarter to 2.5% in the third.

On software, Rose described WPP Open as "our agentic marketing platform" and said WPP had expanded its partnership with Kyndryl, which named WPP its global media and marketing partner. WPP Open Intelligence added almost 50 data partners in the quarter, including IOTA, taking the total to around 400. Rose called that ecosystem "central to our long-term data strategy and a source of competitive advantage for our clients."

The call said nothing about how WPP charges for AI. Elsewhere in the sector that question has become commercial: PPC Land reported in August that agencies are turning AI tokens into a margin business, with one consultant describing free AI tokens offered to clients that sign up for principal buying and a data services contract, and Omnicom reporting third-party service costs of almost $2.9 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.7 billion a year earlier.

Apple's identity block and the InfoSum answer

The one question touching browser privacy came from the webcast. Singlehurst read out a question from Richard Kramer, which he introduced as being "about iOS 17," asking how Apple's steps "to prevent ID resolution" affect WPP Media. The version reference looks wrong: the WebKit post that described the block, published on October 19, 2026, applies to the iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS 27 releases, as PPC Land reported when Safari 27 began blocking identity firms that turn email addresses into tracking IDs.

Rose summarised the change accurately. "It's a technical one, which I won't attempt to answer in huge amounts of detail, but the Apple browser now blocks third-party identity resolution and identity matching providers," she said. "What I will say is it doesn't really impact our data solution at all because we don't rely solely on identity matching, right?"

Her argument rests on InfoSum, which she described as "a data collaboration platform that relies on a mix of data sources from consumer identity to our own WPP proprietary data to live signals from our ecosystem of data partners, nearly 400 of them." She said WPP bought it "roughly two years ago"; PPC Land reported that WPP agreed to acquire InfoSum in April 2025, about 18 months before the call. InfoSum operates as a clean room style environment, in which parties analyse combined data without exposing raw records to each other, which is a different mechanism from the cross-site identity resolution that WebKit targets. "I would say in the scheme of things, the impact on WPP to these iOS changes are minimal," Rose said.

One competitive detail stands out. The nine-domain list in a September 21 WebKit bug report, filed by an engineer at The Trade Desk and never confirmed by Apple, included domains used by Unified ID 2.0, ID5, The Trade Desk, Permutive, Audigent and LiveRamp, as PPC Land reported when ID5's chief executive said regulators should look at Apple. LiveRamp is the company Publicis agreed to buy in May. Rose did not mention Publicis, and the call offered no data on how WPP's own match rates or campaign measurement have changed since iOS 27 shipped.

Savings, reinvestment and debt

Elevate28 targets £500 million of structural cost savings through 2028. WPP is on track for £100 million in 2026, and Wilson said the annualised effect will be £250 million in 2027, "so another GBP 150 million coming through from the actions taken this year." Further actions on corporate functions next year will add to that. The 2026 savings are being reinvested in media, data, commerce and Enterprise Solutions, "including the rebuilding of incentive pools." Adam Berlin of Goldman Sachs asked how much of the 2027 savings will reach profit. "And so look, it is too early to say how much of that will be reinvested in 2027, but we will give more detail in February," Wilson said.

The margin pressure in 2026 comes partly from the top line. "We do have a declining top line this year, and obviously that has some impact on operating deleverage," Wilson said. When revenue falls faster than costs can be cut, the decremental margin rises and profit shrinks faster than sales, which is why the speed of the 2027 recovery matters as much as its arrival.

The balance sheet is more settled. Average adjusted net debt was £3.2 billion at September 30, about £160 million lower year on year, helped by IFRS 9 amendments effective in 2026; on an actual basis, adjusted net debt was down £600 million. WPP repaid a €750 million bond in September, taking its weighted average maturity back to about six years. "We are 90% fixed in terms of our interest," Wilson said, and with issues in December 2025 and March 2026, "all of our debt maturities are covered through to 2028." WPP still expects at least £200 million from disposal-related activity in 2026. "Creating firm financial foundations is a core tenet of the Elevate28 plan, and at the root of this is a commitment to maintaining an investment-grade balance sheet," Wilson said.

The cash guidance contains an inconsistency in the transcript. Wilson is recorded as saying the £800 million to £900 million range for adjusted operating cash flow before working capital "excludes the anticipated restructuring costs," and then that "excluding these" the figure would be £1 billion to £1.1 billion. Both statements cannot hold. The higher range only makes sense if the lower one is struck after restructuring costs; Investing.com's summary of the call describes the lower range as excluding them.

New leaders for the next phase

The call doubled as a farewell for Wilson, who will step down as CFO in 2027 once a successor is in place. Asked by Roch for the top problem in her successor's in-tray, she answered positively: "I think it's a much easier job to inherit than perhaps the one I did three and a half years ago."

Creative leadership is also changing. Jon Cook leaves VML next year after 30 years. Tyler Turnbull joins from McCann, the network Omnicom took on with Interpublic, as global CEO of WPP Creative, and Eric Campbell, CEO of VML North America, becomes global CEO of VML. Adam Gerhart was promoted to chief client officer. Annick Maas of Bernstein asked whether any accounts were at risk from the changes. "The answer is no," Rose said. "There's no client relationships that I see that are at risk because our client relationships aren't tied to any one individual, right?"

Why this matters for the marketing community

WPP is one of the largest buyers of advertising in the world, so its outlook doubles as a reading of large-advertiser demand. The signals from this call point in different directions. More reviews are happening, and more of them are defensive. Spending is polarised by sector. The fourth quarter, which carries the most weight in agency years, is exposed to a geopolitical environment the CFO described as "increasingly uncertain." Media buying has turned back to growth at WPP while creative services keep shrinking.

For publishers and ad tech companies, the call adds two more data points. WPP is building its data offer on clean-room collaboration and roughly 400 data partners rather than identity matching, at a moment when Apple's browser is cutting off identity resolution vendors. And the pitching debate, prompted by peers who say they win assignments without a review, suggests that some large mandates are changing hands without the formal process that has historically opened accounts to competitors. Whether WPP's 2027 return to growth arrives early or late in the year will be clearer in late February, when the group reports full-year results and gives formal guidance.

Timeline

Summary

Who: WPP, its chief executive Cindy Rose and chief financial officer Joanne Wilson, speaking to analysts from Citi, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Berenberg, Deutsche Numis and Bernstein. Clients named include Coca-Cola, DoorDash, Waymo, Nestlé and IKEA.

What: WPP reiterated its 2026 guidance and said it still expects a return to growth during 2027, without giving a number. Gross client losses are costing about 600 basis points of growth this year; gross wins are significantly better than 2025's 250 basis points but not enough to offset them, so net new business stays negative in the fourth quarter. WPP Media returned to growth while WPP Creative declined 5.1%.

When: The third-quarter trading update and call took place on October 30, 2026. Formal 2027 guidance is due with full-year results in late February 2027.

Where: The call covered WPP's global business, with weakness in the Middle East (down about 13%) and China, improvement in North America and the UK, and growth in Germany and India.

Why: WPP's outlook is a reading of large-advertiser demand at a time when clients review agencies more often, spend unevenly across sectors, and weigh agencies on AI, data and production. The call also showed how WPP positions itself against rivals such as Publicis and Omnicom, and against Apple's block on identity resolution vendors.