Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us at WPP's 2025 Annual General Meeting. I'm Philip Johnson, the newly appointed Chair of WPP, and I'm pleased to welcome all our shareholders, both virtually and in person, in the room today. The time is just past 11:00 A.M., and I can confirm that a quorum is present, and I declare the AGM open. Before I introduce you to my fellow Board members, all of whom are here in our offices today, I wanted to take this moment to say how honored I am to be the Chairman of WPP. It's a real privilege to chair the Board of a company like WPP, and I'm looking forward to serving you, our shareholders, and WPP's broader shareholders during my tenure.
It would also be remiss of me not to thank Roberto Quarta for enabling a smooth transition since I joined the Board in September and became Chair from the beginning of the year. Roberto, as you know, served a full nine-year tenure, and on behalf of the Board, I would like to thank him for his dedication and exceptional contribution during his time at WPP. Let me introduce you to my fellow Board members. Turning to my immediate right, we have Mark Read. Next to him is our CFO, Joanne Wilson, and to her right is Sandrine Dufour, Chair of our Audit Committee. Next to Sandrine, we have Cindy Rose, and next to Cindy is Yaqin Zhang, followed by Simon Dingemans. To my immediate left, we have our Company Secretary, Balbir Kelly- Bisla, and next to her is Angela Ahrendts, our Senior Independent Director.
Alongside Angela, we have Jasmine Whitbread, Chair of our Compensation Committee, followed by Keith Weed, Chair of our Sustainability Committee. Next to Keith, we have Tom Ilube, and alongside Tom, we have Andrew Scott, our Chief Operating Officer. Before we turn to the formal business of the meeting, I would like to say a few words, and then Mark will present an update on the company's business performance and the strategy. Now, I've only been Chair of WPP for a few months, and I'm still obviously getting to know the business. However, I would like to share some early observations on where we are today and where we are headed. First, I'm delighted to be serving alongside a very strong, engaged, and effective group of Board members who bring a variety of skills and experience from different business backgrounds to help on our Board deliberations.
While we are fortunate not to have any immediate challenges with Board tenure in terms of meeting U.K. corporate governance code requirements, the Nomination and Governance Committee of the Board continually takes a long-term view on Board succession planning to ensure the Board's skill set remains appropriate to meet the future needs of the organization. This process also helps to ensure that the Board and senior executive levels of WPP reflect the world around us and the customers and our clients and who they aim to reach, recognizing the value of wide representation of the business. Having now spent a significant amount of time in our various markets, it's clear to me that WPP has a very large number of extremely talented people throughout the company. We also have a full range of advanced capabilities that clients need to market their goods and services effectively in today's technology-driven world.
Our agencies are rightly recognized for their outstanding creativity, and our technology credentials are second to none. In particular, WPP has built a leadership position in the application of artificial intelligence to marketing, and Mark will talk in more detail about the opportunities this creates for our clients, our own business, and our shareholders. Now, our approach to AI is critical because the industry in which WPP operates is undergoing massive, profound change, and that change is happening at unprecedented pace. Technology has already obviously transformed the world of marketing services with digital and social channels today accounting for the majority of advertising spend, but we think AI is going to make those changes seem relatively small. WPP is well placed to capitalize on this rapidly changing landscape. The Board and leadership team are focused on ensuring those investments translate into new business success and improved performance.
Now, WPP has, of course, undergone its own transformation in recent years, and today your company is far simpler, it's more efficient, and it's a more modern organization. Great progress has been made from streamlining the business to enhancing its offer for our clients, and the leadership team deserve great credit for that. At the same time, there is still work to do in parts of our business to complete the foundations for future success. GroupM, for example, while an exceptional business that continues to deliver exceptional results for its clients, does need time to implement its new structure and strategy under new leadership. WPP is a company with high standards and very high expectations of itself. Now, it's no secret that our competitive performance in winning and retaining client assignments has not consistently been where we would like it to be.
However, in 2024, WPP made good progress against its strategic priorities. It improved its margin and cash conversion, reduced its debt, and maintained its dividend. Our top-line financial performance, however, was disappointing, and the deeply uncertain macroeconomic environment has weighed on our outlook for 2025. At our preliminary results announcement, the leadership team laid out a clear plan to drive improved growth. As I said in my letter in the annual report, this plan has the full support of the Board, and reviewing its progress is our number one priority in 2025. Now, before I hand over to Mark, I wanted to end on something which I think is really worth remembering about WPP. Very few organizations in the world have a blue-chip client base to rival that of WPP. Our agencies work with leading brands in every sector of global business.
Four of the world's five biggest companies are WPP clients, and the fifth, NVIDIA, is a very important partner. Our business with those clients has been growing. Despite the macro headwinds, the revenue from our top 25 clients increased by 2% in 2024. These world-leading companies entrust the engines of their commercial success, their brands, and their marketing to WPP. There is no greater testament to the talent and the capabilities that exist within WPP. Now, with that, over to Mark.
Thank you. Thank you, Philip. I'll present from here because Stephan will be joining me shortly, and we'll come back. I would like to add my welcome to those of you in the room, as well as to those of you joining us on webcast. I will start my comments at this year's AGM by talking a little bit about the future of advertising and why I think WPP is so well placed to thrive in the decades ahead. I will give you a brief review of our performance in 2024 and the first quarter of 2025, as well as a few thoughts on our strategic priorities for this year. I will hand over to Stephan Pretorius, our Chief Technology Officer, who will talk to you about the power of AI and how we think it will transform what we do for our clients to help them grow.
First, though, please note that you should refer to this important caution statement. Let's look at the future of advertising. It's a topic, as you can imagine, that's close to my heart and one that's critical to the future of WPP and to your investment. The future of advertising is also important as a significant and growing part of the economy and as a driver of economic growth. Globally, advertising is a trillion-dollar industry, and it's recovered strongly since COVID and is now growing consistently at around 6%. Companies have learned or remembered that advertising is an investment in their brands, and in an uncertain economic, societal, or political environment, brands have increasing value because consumers trust them. There's also another driving force behind this growth, which is small and medium-sized businesses. Of course, new advertising media such as search and social media have grown.
Advertising has been democratized and become much more widely available to many smaller companies. The new advertising tools that technology companies like Google and Meta are making available to small and medium businesses has allowed a whole generation of entrepreneurs to launch new ventures and reach new customers. Growth in this segment is actually behind much of the overall growth in total advertising spend. Now, the growth and impact of advertising goes beyond its direct impact on the economy and to the growth it creates. The overall impact is actually even broader than that. Advertising makes a major contribution to society through the funding it provides to media industries, giving incremental revenue to support drama, entertainment, and movies, as well as to support independent journalism and a free press.
To technology companies that use it to fund search engines, free Google Maps, social media, it's critical, as well as to the new creative platforms such as YouTube. Here, advertising money goes to the legions of content creators around the world. You can see why I believe that advertising plays an important part in the economy and why the work that WPP does is important. Actually, we're seeing a report today from the Advertising Association Advertising Pays that talks about the contribution that advertising and marketing make to the U.K. economy. It's the fourth biggest sector in the economy, employing around 1.7 million people. Advertising has long been a heart of successive technology revolutions, adapting to each. With the advent of television, a new generation of madmen launched agencies specializing in creating television adverts, innovating to get their client messages out into the new media.
The digital revolution brought online advertising to the forefront and new advertising models like search. With the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the mobile revolution, then the social explosion again transformed our industry, making the power of computing the internet available to everybody in society. We believe that today we are at another critical junction in our industry with the AI revolution, which in our view will be more profound than any previous revolution in terms of the impact on our industry and indeed on every element of society, from education to medicine to law and to work. To show you a little bit more about what we're doing in this area and why we think it's important, I'll invite Stephan Pretorius to show some of the work that we're doing at WPP. Stephan.
Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. In the next 15 minutes, I'm going to share with you the investments we've been making in AI at WPP, not only over the last two or three years since it's become a very favorite or very popular social topic, but even before that, since I became CTO six years ago. At WPP, we don't believe that you can become an AI company by having AI stuck in the technology department. It really has to be a company-wide initiative, a company-wide strategy, and that is certainly how we've been deploying it over the last couple of years. The formula for success for AI leadership that we believe in is really a combination of strong continuous leadership, a strong vision for how AI is going to transform our business and industry, significant investment in proprietary technology and platforms.
We've built our open platform over the last couple of years and are now deploying it company-wide, an absolutely dedicated commitment to organizing our data and our data platform and assets across the business through Choreograph, as well as a concerted investment in skills and capability development across our business. We have trained our entire workforce on the fundamentals of AI. Only this year, we've concluded 150,000 training sessions around AI and the application of Open. We also bought an AI research lab called Satalia three years ago, which has become the heart of our research capability in terms of the application of AI to marketing. Critically, we partner with the world's largest technology companies to adopt the innovations that they bring to market, to use their platforms in order to scale our capability in the most effective way.
If you read the investments and the plans and the things that are coming to market from the large technology companies, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the like, these companies are investing billions of dollars in core R&D and bringing new capabilities to market almost on a monthly basis. We benefit from partnering closely with them, getting early access to their models, their technologies, and building and adapting those capabilities to our business. We've had great success in adopting AI in WPP. Our open platform is now used by more than 50,000 people on a monthly active basis, and we only this year have deployed more than 28,000 AI agents across a variety of workflows in our business. The simple way that we think about the impact of AI on our business is really in three ways. Firstly, it changes how we work.
It changes how people accomplish daily tasks, how they summarize information, how they come up with ideas, and we do this through the open platform. It also changes how we make work. It changes how we produce content, video, film, images, music, in a fundamental way. AI is a creative technology in a very significant sense, and so a lot of the production technologies and techniques that we have used over the last two, three decades are now being subsumed by AI technologies. Lastly, AI is changing the way that consumers experience the brand work that we do for our clients. This notion of being able to personalize content, to speak directly to individual consumers, can at scale only really be done with AI, and we will show you some nice examples of how that is coming to life.
Our WPP Open platform is really the foundation for what we've been building over the last four or five years out of my team. Really, the core idea of the platform is to create one operating system for our end-to-end service offering for clients. All the various service lines that we offer, from creative to production to media to CRM, come together in a client-centric operating system that we call WPP Open. Over the last year, we've added two critical components to the Open platform, the first being a new user interface for creative ideation that we call Canvas, and secondly, the layer of AI agents that works across our end-to-end workflow. To give you a little bit of a sense of what that actually means practically, I want to give you some examples of how that comes to life.
Firstly, if you think about the process of coming up with ideas, concepts, solving business problems for clients, we use Open and the Canvas platform specifically to enable our teams to work faster, embedded to solve those problems. What I'm going to show you now is a quick dramatisation. It's a little video that we created for you that dramatises the day in the life of a strategist working in an agency. It gets a brief from a client early in the morning and then uses our Canvas platform to solve the problem very quickly.
I guess that's one way to wake up. Morning, AI. Hope you had your coffee. Okay, let's go deep on Valentine's Day. Okay, interesting. I'm seeing themed celebrations and food-centric gatherings. I want to find a TV show to help blow this up in culture. Like Water for Chocolate on Max seems perfect. Okay, what if this was an activation? Where should we stage it? Great. Warm markets with scale. All right. Now let's find some creators to host our events. Nice. Okay, I need some social posts to spread the word. Okay, last step. Put it all together to bring it to our 9:00 A.M. Got it. Awesome. I think I can still make my workout. Huh? Kind of crazy, but I'm on it. I guess today's the day I try desk yoga.
That gives you a bit of a sense of how the knowledge work that we do in our company is changing through the application of AI. The critical point to take away from this is that the platform that enables this kind of work is a proprietary WPP platform. That is the investment we're making in Open. The fact that we own this platform and have the ability to innovate it really fast makes us much more responsive and enables us to take these new technologies and bring it into our teams and clients much faster than otherwise would be possible. The next example I want to show you is just how AI is changing the nature of content production.
For those of you who follow AI or maybe sort of read about the application of it in the press, you will know that no longer than two years ago, AI was creating people with six fingers and strange ears and all kinds of weirdness was being created by AI models. That very quickly became a non-issue. Earlier this year, with the launch of video models like Google's VE02, we've now sort of reached a point where the content being created is oftentimes indistinguishable from live-shot content. The critical point to realize here is that this is not a steady state. This is not the end of the road. This technology is still improving and still continuing to become better.
This notion of a creative person being able to imagine a scene, imagine an interaction, and then for that to be created through an AI system is entirely viable and will be a reality in our business within the next one or two years at a level of fidelity that completely mirrors traditional production techniques. Let me show you where you are with this today. This short film just shows you the creation of a number of video assets through our production studio product, leveraging Google's VE02 model. Just to be clear what you were looking at, all those images, all those video clips were generated either through a text prompt, a simple instruction that generated the video, or a starting image. Image to video, use a starting image and then animate it and create a video from that point onwards.
You can see how far we've come, and this will continue to improve very quickly. The last example I want to show you is really the intersection of AI and consumer experience. As I said earlier, the ability to create very, very personalized, incredibly direct communication to consumers at scale is something we've been pioneering for years. Two years ago, we launched a fantastically successful campaign with the Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan for Cadbury in India. We've subsequently done similar work with Jennifer Lopez promoting Virgin Voyages. Most recently, we ran this incredibly funny and successful campaign for the Mars Snickers brand, where we used the famous football coach José Mourinho, he of own goal fame, to communicate this idea of how funny it is when your friends score an own goal. We used a synthetic version of José Mourinho, in other words, an avatar of him, to communicate this to consumers at scale through an interaction. Let's have a look at the film.
For the last 15 years, Snickers have been calling out people's hungry mistakes, satisfying them when they're not quite themselves. Better? Better. When football fans were scoring own goals off the pitch during the Euros, they had to act. They appointed me, José Mourinho, to provide special one-to-one advice for anyone who messed up. Alice, I did not know it was possible to mess up this badly. If there were medals for mistakes, you would be gold. Michael, your strategy is so poor that even the grass cringes when you step on the pitch. Except I am not José Mourinho. I am an authorized AI version of him. Trained on the post-match interviews to look like José, sound like José, and sing like him too. Snickers have actually released a new tool where you can get José Mourinho to embarrass your friends.
Fans told me about their mate's mistake on WhatsApp. I replied with a personalized video for them to forward on in minutes. Tom said you texted your ex, you lost your keys, you lost the Fantasy League. Won't stop talking about satay chicken skewers. That's like trying to win a chess tournament with rubber ducks. Looks impressive, but utterly pointless. Maybe you just need a Snickers.
This is truly a pioneering AI experience that combined three powerful AI engines in real time to create thousands of completely different videos of José. We built a bespoke chain of AIs to make sure that José always spoke uniquely, funny, and responsibly. Results? José always gets results. 440 million earned impressions, zero brand safety issues. An average dwell time with the brand of over two minutes. That's longer than some of my press conferences. Respect.
Right, wonderful. I think in conclusion, what I want to say is that while we are investing very heavily in AI technology, platforms, and capabilities in the business, the real magic of AI in the marketing and advertising industry is when you combine great cultural insight, brand ideas, and human ingenuity and creativity with technology. Even if you have the best technology, it's not a good product if there isn't a good idea behind it. That is what WPP excels at, and I'm very optimistic about our future given these investments we've made and how we are rolling it out in our business. Thank you very much. Back to Mark.
Thank you, Stephan. Look, I think what I take away and maybe make a slightly competitive point is that a lot of people are using AI in our industry to sort of serve ads at IDs, to personalize individual parts of content. What we're really taking is a very expansive view of the impact of AI on the end-to-end workflow in terms of everything that we do. I do believe that it's going to impact, there's not a single task or job at WPP that will not be impacted in some way by AI, given the power of the technology and the advances that are coming. It's going to be, as you can see on this chart, around augmenting human creativity and also making our people more efficient.
is also going to drive greater integration across the business and grow the value of the data that we have within our business. Our approach to AI is not just about activating this ID, it is about applying it to the end-to-end marketplace to deliver ultimately better returns to our clients. This, we think, will over time translate into a stronger financial model as well. We intend to accelerate our plans of growth to 3% + organically. At the same time, we are committing to deliver a headline operating margin in the range of 16%-17%, supported by the structural cost savings, some of which took place last year, some of which are taking place this year. Finally, we are aiming to improve our cash generation significantly to drive a virtuous circle of increased investment in our business and also a stable platform for ongoing shareholder returns.
This brings me on to the results for 2024 and so far in 2025. Look, and I think while we made significant and solid strategic progress in 2024, we showed improved performance across a number of our key metrics, including margin, cash conversion, and financial leverage. The overall growth profile of the business was not as strong as I would have liked or any of us would have liked. We are a cyclical industry, and there is no doubt that in tougher macroeconomic conditions, our clients' desire to spend is impacted. Our like-for-like net revenue growth came in at -1%, which was consistent with the lower end of our guidance range. Now, this performance in 2024 has amassed some competing tailwinds and headwinds. I would, as Phil did, highlight a robust performance within our top 25 clients, which grew at 2% and supported solid growth within media and production.
On the other side of the coin, we did face challenging trends in China. An 80 basis point drag there and the impacts of historical client losses and weaker discretionary spend, particularly in the fourth quarter of this year. Despite that, we delivered a stronger headline operating margin of 15%, up 40 basis points year- on- year on a constant basis. Included within this was a GBP 250 million investment in AI and data and saw the impacts of that, an incremental GBP 30 million over the course of the year. Our performance in the first quarter of 2025 saw a continuation of the challenging macro trends, again impacted by the sequences of a new business, but the overall performance was very much in line with our expectations.
While we anticipate the second quarter performance to be similar to the first quarter, we also expect to see the impact of the accelerated simplification plan at GroupM to earn our first half margin. We do see momentum improving in the second half of the year. Now, tariff-related uncertainties, we're all aware, clearly represents an overhang, but at this point, we've not seen any significant change in client spending, and we're rating our full year guidance, which already reflected a challenging environment. As ever, we remain agile and vigilant and will continue to be disciplined on how we manage our cost base. Looking briefly at our strategic priorities for the year ahead, we see 2025 very much as a year of execution. At the full year results in February, we highlighted three priorities in which we are laser-focused as a management team.
First, the importance of driving take-up of WPP Open within our organization, embedding it in how people work every day. Secondly, supporting Brian Lesser and his team in re-accelerating the growth at GroupM. Thirdly, to deliver and improve our new business success rate. There are exciting signs or encouraging signs of progress on all three fronts. Starting with WPP Open, we continue to see strong progress in take-up. The 48,000 users represent about 60% of our client-facing staff using Open every month, up about 40% from the beginning of the year. Turning to GroupM, we've seen some encouraging signs of progress from the strategy we launched in 2024 to simplify and integrate GroupM offering, but under the leadership of Brian Lesser, we are redoubling these efforts.
I would particularly highlight the additional actions taken by Brian and his team to make sure our go-to-market is as simple as possible and as integrated as possible, something that not only drives greater cost efficiency, but also makes it simpler and easier for our clients to do business with and means that more of our resources are focused on serving clients rather than managing internal structures, something that's sometimes misunderstood about the restructuring that we're trying to do. I'd also flag the importance of the Infosum transaction as part of our plan, not only to catch up, but leapfrog our competitive set in terms of how we use AI, data, and technology to drive better business outcomes for our clients.
Lastly, in terms of new business, it is lumpy, but I do think we're making progress with some important tangible signs of success this year, including the win of the media mandate for EA, for Godrej Consumer Products in India, the global shopper marketing for Heineken, influencer work for L'Oréal in Australia, Hero MotoCorp media in India, P&O media in the U.K., and many, many other new business pitches which are perhaps less public but work through the system, including the expansion of scope from our existing clients. Finally, I'd like to cover our returns to shareholders. These amount to around GBP 4.6 billion since 2018, reflecting a mix of share purchases and dividends. We continue to invest in our business and maintain a strong investment-grade balance sheet while supporting our dividend policy of around 40% of earnings.
For 2024, the proposed GBP 0.244 final dividend, together with the interim dividend paid in November 2024, is a full year dividend of GBP 0.394 per share, stable with last year. In summary, I'd say we've made progress against the strategy we outlined in our CMD at the beginning of 2024, in particular with respect to margin, cash conversion, and financial leverage. While there is certainly more work to do on organic growth, we have a clear strategy to achieve this, and the first quarter performance was much as we expected. There is ongoing tariff-related uncertainty, but we expect an improved performance in the second half of the year. As a result, we've re-actualised our guidance for 2025.
Our confidence in the future, our long-term future, is underpinned by our faith in the many talented individuals that make up the 106,000 people who work for your company around the world. I would like to close by thanking them very much for their effort and commitment to the business. Thank you all very much for listening. Philip, back to you.
Thanks, Mark, and thanks, Stephan. I hope you found it useful to see sort of an insight into how we're thinking about AI and the progress being made there. I also hope you found it interesting to see some of the great bits of work we've done for clients. There are, I've seen so many examples of brilliant work for clients from brilliant people with very, very strong strategic thinking and taking into account the changing landscape. Okay, moving on to the formal business of the AGM, you've all received a copy of the notice of the meeting dated 28th of March 2025, which fully explains all agenda items for today's meeting. As usual, I will take the notice of the meeting as read.
Before dealing with the items of business contained in the notice, we would like to address any questions which are relevant to the business of the meeting. For those shareholders joining virtually, if you have not already submitted a question in advance and would like to ask a question, you may submit questions via the live webcast. To ask a question, you should select the Ask a Question tab from within the navigation bar at the top right corner of the screen to open the message box, and then you can type your question in there. Once finished, make sure you press the submit button to the right of the message box to submit your question. For those shareholders who are actually in the room and who would like to ask a question, please raise your hand so that we can bring a microphone to you.
Please state your name before proceeding with your question. May I also remind you that only registered shareholders, duly authorized representatives, or registered proxies may ask a question. Every effort will be made to give shareholders the opportunity to ask a question if they wish to do so. Let's start with questions from shareholders who are in the room. That gentleman was first with his hand. Yes, please, sir.
Thank you. Nick Stein, a private shareholder. Thank you for the presentations. I think they were very useful. I'm looking at page 10, where we operate. Again, picking up on really sort of Asia, the revenue is GBP 2.6 billion, which I imagine is mostly China. I go to Africa, Middle East, and the revenue is GBP 0.4 billion and seems to be, looking at the map, just India. I was just wondering whether you can give us some information of how working in China and sort of progressing work in China, which I imagine is pretty challenging indeed, whether there are signs of progress there. You say in the report it is challenging. How does that compare with sort of operating in India? You've had a couple of wins in India. Things look pretty good in India, not so good in China. What are the differences and how do you deal with the differences in the future?
Nick, thank you for your question. It's a very important question. Maybe if I give a little perspective and then Mark can sort of give us some facts. I mean, first, I'd say that one of the great strengths of WPP is its global footprint, 106,000 people spread across the world. It's not just the people, it's the capabilities and the clients that we've got. I have been so positively surprised by what we have in some of these markets. I happen to have worked a lot in China and India, and I visited India just a couple of weeks ago. We've got a brilliant team there, a very strong market position, and that market is very, very dynamic, as you well know. China is a completely different kind of situation for obvious reasons.
I think anyone who's worked there has seen things change dramatically, albeit we are dealing with a certain regime that I think everyone's clear-eyed about how they think. It is different to the Western world. Nevertheless, our clients are operating in those countries in many cases, and we think we need to be there, but we need to be there with our eyes wide open. I would let Mark describe maybe a bit how we do that. Obviously, we've had some challenges specifically in China, but we have got strong credentials all over the world, and we think it's really important for our clients. Mark?
Yeah, I mean, I think thanks for this. I've actually been to both, I've been to both China and India in the last eight weeks, so I have some firsthand experience. I mean, I found we have, as you say, a great business in China. We work with many Western multinational companies and many Chinese businesses. I think a lot of our Western multinational clients are in the automotive, luxury, packaged goods sector and are finding life, let's say, a little bit more challenging. That together with the events at GroupM in China, which were, let's say, unfortunate, have made life a bit more challenging. We are seeing actually good growth from Chinese clients. I actually left China feeling much more positive about the prospects for China over the next five years.
I think that they're pursuing a very independent course of development, and clients like Huawei and others are extremely strong. Our business in India, by contrast, is very broad-based. We have about 11,000 people in India. More than half of them work on local domestic Indian clients and about half are kind of offshore people that work for global clients. We have a fantastic business there. We have a really strong market share creatively and in media. I think that the advertising industry is very highly respected. I was lucky enough to go to a meeting with the Prime Minister to talk about the development of the creative industries there. I think the Indian economy has had maybe fewer challenges over the last few years than the Chinese economy. I think that both will be, in the long term, very strong assets for WPP.
Nick, is that okay? Thank you very much for your question. Have we had someone over there? Yes, sir, please.
Thank you. Good morning. My name's Phil Clark. I'm a long-time shareholder. I've not been to the AGM for a number of years, but I thought I'd come along this year given your arrival. Can I say I wish you well? I hope you do a great job here and actually sort of restore some of our fortunes. Good luck, please. Can I just start with the graph on page 135, which I'm sure you're all horribly familiar with, which shows total shareholder return that shows we've done nothing but destroy value over a decade, which is absolutely horrible. I don't know a vast amount about marketing. I understand the creativity, and clearly creativity is alive and well here. It's also substantially about data, understanding where you sit in the world and having the numbers to actually sort of reinforce your comprehension.
What I was struck by in the accounts was on page 15, where we show the growth in advertising spending 2024, five, six, seven, eight, etc., which are substantial positive numbers. When we look at the actual performance, our like-for-likes this year were down. 2025, they're likely to be down. 2026, thereafter, your medium-term growth is only 3%. There is something gone horribly wrong on market share or some such. I cannot see that in the accounts. You must have the data because you're a data machine. Can you help me understand what's gone wrong and how we will go about fixing that? Once more, good luck, sir.
Thank you. It's a very good question, of course. It's one of the biggest questions that vexes the Board. Thank you for that. I'd reassure you that we're all completely focused on shareholder returns and TSR, of course. Maybe if again, I make a couple of comments and then maybe Mark and any other Board members would like to comment on it. I think clearly I should say that the Board and the management team fully recognize what you say. Please be assured that we're all over the topic. I think that probably the single most important driver of the share price is probably organic growth, to your point. I mean, there are lots of factors that play into it, macro and competitive dynamics, etc. I think, as Mark said earlier, getting us back to organic growth is hugely important.
I think as important to that is, and this is the way the Board thinks, we have got to make sure we have got a plan that delivers sustainable growth and makes sure that we are super competitive versus others. This point of differentiation and making sure that we can win versus others in a very changing market and a landscape that is going to be very different in the next five years. That is why what Stephan showed you is so important. There is this balance between short-term activities versus making sure that for the medium and long term it works. Your point is well made about the last 10 years. We hear you. Our focus is to make sure that for the next period of time, the business is as strong as it possibly can be.
We need to be all over AI in the way that you sort of saw today in order to do that. What I am particularly pleased about is knowing that when we win Amazon and Unilever, for example, and talk to Google, these are huge customers, we have got super competitive propositions. Have we got everything we need today? Clearly not, to your point. I think you are right. You are absolutely spot on to point out that the data part is an area that we probably have not got absolutely spot on in North America, in media, in GroupM. We are on it. I would assure you, we actually at the Board had a meeting yesterday and Brian attended. There is a clear understanding of some of the areas where we can do more. We are working with our clients to do that. Again, it's a fundamental question that the Board and the management team are all over. Mark, do you want to?
Yeah, I mean, I think I'd make two observations. The first is I agree with you. We need to get back to 3% growth. And that's a little bit, that's both accelerating growth in our media business and also dealing with some of the structural challenges in the creative parts of our business that have been under pressure. Making internet banners is not as lucrative as making television commercials, if I'm specific about it. I think the other part of the equation I referred to in my presentation, and if you think back to this, I think much of the 6% growth in advertising spend is new people, new advertisers coming into the market that traditionally would not have advertised and would not be clients of WPP. So if you look at where the growth is coming, it's on platforms like Google and Meta and Instagram and Facebook.
There are millions of small businesses around the world advertising for the first time. What historically perhaps would have been the Yellow Pages has now become Instagram or Facebook. They are not clients that come to WPP. While we have thought about ways over time of perhaps servicing them, I think that is where you see a lot of the growth. It is not totally a like-for-like comparison. You are right in terms of the focus on top line.
Phil, is that okay? Thank you very much for your question. Yes, sir, at the back, please.
Morning. My name's Alistair. I'm here to ask a question on behalf of EQ Investors. WPP has previously questioned the applicability of the advertised emissions concept, describing it as too narrow or blunt. Given the broader and more nuanced framework of service emissions recently introduced by the UN's Race to Zero campaign, which WPP is a member of, does the Board plan to adopt this concept? If so, when can stakeholders expect a reassessment of WPP's client relationships, particularly with energy companies such as BP and Shell, who have rolled back climate commitments and are expanding fossil fuel production contrary to the IEA net zero scenario? Thank you.
Alistair, thank you very much. That is another big question. I am going to ask our Chairman of the Sustainability Committee, Keith Weed, to give you a perspective on that. If any management want to chip in, feel free. Keith?
Thank you. Thank you for the question, Alistair. I think I'll first hold a tiny bit of context. This is a very complex topic. There's been changing and different views on this topic. We both respect, but also recognize that this is going to continue to evolve as we go forward. We do indeed support the Paris Agreement. We believe in the urgent need to transition to net zero. As a business ourselves, as WPP, we've set some very ambitious science-based targets. For instance, we are the first of our peers to include media buying and production in our overall carbon reductions. To give you a feel of the scale of that, that's 2/3 of our footprint. We have looked at our overall footprint and included media buying and production in those targets.
The concept of service emissions is still in its infancy. As you say, it's a recent addition. There is certainly right now no agreement across the industry on how to measure or indeed how to assure those targets, measure and assure. We're working with the industry to find a way to do that. I think the first thing is we need alignment and agreement on the measurement of such emissions. Then secondly, how are we going to assure them? Because a measurement without assurance isn't going to be very accountable. I think things are going to move in the right direction, but we've got more work to do. It's still early days on the new idea of service emissions.
Thank you. Keep your mark. Okay, good. We had a question at the front here. Yes, please.
Hi, good morning. My name is Christoph Bühler , individual shareholder. Three short questions. First one is share dilution. You had the stock provisions in your AGM notice. In reality, what's the threshold for you to dilute us? Second one is, as a foreigner, I was surprised to discover that the French company had actually gotten ahead of you. What's your plan to at least level with them and ideally overtake them again? The last one is AI as an enablement for you to deliver better campaign is quite obvious. However, what's the threat to your business as well? Is there any threat of your customers in sourcing the advertising by way of AI?
Great. Okay. I'll get Joanne to do the share dilution question. Mark can be the French company head of view and how you're going to maneuver the gap. I think on the AI stuff, let me just do that quickly. It's a really good point, of course. There is no doubt that WPP can offer massive advantages and benefits to our clients using AI. You're also right, there are some threats as well. Individual point solutions, for example, and AI will disrupt certain things. That's what Stephan was really, I hope you got a sense from Stephan. We are absolutely confronting it head-on, understanding where are the threats and where are the opportunities. That's why we need to move fast. You're absolutely right, of course, to the balance between threat and opportunity. There's lots to go for for our clients here. So number one, share dilution.
Can we do the French one?
Oh, the French one.
I'll start with it.
While we work out the share dilution correctly.
The second and third, I mean, look, at the end of the day, the second and third questions are very closely related. I think that if you look at WPP's strengths, it's the breadth of our offer across creative production and media. It's the geographic spread of our organization. We are extremely diversified. We have about 38% of our business in the U.S., 62% outside the U.S. We're much more diversified than our competition, who tend to be 60%-70% U.S.-based businesses. I think in the long run, that will be an asset. In the short term, it can make things challenging. I think AI is at the heart of what we're trying to do to reaccelerate growth within the business.
Because I think if you look forwards to the next one, two, three, four, five years, it's going to be at the heart of what our clients needed. I talked to you about our industry, I think, is really, in many ways, always the first impacted by many of these technologies because of what consumers adopt. Going back to what you say, where do I think we have competitive advantages? I think the first, the InfoSum acquisition is going to transform the way that clients think about data. It provides a much more privacy-compliant solution. It moves the argument from how many IDs or how many identities or how many profiles do we have to how well we can combine data. It is certainly resonating well with clients.
I think the second part of what we're going to do is take a very broad evaluation of AI and how it can really transform how we work on an end-to-end basis, which will link the various parts of WPP together in a much more competitive way. It is ambitious, but I think the right thing to do. I think it will both give us a competitive advantage, but also give clients a reason to come with us. I've no doubt that many smaller businesses will go directly to Meta and Google and use their AI tools to create adverts. The big packaged goods clients, the big companies that work with us, the Unilevers, the Procter and Gambles, the Nestlés of this world, I think will want to have partners who bring expertise, objectivity, creative judgment.
AI is not going to come up with the idea of using José Mourinho to advertise Snickers. We need to have smart people who also understand technology to do that. I think our strategic advantage is our ability to integrate really a very broad range of skills around the world and take them to clients. I think that is what will, in the long run, be our competitive advantage.
Yeah, and on this share dilution, there's a cap of 5% before we need to get shareholder approval. I think that's pretty standard across most PLCs.
Okay. Thank you, Christoph. Thank you very much. Have we got any other questions in the room? Sir, please.
Thank you, Andrew Gervin Schilder. Picking up on the last gentleman's questions. To be blunt about it, I read it the other day. Publicis, I know you would not want to talk about your other companies, but anyway, they came out with guidance for this year of a growth of 4%-5%. You, in your first quarter results, came out with guidance of flat at best or 2% decline. I do not know if that's still the case or if you're just losing market share. That's number one. I've got a couple of others. Can I do those?
Sure. Go ahead.
Okay. Coming back to AI, there's a thing going through Parliament at the moment. Particularly, some of the well-known pop artists are very worried about music copyright. Probably some people are just stealing the music for no compensation at all. How do you address that? The other thing also, I saw a couple of days ago that you won a new contract with Coca-Cola. Congratulations on that. Now the good news. I went to Unilever's AGM the other day, and they showed us a whole bundle of adverts, which were all pretty tedious. Until the last one, Harry met Sally with a Hellmann's mayonnaise. There was a round of applause, and everybody was delighted. I hope it's one of yours.
Did we get any? We did not get any credit for it? It is one of us. The team did a great job on that, by the way. There are four questions in that. I think, Mark, if you could do Publicis in a minute. Cindy, I might ask you to have a view on AI copyright. I mean, Cindy works for Microsoft, as you probably know. It is a massive topic about what you write. I mean, this is bigger than all of us, in fact. I think maybe Cindy can give you a view on what we are thinking around that area. On the Coca-Cola one, I mean, Mark, do you want to start with that recent?
I mean, we did renew our arrangement for another two years. That's excellent news. We did have an, we will not be working in media in North America, but we renewed the global arrangement, which is about 95% of the business. That is good news. I think on growth versus Publicis, look, we're very focused on narrowing the gap. My answer comes to the previous question. They are sort of the best-performing company in our sector. Actually, if you look across the sector, others are more in line with our performance. I think it's challenging, but they're doing well. We basically study what they do very carefully, try to learn everything we can from it, and do better. I mean, that's the right thing to do. We did do the Harry met Sally ad. Cindy, do you want to tackle?
I mean, just before Cindy does, look, we are very conscious of the copyright issue. The models of parts we work with do protect people's copyright. I think government needs to sort out ways to compensate creators. I mean, we are a creative company. Our people want to be credited for the things that they create. I understand very much if there's no reward for creation, it will stop.
Cindy, just give a general answer more broadly on AI. Feel free just to give your perspective.
Thanks, Mark. I was going to say pretty much exactly what Mark just said, which is we're an organization that feels that artists should be fairly compensated for what they do. The technology is moving very fast. In most cases, I'd say it's moving much faster than the state of the law and challenging some of the historical intellectual property legal frameworks very seriously. The regulators are lagging behind the technology, and they will inevitably catch up. In the meantime, our technology partners are indemnifying a lot of the use of the technology in the event that there are third-party claims, and we're making the most of those indemnification frameworks. It is a space to continue to watch, I think, in the future.
I think there'll be a, I mean, it reminds me of the early days of YouTube. If you remember the early days of YouTube, they were, people had music on it, people weren't compensated, and everyone said, oh, it's all too complicated. Lo and behold, a few lawsuits later, they found a way to resolve it. I think this will be a similar thing. I mean, I think it's harder for AI models to know which bit of which song got used in which thing. I think people will find a resolution.
Okay. Thank you very much. Yes, sir.
Hi, Scott Wallace, long-term shareholder and corporate representative now. I notice that your creative directors here present to us in the previous years, they all tend to be men. I wonder if you've got any women coming through to present to us in the future and not there just for DEI inclusion purposes.
The good news there is we do lead. While Rob is indeed a man, the creative director of Ogilvy is Liz Taylor, and the creative director of VML is Debbie VanDeven. Liz and Debbie are recognized in our industry as the number one and number two most credited creative directors in the world. We'd like our creative to be more diverse, but we have two very, very strong, I can assure you, female creative directors in our organization.
Will they be presenting to us in the future?
Yeah, we can ask them to come next year. I think they're busy with clients, hopefully. We were in Switzerland. I know Liz was in Switzerland this week. They had a really important presentation, which I think went well. We will ask them to come and talk to us.
Thank you very much for your question. I think we should now see if we've got any questions online. Tom, have we got anything?
Thank you, Chair. There are currently no questions from the live webcast. We are going to wait just a few seconds to see if any come through.
Okay. If while we're waiting, if we do not have any more, we might be able to squeeze one more in before we do the voting. If anyone's got a burning question, have a think about that. Tom, I think we're going to take that as all being pre-submitted or not submitted now. Anyone else in the room would like to ask a question before I move on? Okay. You need a mic.
Just to try and understand your company a little bit, you've done a deal recently, a continuation with Coca-Cola. Is that the whole budget of Coca-Cola or just a section of it? Because people like Unilever, you've got another of your clients. Is that the whole of the Unilever advertising business or not? How does it work?
Yeah, sure. Mark should explain it. I mean, it depends. The answer is a very good answer. Go on, Mark, you go.
I think it depends. I mean, if you take our top three clients, our Ford, Google, and the Coca-Cola Company, with Ford, we do nearly all of their work around the world, though we do not do some of the brand creative work in the U.S. We probably do nearly all of their work around the world. That is a relationship that goes back 75 years. For Google, we do all of their media buying, planning, and buying all around the world and increasing amounts of their creative work. With the Coca-Cola Company, we do much of their creative work and all of their media, with the exception of Japan, Korea, and the U.S. I mean, our biggest clients, we tend to do more of their work. With Unilever, we do media buying in about 70% of their markets here in the U.K. We work on brands like Hellmann's and Dove, Sunsilk. We do actually much of their best work.
Very significant. Very, very significant. Okay. Let's move on then to voting. The resolutions are set out in the notice of the meeting. I now formally propose that each of the resolutions are put to the vote of the meeting. Resolutions 1 - 19 are proposed as ordinary resolutions and require a simple majority of votes to be passed. Resolutions 20 - 22 are proposed as special resolutions and require at least 2/3 of the votes to be cast in favor to be passed. As stated in the notice, all resolutions will be determined by way of a poll rather than a show of hands. I now direct the company's registrars, Computershare, to act as scrutineers in relation to the poll.
Only the votes of shareholders present today or shareholders who have submitted their proxy votes in accordance with the details set out on the proxy form will be taken into account. When you came into the meeting, you were each given a poll card with all of the resolutions that have been proposed at the annual general meeting. If you are a shareholder or a proxy for shareholders, including a proxy for the U.S. depository with respect to shares represented by ADRs, please complete that card and sign it where indicated. In the case of a corporate shareholder, the card should be completed by its authorized representative present at this meeting or by proxy. The number of shares being voted should be entered into the poll card, and all details will be checked against the company's share register.
Finally, I should mention that those shareholders present who have already lodged proxies and do not wish to change their vote need not vote on the poll unless they wish to do so. Please place your completed poll card in the ballot boxes located by the doors as you leave the meeting. To close, I would like to thank all of those shareholders who took the time to submit their proxy votes in advance of the meeting. Proxy votes submitted ahead of today's meeting in respect of which, as I, being the Chair of the meeting, have been appointed as proxy and have completed a poll card in respect of such votes amounting to an approximate average of 900 million votes per resolution, representing over 80% of the company's issued share capital in respect of each resolution.
Based on the proxy votes received, I can tell you that the provisional results show that all resolutions are carried. The poll will close in 10 minutes, and the results will be released to the stock exchange and will be available on our website as soon as practically possible. That now concludes the formal business of the AGM. On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank shareholders for their participation today and all our stakeholders for their continued support. Refreshments will now be available in the lobby area on the ground floor. Thank you, everybody, for coming and for listening in. Bye-bye.