WPP cuts out the agency to help brands create their own ads with AI

By Paul Sandle LONDON (Reuters) -British ad group WPP said on Thursday it was letting brands access its AI-powered marketing platform to plan, create and publish their own campaigns. WPP Open Pro, a new edition of its AI platform WPP Open, has been designed for smaller brands that do not use full-service agencies, it said, as well as to provide new capabilities to existing clients. Advertising groups are facing the challenge of brands starting to use AI to do more of their own creative and planning work, reducing the fees they pay to agencies. WPP has appointed Cindy Rose to turn it around after it lost its crown as the world's biggest ad group to French rival Publicis last year and its shares more than halved this year. The company, which owns Ogilvy, AKQA and WPP Media, said it was the first of its peers to provide a range of integrated, AI-powered delivery models, including directly to clients. Rose, who took over from Mark Read last month, said WPP's creative and strategic talent would always be at the heart of what it did for the world's biggest brands, such as Coca-Cola. But technology was fundamentally reshaping the industry, she said, and the new platform would put its AI capabilities into the hands of a much wider array of brands and businesses. "This is about transforming how marketing is delivered, expanding our total addressable market, and giving more brands the tools they need to lead in the AI era," she said. The platform will enable brands to create channel-specific ads in seconds, it said. For example, a coffee shop chain could combine brand-approved imagery with content generated by AI to create a campaign for a new store opening. The ad could then be dropped into WPP's Open Media Studio to be published or it could be published directly to major platforms, WPP said. (Reporting by Paul Sandle; editing by William James)

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