WPP Just Built a Platform to Replace Its Own Agencies
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
WPP’s new CEO just greenlit a product designed to reduce demand for WPP’s agencies. That should tell you everything about where she thinks the industry is heading.
WPP Open Pro, announced on Thursday, is a self-serve version of the company’s AI marketing platform. Brands can now plan campaigns, generate content at scale, and publish directly to ad platforms—all without picking up the phone to call an account director. The target market is explicitly SMBs, performance marketers, and regional teams within larger organizations. You know, the clients who couldn’t afford a full agency relationship before, and the business units that agencies often ignore because they’re not big enough to be worth the overhead.
WPP is essentially admitting that the middle tier of marketing services is being hollowed out. Complex, high-touch brand work still needs humans. Tactical execution? Increasingly automated. So rather than watch that middle market flow to Canva, Adobe Express, or self-serve platforms from Meta and Google, WPP is productizing its own expertise and selling it as software.
They’re unbundling the agency model before someone else does it for them.
If Open Pro works, it proves that a significant chunk of what agencies do can be automated away. If it doesn’t work—if the output is generic or the tool is clunky—it damages WPP’s credibility as an AI leader. Either way, WPP just exposed the central question facing every agency—one that most of their competitors haven’t even acknowledged yet, let alone started answering:
Are big agencies becoming tech companies that occasionally staff creative teams, or are they creative companies that happen to build good tools? Because you can’t really be both at scale.
And if you’re a smaller independent agency watching this, the question gets even harder: do you partner with a platform and become an implementation layer? Build your own tools and compete on a completely different playing field? Or double down on the irreplaceable human insight that can’t be productized—assuming that still exists and clients will pay for it? WPP at least has the capital and data to make a bet on software. Most agencies are still figuring out whether they even should.
The real question isn’t whether Open Pro succeeds. It’s whether this represents the future business model for all agencies, or the last desperate move of a holding company that couldn’t figure out how to make the old model work anymore. Or a bit of both.
The era of agencies as pure service businesses is ending. What replaces it is still being written, and WPP just made a significant edit to the first draft.
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