Cindy Rose.
WPP and Google announced a five-year expansion of their partnership, dedicated to advancing cloud and AI technology and cultivating skills to transform marketing.
The collaboration aims to revolutionise how brands approach integrated creative, production, media, experience and commerce, enabling real-time personalisation for millions of customers and moving beyond efficiency initiatives to unlock growth.
The expanded partnership includes a $US400 million spending commitment from WPP for Google technologies, and was cemented in Mountain View during a meeting between WPP CEO Cindy Rose, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and members of their senior leadership teams.
The spend will go towards WPP's efforts to infuse AI into its services alongside the company's investment into AI and technology through WPP Open, WPP's AI platform.
Rose last month took over as CEO at WPP, a company in the middle of restructuring, with negative growth, a weak share price and pushback from staff on a back to the office mandate.
She said the partnership with Google would redefine what was possible for clients.
"By delivering bespoke AI solutions and enabling hyper-relevant campaigns with unprecedented scale and speed, we're accelerating innovation across every facet of marketing to drive unparalleled growth and impact," Rose said.
Kurian said the expanded partnership with WPP was built on a shared vision to harness the power of generative and agentic AI to transform business outcomes.
"By enabling WPP to innovate on our AI-optimised technology stack, we are helping create the future of marketing technology for brands today," he said.
Lorraine Twohill, SVP global marketing at Google, said WPP had been working closely with the company on a number of AI tools and innovations built with Gemini.
Key initiatives include transforming WPP clients' businesses with bespoke AI solutions built with Gemini, rapid bespoke AI model development, secure privacy-first data collaboration, revolutionising video and image production, preferred access to Google's AI, cultivating the next generation of AI talent and transforming WPP's operations with Google AI for enhanced client service.
WPP will receive early access to Google's latest AI models, including Veo, Imagen and others, integrated within WPP Open.
With these models, WPP has been able to create campaign-ready assets for clients in days, not weeks, achieving up to 70% efficiency gains and a 2.5x acceleration in asset utilisation.
WPP's Creative Technology Apprenticeship program is expanding, with Google joining as the primary curriculum partner. Building on 50+ permanent placements across WPP agencies since 2022, this initiative will train more than 1,000 early-career creative technologists by 2030.
The spending commitment with Google is part of WPP's investment in AI, which includes £300 million per year.
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