Stephan Pretorius: WPP’s platform push won’t come at the cost of its agency brands

As he acknowledges in conversation with The Drum at Cannes Lions, his vision upon being made CTO in 2018 was to “[convert] WPP into a platform business” and WPP Open is the manifestation of that ambition. But Pretorius insists that the all-encompassing shared AI service does not diminish the individual importance of its agencies, including AKQA.

“Both things can be true at the same time,” he says. “You can have agencies with different flavors of service offerings all working on the same technology platform and adapting it to their purpose. Open is not a one-size-fits-all. It’s a platform that we adapt both for our clients and for our agencies.

“Each of our agency brands has a unique differentiation and unique kind of positioning. While AKQA is using all the AI tools within Open… they’re applying it with their own flavor of service offering, their own approach, their own aesthetic, their own kind of philosophy.”

It is natural to wonder, especially in an organization as accustomed to consolidation as WPP has been in recent years, if the inevitable next step of WPP Open’s development is a move towards a ‘one WPP’ model rather than the house of agency brands it remains today. The recent roll-out of WPP Media has only fueled speculation that ‘WPP Creative’ will follow next.

But Pretorius, using AKQA as an example, says the individual agencies still provide a vital point of differentiation and losing that individuality would be self-defeating.

“You come to AKQA when there’s no roadmap for what you want to solve,” he says. “Its sweet spot is intense attention to craft and aesthetic delivery, proper originality and inventiveness, and then extremely agile and fast execution. I think it would be a mistake to flatten that into a sort of generic mass of a creative service offering. The sort that we see in some of the other competitors, right? You would destroy a lot of inherent meaning and a lot of inherent value if you did that.”

That balancing act between platform leadership and agency stewardship becomes even more relevant when you consider Pretorius’s potential future at WPP. He is one of the rumored candidates under consideration to replace outgoing CEO Mark Read.

While he bats away leadership speculation with diplomatic discretion when pressed, tellingly, he also doesn’t rule himself out of the running. “It’s not something I can comment on right now,” he says when asked directly if WPP leadership is in his sights. “Mark is still the CEO until the end of the year and it’s a very carefully managed process.”

For the time being, Pretorius is preparing to hand AKQA over to its new CEO in the coming weeks and working on the evolution of Open. That now includes the integration of Symphony, TikTok’s generative AI tools, as part of a partnership announced this week in Cannes.

“We’re going to do several more integrations like this,” he says. “The creative idiom for TikTok is entirely different from YouTube, entirely different from LinkedIn. And so, if you don’t know what your channel is before you come up with an idea, then you’re going to come up with some random, generic idea that you can’t adapt to the channel.”

Deals like these are designed to convince clients that it’s easier to partner with the likes of WPP than use AI to take advertising in-house, however tempting that might seem, given the overwhelming plethora of LLMs and prospective partners for clients to navigate.

“About two years ago, there was quite a big discussion around in-house production,” Pretorius says. “And I’ve got to be honest with you, that has moved on. Two Cannes ago, a lot of our clients said to us, ‘Build this kind of a brand-specific AI system, and then we license it from you, and then we can make our content internally.’ And after like, three months, most of them come back and say, ‘Well, it’s not really what we want to do and not really what our people should be spending time on’.”

But AI isn’t only changing what agencies make – it’s transforming how they work, how they’re valued, and how they get paid. Commercial models are also under pressure. “There’s a wholesale move away from time-and-material and FTE models to outputs – and ultimately outcomes,” Pretorius says. “What clients really want is a better return on their marketing investment.”

That shift requires agencies to take on broader scopes of work – combining creative, media, and production – and to be measured against results, not just deliverables. It also demands that agencies understand and help clients navigate a vastly more complicated set of decisions than simply where to run ads.

“The modern marketing services organization… helps [clients] navigate the entire ecosystem of decisions,” Pretorius says. “If our job was simply to take their money and go run some ads on Instagram, we wouldn’t have a business.”

What AI makes possible, and in Pretorius’s view increasingly necessary, is tighter integration across marketing functions. “AI is not just making it possible – it is forcing it.”

Pretorius may or may not become the next WPP CEO. But he’s already becoming a profoundly influential figure in shaping the holding company’s future.