WPP is reportedly preparing to cut another 1,000 jobs before the end of the year, extending a restructuring programme that has already seen almost 11,000 roles disappear since the beginning of 2025.
The advertising giant is expected to make the latest reductions over the coming months as chief executive Cindy Rose pushes ahead with her overhaul of the business and targets £500m in annualised savings by 2028.
The Financial Times reported that around 1,000 further roles are expected to go, although it remains unclear which parts of WPP will be affected.
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WPP declined to comment on planned redundancies for the second half of the year.
The latest reported cuts come despite early indications that the group’s trading performance is beginning to improve.
WPP reduced its workforce by 1,267 during the first half of 2026, taking its total headcount to 97,388 at the end of June – 6.4% lower than a year earlier.
Almost 11,000 roles have now been cut since the beginning of 2025. Rose had warned when unveiling her Elevate 28 transformation plan in February that further redundancies would be inevitable as WPP sought to simplify its operations.
But the group has more recently pointed towards an improving new-business picture.
During WPP’s first-half results, Rose said its new-business win rate was “significantly better” than a year earlier, while highlighting client retention including Tesco in the UK, Huawei in China, L’Oréal in Australia and New Zealand and Skechers across several markets.
However, chief financial officer Joanne Wilson warned that major account losses during the previous year, including Mars, Coca-Cola North America and Paramount, would continue to act as a “drag” on WPP’s performance for the rest of 2026.
The continued reduction in headcount comes against a wider squeeze on the traditional agency model as clients put a smaller proportion of their marketing budgets into agency fees.
Jay Wilson, VP analyst at Gartner’s Marketing Practice, said agency fees now account for 19.2% of marketing budgets and predicted that could fall to 15% by 2030.
“Marketing budgets are stagnant, at 7.8% of company revenue, and the percentage of those budgets spent on agency fees has been in decline since 2023 and now sits at just 19.2% as clients shift ‘non-working’ spend to working media budgets, which now sit at 31.4% – the highest share we’ve seen,” he said.
“Gartner predicts that by 2030, agency fees as a percentage of marketing budget will hit an all-time low of 15%, driven largely by the existential shifts caused by AI.”
Wilson believes those economics are beginning to change the shape of agency workforces, particularly at junior level.
“The traditional agency staffing pyramid – with a wide base of junior employees executing manual tasks – is actively inverting, with agencies moving towards leaner, more senior and less labor-intensive orchestration of AI systems and processes. While entry-level staff cuts present easy opportunities to reduce cost, the risk to the long-term talent pipeline and succession planning shouldn’t be overlooked.”
WPP is not alone in reducing headcount. Omnicom announced around 4,000 job cuts following its acquisition of IPG last year, while around 10,000 more roles were expected to be affected by disposals. Dentsu has also been working through plans to eliminate around 3,400 roles outside Japan, equivalent to approximately 8% of its international workforce.
Wilson said the changes could also alter the competitive balance between the global networks and independent agencies.
“The often-bloated hold co model isn’t holding up to AI impacts and these large agency networks need to recalibrate, while independents, which have less overhead and sunk technology costs, are able to capitalize,” he said.
“AI is helping scale the capabilities of those independent agencies and is making them viable direct competitors of the larger holdco shops, who have traditionally competed on global scale and technology depth.”
Rose is due to provide the market with WPP’s next performance update in October.
