There was a time when then WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell used to refer to the big tech platforms, notably Google, as “frenemies.”
These were the days when his mighty GroupM media agency empire could look the likes of Google in the eye: in the ad market they were more or less equals and needed each other.
No such luck any more but post-Sorrell WPP has already struck a supposed $400m deal with Google to contribute to its WPP Open ‘agentic’ platform and now it’s announced another seemingly big deal with Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
WPP will become the first advertising partner to pilot Meta’s new “creative solution,” built to navigate creative strategy and optimisation, currently in testing, for brands to analyse and suggest improvements. To be integrated directly into WPP Open.
In Q1 for 2026, global ad impressions across Meta increased by 19% with 3.5 billion consumers using its apps. The new deal lets WPP turn campaign performance data into a creative playbook with AI, allowing marketers to identify high-performing creative, generate new concepts and validate them with testing. First client is Unilever.
Selina Sykes, global VP, digital, social and AI transformation, Beauty & Wellbeing, Unilever (all those things at once), says: “We believe the future of advertising lies at the intersection of creativity and technology. Being an early partner with WPP for Meta’s latest tool gives us the opportunity to shape a solution that helps our brands move faster, create smarter and connect with consumers more effectively across the platforms where they spend their time.”
Elav Horwitz, chief innovation officer, WPP, said, “The future of creative effectiveness is here, and it starts with better insights, not just what worked, but why. From there, the best ideas emerge. And with the right tools, those ideas move faster from brief to impact than ever before.
“With this newest Meta solution, we are arming our teams with a deeper understanding of what is performing well for our clients and why, so they can make smarter, more effective creative decisions, faster. This is how we close the gap between creativity and media, turning insights into ideas and ideas into measurable impact.”
