Our WPP trust principles

Our WPP trust principles

Our WPP trust principles

When we set out Elevate28 earlier this year, we aligned around a clear mission for WPP: to be the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands. This mission defines not only what we want to achieve for our clients, but how we intend to achieve it. And for me, the two words at the heart of our mission – growth and trust – matter more than ever.

Growth is the number one requirement our clients are asking us to help deliver as their partner. This approach to partnership goes beyond just being a traditional supplier of marketing services, we are committed to helping our clients deliver real business impact: stronger brands, deeper customer relationships, better return on marketing investment and new sources of demand and sales conversion. Increasingly, what I hear from clients is a desire for transformation – for marketing to become their most valuable driver of enterprise growth. That’s why we are reimagining growth for our clients leveraging WPP Open, our agentic marketing platform, powered by Open Intelligence, to understand what influences human choice through diverse live data signals, identify new growth audiences and accelerate performance.

But sustainable growth is built on trust. Clients are entrusting us with some of their most strategic assets: their brands, their data insights and their customer relationships. In selecting the partners they work with, clients are asking important questions. Can I trust that my data is safe, secure and not being used to train third-party AI models or platforms? Can I trust that I am not being locked into a closed ecosystem? Can I trust that AI is being used responsibly, with the right governance and human accountability? Can I trust that my brand will be protected? Can I trust that my media budget is being optimised for my growth? And can I trust that my partner will help me transform my business to grow?

These are the questions that inspired our new WPP trust principles. These are not abstract aspirations; they are commitments to our clients and partners that describe how we operate. Many reflect how we have worked for years, but we have never codified them publicly. In an environment where AI is dramatically transforming our industry and trust is increasingly in scarce supply, we believe now is the time to be explicit about the standards we hold ourselves to.

1. Clients own and control their data.

We don’t own it, control it, use it for our own benefit or allow it to be used to benefit third parties. Our data solutions are fully secure, leveraging patented privacy-enhancing technology to ensure end-to-end protection by design.

In the era of AI, this principle is non-negotiable. Data and insights give our clients unique asymmetric competitive advantage – the foundation for building differentiated brands that drive growth – and we believe it should stay that way. Our clients’ data and the insights derived from that data must always remain under client ownership and control; it shouldn’t be used for anyone’s benefit but their own, including training third-party AI models or platforms.

This isn't a new position. This is how we've operated for over a decade, underpinned by our Data Code of Conduct, rigorous controls, data protection agreements and regular independent audits. What's new is the technical infrastructure we've built to encode this principle: Open Intelligence, our foundational intelligence layer, powers WPP Open and uses our patented data bunkers to connect client data to live data from over 350 partners and WPP in a private data network. It resides within the client’s environment, turning real-world behaviour into predictive intelligence while preserving privacy, control and trust.

2. WPP Open is open by design.

Our agentic marketing platform is built to keep pace with AI innovation and interoperate with client and partner solutions, not lock clients into a singular, closed ecosystem.

AI is evolving at a staggering pace and enabling innovation that wasn’t possible even a few months ago. Today, no single company can go it alone and keeping pace requires us to think differently about our partner ecosystem. Equally, we don't believe clients should have to bet on a single technology and hope it keeps up.

WPP Open is architected and built with this “open” philosophy at its core. We partner with the world’s leading technology companies, integrating their AI models and tools, so that our clients always get access to the best and latest innovation. We commit to interoperability by design with no structural lock-in; if a client wants a different solution or prefers to build their own, our architecture doesn't fight them. WPP Open will integrate and interoperate to simplify and unify marketing workflows and enhance our clients’ existing capabilities.

We've made this design choice because we believe that if we’re relying on contractual friction, data dependency or platform lock-in to retain clients, we've failed. We want our clients to stay with us because of the superior growth we deliver for them.

3. Consumers are people, not IDs.

We build trust between brands and the people they serve in an increasingly agentic world. We unlock growth opportunities through data collaboration and deep understanding of who people are and what influences their choices, not by relying only on personal identifiers or invasive tracking.

Brands matter more than ever. But for decades, our industry has targeted consumers based on personal IDs and past purchasing history rather than deeply understanding what drives behaviours. The result is an alarming decline in brand trust and differentiation – and the growth ceiling that comes with it.

We are entering an increasingly agentic world, where AI agents mediate consumer decisions and shape brand experiences. In this environment, trust becomes a valuable asset and earning it means influencing both the human and the algorithm. Open Intelligence uses privacy-first predictive intelligence to find growth audiences based on a deep understanding of who people are: their motivations, values, interests, beliefs and cultural context.

By connecting diverse data across capabilities, geographies and partners, we help brands build influence within communities they'd never reach through IDs alone. The brands that compound meaningful value over time are the ones that earn trust – not just buy attention.

4. AI augments human creativity, it does not replace it.

Brand differentiation and trust are rooted in human taste, empathy, governance and expertise.

I have always believed that human creativity is the ultimate differentiator. It's been true through every era of change in our industry – new tools make innovation possible, but it takes human creativity and craft to find the applications that unlock new pathways to growth. AI is no exception. Imagination, judgment, taste, empathy, humour and even imperfection: these are the things that differentiate brands. AI enables our people to automate the ordinary and elevate the extraordinary.

Embracing AI at scale demands rigour in how it's developed, deployed and used. Over the past two and a half years, we've conducted approximately 300 AI vendor assessments. Every tool on our platform, WPP Open, is reviewed by cross-functional teams spanning legal, privacy, security and enterprise technology. We operate a clear classification system – what's approved, what's conditional, what's off-limits – and we publish client guidance on complex issues from synthetic humans to disclosure requirements.

We take the same approach to AI agents: narrow guardrails, close supervision and automation that must demonstrate reliability before scaled deployment – and always with human accountability. We've built simulation-based verification tools and have a robust agentic governance framework – testing how agents behave before they go live, scoring them for accuracy, compliance and consistency as an ongoing discipline, not a one-off pass. We believe that's the only responsible model when you're entrusted with a client's brand, data insights and reputation.

That same rigour extends to intellectual property. We work exclusively with rights-cleared content providers within our platform and conduct thorough IP due diligence on every integrated AI model. In the AI era, governance done properly doesn't slow innovation down. It's what makes agility possible.

5. We take accountability for driving our clients' growth.

Our clients’ media budgets are theirs and it is our responsibility to maximise return on this investment for clients, and increasingly we tie our remuneration to client growth.

To fulfil our mission, we must make our clients' marketing investment the single most valuable driver of their growth. When a client entrusts us with their media budget, that trust carries weight. It is their investment, and our responsibility is to maximise the return they generate from it. Our media plans and solutions are driven by what will best deliver the growth our clients need. We operate with transparency and we welcome client scrutiny. We’re so confident in our ability to deliver growth for our clients that we are increasingly tying our remuneration to client business outcomes when they wish to do so.

In a world where trust is increasingly precious and scarce, our licence to operate depends on us earning it – day in and day out. Our clients look to us for bolder creative work, braver media investments and cutting-edge innovation. They look to us for transformational partnership that delivers sustainable growth for their business. WPP is their trusted growth partner. And everything we do is in service of this mission.