Shaping performance: inside WPP Production’s AI model for relevance at scale

In WPP Production's view, the biggest threat to modern marketing isn’t budget cuts or media inflation, it is the cost of being ignored. Its new ‘shaping performance’ model responds to a stark diagnosis: WPP Production finds that 78% of consumers ignore generic messages¹, 63% are annoyed by irrelevant ads², 89% pay attention to brands that understand their needs³ and 80% trust those brands⁴. It is a landscape defined by what the team describes as a “sea of sameness”, where attention evaporates fast.

As WPP Production's Group Strategy Director Kate Johnson puts it, “You may still be getting all the reach and impressions, but if you're not getting engagement, likes or comments. If they’re all flat or declining, then that is the first alarm bell that something is not going right.” Relevance does not just influence performance; it determines whether a brand is noticed at all.

Compounding the problem, platforms now enforce their own demand for freshness. “Every platform now has creative fatigue built into its algorithm. Meta will literally downweight your ads, even if they are the best content in the world, if you're not refreshing the content around every two weeks,” says Matt Vertigans, WPP Production's Global Agentic Solutions Consultant. In other words, brands must produce more, refresh constantly and still maintain coherence or risk fading into the background altogether.

The shift

The transformation at the heart of shaping performance is a redefinition of what data is used for. Rather than acting as a passive report on what has already happened, data becomes an active guide for what should happen next, a forward-facing system that informs decisions before creative is even made.

As Matt puts it, “You have got to build that data into every single part of what was traditionally a much more linear process. It is about plugging in where you can and making sure it is a cycle, not a linear thread.” In practice, that means dissolving the old pipeline of strategy, production and post-launch optimisation and replacing it with a continuous, dynamic loop where insight, execution and feedback blend.

This shift is powered by tools built to anticipate rather than react. “We have got pre-flight agents that come before anything is even gone out, assessing and predicting how well that creative is likely to perform,” says Kate. The creative process becomes more confident and more accountable. Ideas are shaped with foresight, not hindsight, ensuring that what enters production is already strategically sound and performance-ready.

How it works

AI agents

A core pillar of shaping performance is WPP Production's use of AI agents, autonomous systems that handle data analysis, versioning and formatting at speed. These agents are designed to absorb the repetitive, operational strain that typically slows creative production, freeing teams to focus on higher-value tasks.

Kate describes their early adoption clearly: “We were very lucky to build agents to help us do strategy to creative and then all the way through the entire production line.” That end-to-end capability means the same system can interrogate data, generate structured outputs and support production workflows without handoffs or duplication.

Their impact compounds quickly. As Matt notes, “Those small workflow processes, once you add them all together in the system, become a massive time saver.” The speed and consistency of agentic support is not about cutting corners; it is about creating the operational headroom for relevance, originality and cultural fluency to flourish.

Synthetic personas

Synthetic personas give WPP Production a scalable way to test ideas, messages and creative nuances across cultures and markets without waiting for real-world reactions. As Matt explains, “We can build a focus group of synthetic audiences, put the strategy against those people, see how they feel.”

They also help catch cultural sensitivities that could undermine a campaign long before anything goes live. Kate recalls one test where a simple thumbs-up icon triggered an unexpected warning. In Turkey, that gesture can be interpreted as rude rather than positive. It was the kind of nuance even experienced teams might miss under production pressure, but the persona surfaced it instantly.

The result is faster, safer and more accurate decision making, a practical shortcut to cultural intelligence at a global scale.

Agentic workflow

WPP Production's agentic workflow shifts production from linear to adaptive, with AI and humans collaborating in real time. Matt describes it as a system where “a master orchestrator agent pulls on other agents, specialists”, coordinating tasks dynamically rather than sequentially.

Crucially, the workflow also elevates human oversight, which is always there. “Those check-in points can be surfaced a lot more easily. Even to the extent of sending an email to the strategist to say: the strategy is ready, do you want to have a look?” he says.

The result is a flexible, self-adjusting process designed to keep pace with cultural and platform demands.

Human shapers

While AI accelerates production, WPP Production is clear that creative direction still depends on human judgement. “The human brain can make something that has not been done before,” Matt says, drawing the line between originality and AI’s largely historical frame of reference.

Humans also supply the emotional and cultural intelligence that machines lack. As Kate puts it, “AI can tell you what is trending, but it does not necessarily know why. That is where you need the human strategist or creator.” These “human shapers” ensure every output stays empathetic, culturally attuned and creatively distinctive.

The process

1. Dig deep

The first stage of shaping performance begins with a comprehensive interrogation of data to uncover the human story behind it. As Kate explains, teams must navigate “all these disparate sources of information, first-party data, third-party data, social listening” and bring them together in a way that reveals genuine insight.

2. Build connections

Once the human insight is clear, the next step is aligning it with the brand’s commercial ambition. This means, as Kate describes it, “build[ing] the bridge and connecting the human problem to the business problem or the business objective.”

This connection becomes the campaign’s guiding principle. “That essentially is what becomes our strategic north star, when we find that bit that sits in between the two.”

By translating audience reality into business relevance, this stage ensures the work remains focused, coherent and purposeful, a single thread that keeps strategy, creative and performance tightly aligned.

3. Craft relevance

With the strategic north star defined, WPP Production turns to crafting relevance at speed and scale. This is where AI becomes fully activated. “This is where we can really unleash the AI,” Kate says, describing how agentic workflows translate strategy into tailored narratives.

The system draws on a deep understanding of the brand. “The agents are trained on the brand’s DNA or the guidelines or the tone of voice,” she explains, enabling rapid creative development without sacrificing consistency.

By automating adaptation and alignment, this stage allows teams to shape work that is not only fast but precisely tuned to audience needs.

4. Make it sing

The final stage is where relevance becomes expression, thousands of tailored executions shaped for different audiences, regions and moments. Kate highlights how granular this can get: “We have even gone to a regional level within countries. We did something for Germany, where it is very different attitudes in north, south, east, west, being able to make the content really relevant to those audiences. Everything we are doing comes back to being consumer-centric, knowing your audience. If you have got your audience nailed, you can then make anything relevant to them.”

Agentic systems turn a single idea into a full ecosystem of touchpoints. As Matt describes it, “You go from this piece of long-form content into several different touchpoints of media, a fully agentic system.”

This is where the model delivers its promise. High-quality creative, adapted at scale and at speed. It is the stage where the system produces thousands of hyper-relevant variations, each shaped to audience, platform and funnel stage, the core promise of shaping performance.

The proof

WPP Production's shaping performance model promises dramatic gains in speed, scale and effectiveness and the reported results are striking. The company cites 95% faster strategy creation, 1,000 times more creative versions for hyper-targeted adaptation and an average 17% lift in campaign engagement. A recent demonstration for example, shows what that looks like in practice. A full funnel, multi audience strategy for a fictional fragrance brand built in under three minutes, with messaging automatically shaped to audience values, funnel stage and platform.

Much of that acceleration comes from re-engineering workflows. As Matt asks, “Checking a spreadsheet for a thousand ads, does a person need to do that?” Agentic automation not only reduces production friction but ensures teams can shift their energy towards shaping ideas rather than shepherding assets.

But speed is only meaningful if the work resonates. Kate points out that relevance directly correlates with performance. “If you see an ad and it is not relevant to you, you just swipe. If something is actually tapping into something in you, then you are probably going to look at it.”

The model also reduces the cost of learning. “You do not have to spend your media money to find this information out,” Matt says, highlighting the impact of pre-flight analysis. Predictive systems refine strategy and creative before launch, driving better outcomes without wasted budget.

Together, these gains illustrate a system designed not just for efficiency but for effectiveness at scale.

Why it matters

For WPP Production, the value of shaping performance is not in automating creativity but in elevating it. The model separates the mechanical from the meaningful, allowing AI to handle scale while the strategists and creatives focus on originality, cultural nuance and emotional intelligence. As Kate puts it, speaking about those humans shaping the work, “They need the empathy to find that human story that you tell across the campaign,” drawing a clear line between invention and automation.

AI’s role is to empower that invention. “AI can bring everything together at such ease,” Kate says, a foundation that frees strategists and creators to spend more time exploring culture, shaping ideas and crafting work that genuinely connects.

Rather than replacing talent, the system increases its impact. By removing production drag, refining decisions earlier and grounding creative choices in real human insight, shaping performance allows teams to deliver work that is faster, sharper and crucially more relevant.

The takeaway

The urgency behind WPP Production's approach is clear. Brands that hesitate risk falling behind a culture moving faster than ever. As Kate warns, “The biggest risk at the moment is the brands that are moving too slowly with their AI. Anyone can knock out content at speed now, but it is getting that content to truly resonate.”

Relevance is crucial for a brand’s survival. And shaping it requires both technological acceleration and unmistakably human sensitivity. In the end, the promise of this new AI-driven model is simple but profound. It enables the industry not only to keep pace with the platforms but to restore what makes creativity matter. But for all the tech, Kate sums up the core principle: “It is about making human connection.”

This piece was originally published on lbbonline.com