WPP Cuts Hundreds More Jobs Under Elevate28

If you work in advertising, you’ve probably felt the ground shifting under WPP for a while now. The latest news confirms it: the world’s once-largest ad holding company is preparing to cut jobs in the mid-to-high hundreds before the end of 2026, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by AdAge. The cuts trace back to CEO Cindy Rose’s Elevate28 strategy, and they land on a workforce that has already shrunk dramatically — from 108,000 employees at the end of 2024 to 99,000 by the close of 2025, a drop of more than 8%.

This isn’t a one-off layoff round. It’s the visible edge of a much bigger reset happening inside one of the advertising industry’s most recognizable names — one that owns agencies like Ogilvy, VML, and Grey. Here’s what’s actually going on, why it’s happening now, and what it means for the people and clients connected to WPP.

Who Is Cindy Rose, and Why Is She Cutting So Deep?

Cindy Rose took over as WPP’s chief executive in September 2025, stepping into a company that was already dealing with client losses, negative growth, and a sagging share price. She didn’t inherit a company in decline — she inherited a company in crisis, and the numbers back that up.

WPP’s full-year 2025 results, reported alongside the Elevate28 announcement, showed revenue less pass-through costs falling 5.4% to £10.2 billion, the company’s worst performance since the pandemic. Pre-tax profits collapsed 87% to just £131 million, and the company took a hit from writing down the value of agencies including Ogilvy, Grey, and AKQA. That’s not a business that needed a tune-up. It needed a rebuild.

So in February 2026, Rose unveiled Elevate28: a three-year plan to pull WPP out of its slump by 2028.

What Elevate28 Actually Changes

The name of the strategy tells you the target date, but not the substance. Here’s what’s actually shifting inside the company.

WPP is abandoning the holding company model entirely. For decades, WPP operated as a loose federation of independently branded agencies. Rose is collapsing that structure into four core divisions and four global regions, moving the company from a holding company structure toward operating as a single, unified company. The four divisions are WPP Creative, WPP Media, WPP Production, and WPP Enterprise Solutions.

Client feedback pushed the redesign. Rose has been direct about why this needed to happen, telling investors that clients had pointed to WPP’s internal complexity as a genuine obstacle — the company was siloed, hard to navigate, and slow to deliver on data, which hurt the media business specifically.

The savings target is steep: £500 million a year. That figure — roughly $677 million — is meant to be freed up annually and redirected into higher-growth areas like AI capability. And WPP’s own CFO has been candid about where that money has to come from. Joanne Wilson told investors that because most of the company’s costs are people, hitting the savings target means reducing headcount — even as the company reinvests in different types of talent, including commerce, influencer, and analytics specialists.

The plan unfolds in three phases. 2026 is the “Stabilise” phase, focused on halting the slide in new business. 2027 is “Build,” when the redesigned operating model is meant to be fully embedded and the company aims to return to growth. From 2028 onward, WPP wants to operate as a leaner, AI-enabled business with stronger margins.

AI is central, not a side note. The strategy leans heavily on AI to support faster, “high-velocity” production, alongside a new talent framework built around a high-performance culture. Rose has also pointed to expanded internal training — including AI coaching and creative technology apprenticeships — as part of keeping the existing workforce competitive as the tools change.

Where the New Job Cuts Are Landing

The latest wave, first reported in mid-2026, is more targeted than the headline number suggests. These redundancies are expected to affect VML and “back office” roles specifically — in other words, the cuts are concentrated in one of WPP’s largest creative networks and in the shared administrative functions that Elevate28 is designed to consolidate. That tracks with the strategy’s own logic: fewer overlapping teams, fewer duplicated support functions, more shared infrastructure like the WPP Open operating system.

WPP hasn’t published an exact headcount reduction target for this specific round, and leadership has been cautious about getting too specific in public. When asked directly about headcount numbers on a call with journalists, Rose declined to give a figure, though she acknowledged the sensitivity of the moment, saying she was well aware of the risk of “transformation fatigue” given the company’s history of prior restructurings, and that she recognized times of change are anxiety-inducing for staff.

Is WPP the Only One Doing This?

No — and that matters. Other agency holding companies are running similar playbooks, with a shared focus on cutting labor costs, which is adding to the sense of uncertainty already gripping the industry. Omnicom, for instance, has its own labor cost reduction plans tied to its IPG acquisition. The pattern across the sector points to a broader industry recalibration: AI is changing what agencies actually need staffed, and holding companies built through decades of acquisitions are now paying down the complexity that growth-by-acquisition created.

Did Investors Buy It?

Not immediately, no. WPP’s share price fell as much as 8% to around £2.50 in early trading after the Elevate28 announcement, with some analysts flagging that the company hadn’t set a firm revenue target for 2026 beyond guiding toward a mid-to-high single-digit decline in the first half of the year. A separate analysis of the plan noted that investors were unimpressed in early trading and marked WPP’s shares down further, with WPP’s persistent net debt — around £3.4 billion, still larger than the company’s current market value — cited as the real long-term worry.

That skepticism is worth sitting with. Cost-cutting can stabilize a balance sheet, but it doesn’t automatically win back the clients WPP has been losing. The real test of Elevate28 isn’t the size of the savings — it’s whether a simpler, AI-forward WPP can actually grow again by 2027 and 2028, as promised.

What This Means If You Work in Advertising

Whether or not you’re a WPP employee, this story is a signal worth reading closely. Holding companies built on decades of acquisitions are actively unwinding that complexity, back-office and production roles are being consolidated across the board, and the skills getting reinvestment — commerce, influencer marketing, analytics, AI-driven production — are the ones holding companies are betting on for the next three years. If you’re mapping out where the industry is headed, that reinvestment list is as informative as the layoff number itself.

WPP’s Elevate28 isn’t finished playing out. Phase one alone runs through the end of 2026, and by the company’s own account, more change is coming before things stabilize. Worth watching where the next round of cuts lands — and where the hiring picks back up.