WPP Open and red ocean agencies are reshaping media. Here is how CMOs and procurement leaders can protect their advantage.
Why WPP Open And Red Ocean Agencies Matter Right Now
WPP Open and the wider ‘red ocean’ of agencies matter because they signal a shift from service-led to sales-led, AI-fuelled media businesses, which can erode advertiser objectivity and quietly reshape where your budgets really flow. CMOs must treat these platforms as powerful, but conflicted, commercial engines.
If you lead marketing, procurement, or global media, you are feeling two pressures at once. On one side, holding companies promise AI-powered speed, savings, and sophistication. On the other, every quarterly call hints at margin pressure, proprietary media pushes, and new technology fees.
This episode of #MediaSnack Live brings those tensions into sharp focus. Tom Denford revisits the earlier Red Ocean episode of #MediaSnack framing of the holding company landscape, while David Indo walks through his three-hour deep dive into WPP Open, the agentic AI operating system that now sits at the heart of WPP Media.
For CMOs, Procurement Directors, and Global Heads of Media, the pain point is clear: you are being asked to sign up to AI-driven operating systems you did not design, that you do not fully see, and that might be optimizing as much for agency income as for your business growth.
This blog distils the episode into a practical playbook you can use this quarter.
The ID Comms Breakdown
What is going on?
At the macro level, Tom and David describe a media agency market that has become a Red Ocean: a crowded, often brutal fight for survival where a few large holding companies pull away from a choppy middle pack.
On one side sit the big three: Omnicom, Publicis, and WPP. They are shifting from traditional service businesses selling FTEs to sophisticated sales businesses trading in media inventory, technology, data, and proprietary products. Media has become an arbitrage game: buy low, sell high, and use AI and scale to make the spread larger and faster.
Tom references disclosures from a recent WPP legal case. WPP revealed around $1 billion in non-product related income, including an example TikTok arrangement where roughly $70 million of advertiser spend appeared to generate about $30 million in income for WPP. For many CMOs, those economics feel out of proportion to the value they thought they were buying.
Beyond the big three is the red ocean cluster Tom calls out: Havas, Horizon, Stagwell, and Dentsu, joined by others like S4 Capital. These groups are navigating restructures, mergers, and volatility, all hunting for their own proprietary revenue streams and AI stories to stay relevant.
For marketers, the net effect is that the classic holding company relationship is fading. You are no longer simply buying service and neutral advice. You are increasingly walking into what Tom calls the grocery store or Costco of Media: a giant retail environment, where the store owner has a strong incentive to push you toward the highest-margin aisles.
What are the implications?
David’s review of WPP Open brings this shift to life. WPP Open is an agentic, AI-driven workflow platform that:
- Ingests briefs
- Builds audience segments
- Designs strategy and implementation plans
- Optimizes in-flight campaigns
In WPP’s own narrative, it can compress campaign timelines by around 30 percent from brief to execution. It also introduces ‘super agents’ that mine vast data sets and feed planners with insights they would struggle to collect manually.
From a CMO’s seat, this has two big rational implications:
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Who captures the savings? If an AI operating system removes 30 percent of the time from the process, where does that value go? Does it translate into lower fees, reinvested working media, or higher holding company margin hidden inside tech and platform charges?
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How objective are the decisions? When audience selection, channel allocation, and optimization sit deep inside an opaque algorithm, it becomes harder to see whether the machine is choosing what is best for your brand or what is best for proprietary inventory and preferred deals.
On top of that sit two more subjective, but important, human concerns:
- Over-reliance on the machine. Strategists may become too deferential to AI-generated strategies, using them as final answers rather than starting points for human craft.
- Analysis paralysis and creative flattening. With so much data, there is a risk that distinctive, sharp creative ideas are smoothed away in pursuit of the most statistically safe answer.
"If every brand pushes its brief into the same machine, how do you truly outthink competitors and build a durable media advantage?"
How should marketers be thinking?
Tom and David are clear that technology is not the villain. AI platforms like WPP Open, Omni, Growth OS and others can be powerful enablers if you frame and govern them correctly.
For sophisticated advertisers, the challenge is to treat holding company operating systems as commercial products, not neutral utilities. That means:
- Accepting that these platforms are designed to grow holding company income
- Designing scopes, contracts, and KPIs that recognize that reality
- Separating what should be automated from where you want human judgment
The real competitive advantage will flow to marketers who can do three things at once: interrogate the process, protect objectivity, and still harness the speed and intelligence these tools offer.
How To Interrogate Holding Company AI Platforms
The most practical advice in the episode is David’s simple three-part framework for CMOs and procurement leaders who are being pitched an AI-driven operating system.
1. Interrogate the process, not just the interface
You should understand, in detail, where technology makes decisions and where human specialists step in. Ask your agency to map the workflow from brief to reporting, and highlight:
- Which steps are fully automated
- Where ‘super agents’ or AI models propose options
- Where named human practitioners must review, challenge, or override recommendations
If human interaction has become thin, that is a warning sign. Technology should elevate the brilliance of your best people, not replace their strategic role.
2. Clarify data and idea ownership upfront
As these systems blend your first-party data with WPP’s data and external sources, you need contractual clarity on:
- Who owns the derived audiences, models, and strategic frameworks
- What happens to your data, segments, and creative platforms if you change agencies
- Which parts of the operating system are standard products versus client-specific IP
A common pain point we see at ID Comms is brands discovering, too late, that much of the intelligence they assumed was their asset actually lives inside a holding company black box.
3. Redesign the commercial model for the AI era
Traditional FTE-based fee models were already under strain. AI compresses delivery time and introduces new layers of tech and license cost. You should now be asking:
- How are time savings measured and who keeps them?
- Which fees are clearly associated with the platform and which relate to people?
- Where can outcome-based or performance-linked fees replace opaque margin stacking?
Tom and David also stress a specific risk point around principle-based buying. If your agency is buying and reselling media as principal, you must be crystal clear on:
- Caps on volumes of principal inventory
- Quality guardrails
- Independent measurement of what you actually received for your spend
Panic is not the right response, but active renegotiation is.
Building A Pragmatic Gameplan With ID Comms
The heart of the #MediaSnack thesis is that media can be a competitive advantage, not an admin line. In a world of WPP Open and red ocean agencies, that advantage depends on making three kinds of optimization work together:
- Internal media capability. Your people, processes, and governance around media.
- External partner performance. The way you structure, incentivize, and oversee agencies and platforms.
- Paid media investment. Where, how, and why your budgets are deployed and how that can be continuously improved.
ID Comms has spent 15 years helping ambitious brands connect those dots. In this new era, that often means splitting scopes more deliberately:
- Keeping independent, objective advisory and governance outside the holding company
- Using holding company platforms where they create clear, measured value
- Tightening RFPs, contracts, and KPIs to reflect the realities of arbitrage and proprietary media
If you are navigating a WPP Open implementation, a red ocean agency review, or a shift to principle-based buying, now is the time to get your gameplan straight. The brands that move first will set the norms; those that drift will inherit someone else’s commercial model.
If you want to confidentially pressure-test your current arrangements, get in touch with ID Comms to discuss your gameplan and options to protect your competitive advantage in media.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. Is WPP Open automatically bad for advertisers?
No. WPP Open can genuinely improve speed and consistency in media planning and optimisation. The risk is not the technology itself, but how commercial incentives, data ownership, and decision transparency are structured. With the right guardrails, it can be a net positive.
Q2. What is the ‘red ocean’ that Tom Denford talks about?
The red ocean is Tom’s shorthand for the crowded, turbulent group of holding companies and networks fighting for survival and share. It includes Havas, Horizon, Stagwell, Dentsu and others whose fortunes are fluctuating as they chase scale, proprietary media, and AI stories.
Q3. How should I think about principle-based buying in this context?
Principle-based buying can deliver attractive pricing, but it concentrates power and opacity with the agency. As David Indo notes, you must compartmentalize what you want, set explicit caps and quality guardrails, and bring in independent measurement so you know what you actually bought.
Q4. Where do my strategists add the most value if AI is doing the heavy lifting?
Your strategists should focus on framing the right questions, challenging AI-generated options, applying brand and category nuance, and connecting media choices to business outcomes. The machine should surface possibilities; humans should decide what is distinctive and on-strategy.
Q5. How can ID Comms help my organisation right now?
ID Comms can benchmark your current contracts and ways of working, evaluate holding company platforms like WPP Open, redesign scopes and incentives, and help you optimize internal capabilities so that AI and agencies are working for your competitive advantage, not against it.
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