Richard Glasson is CEO of WPP’s production operation Hogarth Worldwide, a role he has held for nearly 15 years. Earlier he was CEO of Gyro, the B2B marketing agency now owned by Dentsu.  

Glasson sat down with MediaPost shortly after returning from the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity last month. In the following Q&A (edited for clarity) Glasson discusses his big takeaways from the festival, how AI is transforming production and more. 

What were your big takeaways from Cannes last month?  

Cannes is changing, isn't it? I think my specific takeaway from Cannes would be probably one that a lot of people have, which is it was all about spending time with clients. It was all  clients there with the intention of being there to do business, and so I think it's turned into a highly productive week.  

How did you spend your time with clients?  

We spent a lot of time in working sessions taking them through examples of how we bring work to life through our studio on the WPP Open Platform. It was good constructive time that you don’t always get with clients and prospects and we came out [of the Festival] with a lot very interesting conversations underway.  

Listening to a number of the sessions I came away with the impression that AI is going to enable just about any creative person with the tools to create professional looking content at relatively low cost. Is that true and if so how does that Impact what you do?    

I would take a step back and say that I am incredibly bullish about what AI means for us as a business and the opportunity it creates for us so we're leaning very heavily into all things AI. But we believe that we are in the early stages of a content explosion, and that every client is going to need exponentially greater amounts of extremely high-quality content that is fit for every channel and fit for every audience and fit for every moment. And that’s a very substantial undertaking, and we are very well positioned to be part of that growth.   

Explain why you think so.  

We look at AI in three ways.  We talk about this framework of integration, automation, and optimization.  

Integration is essentially the tools of generative AI. How we can use tools to visualize ideas better, to co-create with our clients and with each other and to collaborate effectively across creative, media and production. And how we can leverage deep research capabilities and use this to help shape audiences, help shape strategy and other activity.  

Talk about the automation aspects. 

For us I think an awful lot of the heavy lifting of AI is done in the area of automation and optimization. It probably doesn't get quite the same attention because it doesn't have pictures associated with it and it's not all over X and it's not all over Instagram. But actually where we're making the biggest difference for our clients is in agentic-driven workflows which transforms the process by putting together hybrid teams of humans and agents. 

And about harnessing the power of AI as an analytic tool and a tool of automation and a tool that allows us to efficiently adapt content for channel and for audience. So that automation piece of AI lives very much within our production world.   

And optimization? 

The optimization part is deploying content into social, client platforms and other media. AI is incredibly effective at understanding patterns, at understanding what is driving responses how work can be changed in order to drive a stronger response.  

Thinking about those three categories in a different way, there's craft, efficiency, and there's performance, and clients need all of those things.  

And so, going back to where you started the question, can anybody produce a high quality, high fidelity engaging looking asset using generative AI tools I think the answer is yes, in the hands of a skilled creative person. You need to understand a whole bunch of things in order to produce the best possible work, but a lot of people can do that.  

So scaled logistics is a big part of what Hogarth adds. 

Yes, there’s a massive logistical and craft task there. How you take that originated content and make it speak in every channel to every audience. How you think about content in a more hybrid sense of how do we bring together VFX pipelines with digital twins with generative AI, with actual shooting with virtual production.  

So I see our  evolution into being a managed service business working with our clients to enable them to coordinate all of their content activity from origination through adaptation and customization and deployment into media. 

So, really its content production as activation. So, that that's where I think the market is heading and where they'll be a very strong role for us to play.  

Marketers are hoping AI will help them reduce production costs and generate more content at the same time. Is that what you're hearing from clients and what are you telling them? 

We’re telling them it should reduce production costs. Interestingly, I would say the majority of conversations we are having with clients have the side effect of us being able to take cost out the process. But the starting point is, how do we take time out the process? How do we move from what was a six-month process to a six-week process or a six day process? Or even a six-hour process.  

How do we use these technologies to enable us to move at the speed of culture to be in the conversation with consumers. When you reduce time, you probably reduce cost. 

How does that impact your business? 

We don't see that as threatening to our business. We see that as an opportunity to work more comprehensively with our clients. 

Our thesis is clients want to be able to produce the highest possible quality work for every audience, every time, every channel and that they are currently constrained by process, their constrained by cost. They are constrained by the amount of human input that is needed for approval and review. The danger is that client and agencies end up running processes. That we're all project managers whereas what we should all be doing is thinking about how we're talking to consumers, how we're thinking about strategy, how we're getting the best message to the best person at the best time. 

What's the biggest change occurring at Hogarth in 2025?  

At a global strategic level, I would say the biggest shift that we're seeing, is that the conversation around content production is shifting from one, which is primarily driven by efficiency and ability to execute to one which is much more performance driven. How, do we think about content production in a way that drives greater engagement with our consumers?  

And how does that play out?   

Holding company pitches have become much more the norm over the past couple of years and clients are looking to act in a more integrated way and so we find ourselves at the heart of many more of those conversations. Studio X and Coke would be a great example of a structure that's been built in order to leverage that shift and integration that clients want to produce amazing work in a way that it works across every aspect of what we do. 

What about more tactical changes? 

We’re looking at how we organize our teams to leverage the power that AI brings. An agentic workflow is the biggest change in the way that we will be working with clients. So we built a dedicated agent building team at our global content hub in Chennai [India].  

Does Hogarth have an M&A strategy?  

We have grown entirely organically. We're 16 years old as a company, and we've grown from a startup to about 8,000 people globally and entirely organically. As an organization, I wouldn't rule out us making acquisitions in the future, but it’s never really been a meaningful part of our strategy. 

How will AI effect the organization’s talent needs?  

It’s a question we spend a lot of time thinking about. I mean, I don't believe that AI is going to mean that we’re suddenly reducing headcount in a significant way because we're continuing to grow fast as a business. And if we think of ourselves as a managed services business then we continue to believe that that our clients are going to need access to the best quality craft talent, people that manage the clients and build the agents and monitor the campaigns and so what we're doing is investing a huge amount in the training and development of our people. We've equipping them to thrive and prosper  in the AI age,  whether that is specific training on WPP Open or putting people through AI MBAs or putting in fundamental training programs. So we believe that headcount will continue to be strong. 

So, you're at about 8.000 now, where were you two years ago? 

I’m guessing around six or six and a half thousand.  

What’s the single biggest ethical concern you have about Gen AI as it continues to transform the business?   

The state of the art of what is possible in generative AI is well ahead of what our clients can or should be putting into market. I don't think we work with any clients that would feel comfortable at the moment using synthetic humans.  

And equally none of our clients want to be and we don't want to be the test case for who owns the IP in any given image. Although we do use generative AI in live work at the moment that's primarily for environments or backgrounds.  

But it’s not synthetic people and it's not work that where we would have any fear about potential copyright infringement.  

What’s your view of the current regulations around AI? 

There isn't a regulatory environment for AI. There is a huge amount of freedom here in the US. There's almost a ban on AI in some countries around the world so there isn't a consensus on what it looks like. We work very closely with our clients to make sure that we are very comfortable about the compliance and any work we do with AI and the way that work is put into market.  

You mentioned synthetic people earlier, do you see the industry trying to figure out a way to sort of make that a more common approach? 

There are already synthetic influencers aren't there, and ironically they seem to drive very strong response. I think if you're looking at people walking in the background of a primary shot, are they going to increasingly become synthetic people, I should think so. I expect at some point in the future there'll be greater use of synthetic people, but I don't think it’s going to enter the mainstream anytime soon.