Executives at WPP knew early on that 2025 was not going to be stellar, with initial guidance pointing to a flat year at best and down 2% at worst on an organic revenue basis.  

 And today the company confirmed that it will be significantly worse than initially anticipated. The revised full-year revenue decline is now expected to be between 3% and 5%. The second quarter decline alone is between 5.5% and 6%. 

The company’s surprise “update” was issued a month before it will release its full second quarter earnings report on Aug. 7. 

On a call with analysts earlier today outgoing CEO Mark Read said that most of the “deterioration” in the company’s performance was due to issues at WPP Media and Ogilvy. 

At WPP media the major performance issues are related to client spending cutbacks and lack of new business. Declining project work at Ogilvy was also cited. For the first half, the firm’s integrated agencies segment (media and creative agencies) was down mid-single digits. 

The new business pipeline at WPP Media is down sharply, Read noted. Year-to-date, it has shrunk by about two-thirds compared to the year-ago period. 

Initially, the company had hoped that headwinds in the first half due to client losses last year would abate by the second half. But those expectations were dashed with the loss of the North America Coca-Cola media business in March followed by the loss of the global Mars media business last month.  

The company has been restructuring the media unit since the arrival of new global CEO Brian Lesser—believed to be a top candidate to succeed Read--last fall. In the first half the company cut its workforce by 3.5%, spending 100 million GBP on severance costs. Most of those cuts came from the media division. Further cost cuts will likely be detailed during next month’s second quarter earnings call.  

Commenting on the update Madison & Wall’s Brian Wieser stated, “That net new business trends have been weak at WPP is unsurprising given recent news of significant account changes. Similarly, while we recognize that macro-economic risks to the advertising industry are substantial and that there should be some effect of current US economic policies on spending by companies around the world by now.” That said, he added, “We don’t believe those risks are currently having a meaningful effect on the overall advertising market or the agency industry, at least at this particular moment.”  

Wieser noted that an analysis his firm did recently found that major independent agency growth in the second quarter averaged about 2%, which he said was “probably broadly representative of the growth trends for the agency industry at this point in time.” 

A better read on broader agency industry trends will become clearer when Publicis Groupe issues Q2 results on July 17, Wieser said.