Between chaotic levels of market fragmentation and economic volatility, marketing and communications agencies can no longer rely on the human intuition they’ve traditionally used to win clients and optimize their ad spend. WPP is replacing that guesswork with an AI-powered view of shifting market dynamics, giving brands predictive certainty that lets them invest with confidence while moving at the speed of the market. That’s the value of WPP Open , its agentic marketing system.
But before it could begin applying sophisticated AI models to power those insights, WPP had to overcome a critical engineering challenge: the marketing data that made up the models was fragmented across hundreds of global agencies. While this dynamic made it nearly impossible to deploy AI tools efficiently and securely, access to models was only part of the equation. And until it built a reliable way to ingest, clean, and serve data to those models, WPP couldn’t unlock the true potential of generative AI.
To solve this, WPP partnered with Google Cloud to construct a unified data backbone and custom platform engineering path. Now, by standardizing its serverless compute patterns and data processing workflows, WPP is able to securely deploy targeted marketing campaigns in days instead of months. Architecting a centralized, service-based data foundation An important part of this effort was accelerating data availability and centralizing management. To do this, WPP adopted a service-based project structure for its current production environment.
Rather than isolating every workload into separate silos, its engineering team centralized Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and BigQuery into dedicated, shared data projects, while also segregating the compute and processing workloads into distinct processing projects. This structure simplified the core team’s user experience and ensured that all data consumers interacted with a unified source of truth. Because data from WPP’s various product lines lives in shared infrastructure, it was essential that security be strictly enforced at a granular level.