WPP

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me on the WPP Q1 trading update call. My name is Claire, and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation, you can register a question by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to Joanne Wilson, Group Chief Executive Officer, WPP to begin. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter results. I'm joined today by Tom Singlehurst, our head of investor relations. Hopefully, you've had time to read the press release from this morning. There's also a full deck that accompanies this session with our usual disclosures, including our cautionary statement, which you should read carefully and take note of. Before we dive into the numbers, this is, of course, the first quarter that we are reporting on since we outlined the Elevate28 strategy. As you know, this is a multi-year plan focused on returning WPP to growth. While it is still early days, we are very much on track against our strategic plan and encouraged by the client and employee response to the actions we are taking and the changes we are making.

Driving this scale of change takes time and of course, won't be linear, but there are definitely encouraging signals, which I will talk about shortly. Before that, I'm going to share some detail on our first quarter financial performance, and then I will open the call up for your questions. Starting with our operating performance in the first quarter on slide four, like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs fell 6.7% in the first quarter, with organic revenue growth, a key metric disclosed by some of our peers, down 4%. Both figures represent a mild sequential improvement from the fourth quarter of last year and were in line with our expectations. The impact from M&A was negligible, and FX represented a headwind of 2.1% in the quarter, resulting in a reported decline in net revenue of 8.9%.

You will find further detail on performance by business segment, geography, and client industry on slide five of the presentation. I would call out the following features of performance in the first quarter. Starting with business segments, WPP Media saw a like-for-like decline of 8.5% in the first quarter. While this was a sequential improvement from a double-digit decline in Q4 2025, we continue to see a significant drag from gross account losses, while new business won in the fourth quarter and in the first quarter this year will take time to ramp up. Performance across our non-media businesses showed a slight decline quarter-on-quarter. However, we delivered growth across WPP Production and our larger specialist agencies, including Landor, Design Bridge, and CMI. By geography, the shape of performance largely reflects account losses, which weighed most heavily on North America and the U.K.

Elsewhere, we see signs of stabilization, including sequential improvement in the Asia-Pacific and with pockets of growth in markets including India, Italy, and Japan. I want to also mention performance in the Middle East, which represents just under 2% of our business. The region saw a like-for-like decline of 12.6% in the quarter following low single-digit growth in Q4 2025. With the ongoing conflict, we expect the Q1 trends in the region to continue through the second quarter. By client sector, CPG in particular, reflects the impact from client assignment losses. Meanwhile, we see a high degree of polarization across healthcare and tech. Looking at growth through the lens of our largest clients, Q1 like-for-like decline for the top 25 clients was net 9.4%, which reflects the impact of specific client losses.

This level of performance is not where we want it to be, but with organic growth a lagging metric, this outturn is very much in line with our expectations. Turning to slide six, organic growth is our North Star as a management team, and improving this is the primary focus of the Elevate28 strategic plan we announced at the end of February. Organic growth, however, is a lagging metric, and the focus in the first stage of our plan is on stabilizing the business. As we discussed in February, the key leading indicator of success is net new business, both new client wins and critically client retentions. Alongside this, we are also focused on leveraging strategic partnerships, implementing our operating model changes, and delivering the associated cost savings, as well as progress on asset disposals to provide a greater degree of financial flexibility.

On this front, we are encouraged with progress in the first quarter and our plans are on track. On new business, Q1 was the second consecutive quarter where WPP was ranked number one in net new business by JPMorgan. We also expect to be ranked number one by COMvergence, which more narrowly focuses on media. Key wins during the quarter include Estée Lauder, S.C. Johnson, JLR, and Norwegian Cruise Line. Post the quarter close, we were appointed as Wendy's media buying agency in the U.S., and we won Natura in Brazil. Just as important as client acquisition is client retention, and we were delighted to be reappointed by Tesco in the U.K., and across Central Europe and to retain mandates for Huawei in China and Red Bull in India. On partnerships, we announced the expanded partnership with Adobe in February.

This brings together Adobe's industry-leading AI capabilities, content platforms, and data orchestration with WPP's deep strategic insight, creative prowess, and end-to-end transformation expertise. We are very excited about the potential from this partnership, and it is a great example of how we are expanding our go-to-market sales channel for enterprise solutions. We also continue to expand our data partnerships in order to build the value of the open intelligence ecosystem, including Trainline in the U.K., and the Salling Group in Denmark.

On the people front, we've continued to fill critical roles in our operational leadership, including Nancy Hall as CEO of WPP Media in the U.S., Angela Steele as U.S. Chief Client Officer for WPP Media, and Andrea Suárez as CEO of WPP Media in LATAM. At the group level, Mark Taylor has joined as Chief People Officer and Anne-Isabelle Choueiri as our first Chief Transformation Officer, both of whom will play a critical role in supporting execution of our Elevate28 plan. Now, there remains much to do, and we are laser-focused on the disciplined execution of the strategic initiatives which underpin the stabilization phase of our Elevate28 plan.

The early actions we've taken to build a simpler, more integrated WPP, powered by WPP Open, are resonating strongly with clients, giving us the confidence that we are on the right path to return to growth and deliver longer-term sustained returns for our shareholders. Turning to our balance sheet, you can see the detail of where net debt stands at the 31st of March on slide seven. In short, average adjusted net debt at GBP 3.3 billion continues to come down both year-to-date and year-on-year, albeit assisted by a relatively small beneficial impact from IFRS 9 amendments, which were effective from the beginning of 2026. I'm also pleased with the successful issuance of a $600 million 10-year bond in March, marking our return to the U.S. credit market after more than a decade.

This takes our weighted average maturity to almost six years and covers all of our debt maturities through to mid-2028. As encouraged as I am by this, I want to reemphasize that creating firm financial foundations is a core tenet of the Elevate28 plan, and at the heart of this is a commitment to maintaining an investment-grade balance sheet. As we indicated in February, we have initiated processes to assess the potential sale of certain portfolio assets. Those processes are advancing as planned, and while we do not have any additional comments to make on them today, we will update in due course as appropriate. Looking forward, on slide eight, while we are encouraged by the first quarter performance, which was in line with our expectations, we still see ongoing volatility in client spending and note uncertainty in the Middle East.

Coupled with the phasing of net new business, we continue to expect like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs to decline in the mid- to high single digits in the first half of 2026, consistent with the performance in the first quarter, before seeing an improving trajectory in the second half. On profit, we anticipate headline operating profit margin for the full year to be in the range 12%-13% and expect H1 margins to be down, reflecting the impact of net sales performance and investment in our growth drivers. As shared previously, the in-year cost savings benefit from our operating model changes will be skewed to the second half. We also expect to rebuild our incentives, which are also skewed to the second half.

Turning to cash flow, we continue to expect adjusted operating cash flow pre-working capital in the range of GBP 800 million-GBP 900 million. As a reminder, this includes the anticipated restructuring costs associated with the Elevate28 program and historical restructuring programs. Excluding these, we would anticipate adjusted operating cash flow before working capital of GBP 1 billion-GBP 1.1 billion. The final thing I want to mention before we open up to questions is the evolution of our reporting, both by segment and by geography, on slide nine. As shared in February, we are aiming to align our segmental reporting disclosures from half year 2026 with our new operating model, moving from three reporting segments to one global integrated agencies. This corresponds to the vision and plans to make WPP a single unified operating company.

In 2026, we will provide additional disclosure on operating performance within the key units, WPP Media, WPP Production and WPP Creative. This will include like-for-like growth and net sales splits, but will not include the profitability metrics consistent with our peers. We will also shift our geographical reporting to four recalibrated regions, North America, Latin America, EMEA and Asia Pacific. We anticipate moving to this new reporting at the half year, and from 2027 it is our intent to also provide like-for-like growth and the net sales split for WPP Enterprise Solutions. That wraps up my pre-prepared remarks. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our people for their hard work and their unwavering commitment in the year-to-date, and I would now be delighted to take your questions. I'll hand back to the operator.

Thank you. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. Our first question comes from Nicolas Langlet from BNP Paribas. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, everyone. I've got three questions, please. First of all, what was the net new business effect in Q1 2026? And how do you split it between gross losses and gross wins? Based on the recent account moves, what is the net new business effect you expect for the full year? Second question on China. The trend remains quite soft despite easy decline in the past two years. What initiatives have you put in place recently, and when do you think the business could stabilize? Finally, on the H1 margin, you said you expect it to be down, but do you expect the decline to be in the full year guidance range? Flat to -100 basis points, or it could be worse than 100 basis points and then improving in H2. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks very much, Nicolas, so let me just start with the net new business impact in Q1 2026. Nick, it was broadly similar to Q4 2025. As I talked about in February, we are expecting gross account losses to have an impact of 500-600 basis points in the full year, and the gross wins offsetting that. We did say at the end of February that we were already ahead of that level for 2025. Of course that has improved through Q1 as we continue to build on the momentum on new business that I talked about in my pre-prepared remarks, so yes, a similar, very similar to Q1.

I also expect that as we go through the year, that drag from net new business will ease, and we have talked about the improving trajectory into the second half. I would expect Q1 to be the worst quarter for net new business. In terms of the full year, look, it's too early to put a number on net new business impact. I've shared what we are seeing for growth losses and also where we are at this point in the year on gross wins. You know, the pipeline is healthy. We talked last year about particularly media. There's been a lower volume of pipeline activity, and we've been encouraged by the level of activity that we've seen in the last few months and also, you know, our improving win rate.

You know, I think we'll update on that as we go through the course of the year in terms of that net new business impact, but hopefully that gives you some color. In terms of China, yeah, China was down just over 12% in Q1. You know, I'd say a couple of things on China. First of all, we are seeing a stabilization in our media business in China. We've done an awful lot of work in the last couple of years around our proposition and our go-to market, and we're starting to see the benefits from that. I referenced the retention of Huawei in China, who's become, you know, an important client for us in that market.

I would also say that, you know, we're starting to lap through some of those client losses that impacted us last year. Some will continue into the balance of the year, but I would assume that we will see an improving trajectory in China as we go through the balance of 2026. Thirdly, you know, we've talked about the mix of clients in China. Historically, our portfolio was more skewed to global clients. You know, that's rebalancing towards local clients. We have improved our proposition to make sure it's competitive and relevant for that market, including, you know, introducing WPP Open to that market. We operate now a market model in China, so that's a much more integrated proposition. As I said, I would expect to see an improving performance as we go through the year for China.

In terms of your last question, margin, yes, in H1. Yeah, I would expect margin to be in line with the expectations for the full year in terms of the year-on-year decline. Just a couple of things on margin. In the first half, obviously we'll have the negative impact from operating leverage. As we've said, we expect to see the top line trajectory improving in the second half versus the first half. Our investment through the year is fairly balanced between H1 and H2, and the cost-saving initiatives from Elevate28 are very much skewed to the second half. As I also shared in my remarks, we will be looking to rebuild our incentives in the full year, and that will also be skewed to the second half.

That will give you an indication of some of the drivers between H1 and H2.

Perfect. Thank you very much, Joanne.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Annick Maas from Bernstein. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Good morning. Thank you for the call. My first question is on the Middle East. I have a couple actually for the Middle East. First of all, is it fair to assume that March was down about 30%? My second one on the Middle East, I think you're now forecasting the same trends for the second quarter as well. If these trends were to persist for the full year, are there any other geographies that have been performing slightly better that could offset this Middle East weakness? Or if we would see continued weak trends there that could impact actually the full year guide? That's the first one. The second one is you have some defensive pitches coming up in the second quarter. Do you have already an idea of how those have been going?

Respectively, have there been some that you hadn't planned at the start of the year? Thank you.

Okay, let me start with the Middle East. Look, you know, as I shared in my pre-prepared remarks, the Middle East is less than 2% of our net sales. We did see a deteriorating trend as we went through the quarter, but March wasn't as bad as a 30% decline. March was the worst month in the quarter. In terms of the Q2 trends and if they persist and any other geographies to offset that, look, I talked about some markets we are seeing stabilization and getting back to growth. I would say, you know, when we've seen regional conflicts or challenges in the past, what you tend to find is clients do redirect spend across the region. Of course, it will really depend on how prolonged the conflict is.

As I said, you know, it's very much reflected in our guidance, and the Middle East at 2% is a fairly immaterial share of our overall net sales for WPP overall. In terms of defensive pitches, you know, what I would comment on that is we're very much focused on new business but also client retentions, and I talked to some of the important clients that we've retained in the first quarter. You know, we are very encouraged by our new business performance. There's significant opportunity with our existing clients to continue to grow with them. You know, I think the Q4 and the Q1 net new business momentum that we're seeing really reflects the improvement in our competitive proposition and how we're showing up to pitches.

You know, the pipeline, as I said, is active, it's healthy, it's more skewed to opportunities than it is to defensive pitches. You are right, there are a number of defensive pitches with existing clients and I won't comment on those. As I said, you know, I'm encouraged by the momentum that we're seeing and our performance in new business.

Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Laura Metayer from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hi, Joanne. Two questions from me, please. The first one is the growth with existing clients. Could you give us an idea of what the number was in Q1 excluding the losses? Second question is on your enterprise solutions business. Could you give us a sense of the performance of that business versus the media and creative business of WPP? Is it doing better or worse in Q1? Thank you.

Okay. In terms of our existing clients, if you look at our top 25, we talked about them being down high single digits. If you strip out the losses from that top 25, the decline would drop to low single digits. We, you know, we have talked in the past about the relatively better performance we see across our largest clients. As I said, I think it was in response to Nicolas' question, you know, the net new business impact in Q1 was very similar to Q4. We're seeing continued or similar trends in Q4 across our existing client base. In terms of enterprise solutions, you know, very encouraged by the work that Jess and the team have been leading on.

You know, we shared in February, just two months ago, how we were going to scale the capabilities across Enterprise Solutions and really build three go-to-market channels. The first through our existing agencies, the second building a direct go-to-market, and then the third through partners, and a good example of that is Adobe. In terms of Enterprise Solutions, you know, it's a very different business to Creative and Media. It's more project-based, but we do have a significant opportunity to cross-sell with our Creative clients. We don't report Enterprise Solutions yet. As I said, it is our intention to do that from 2027, but Enterprise Solutions, were we to report it, would have done better than Creative and Media in the first quarter.

You know, I think the most important thing is we're very focused on growing our share of enterprise solutions. You know, the market, as we shared in February, is growing at around 7%, and we see lots of white space to do that. Excited about the opportunity for enterprise solutions in the year ahead.

Thank you.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Ciarán Donnelly from Citi. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yeah. Thanks a million for the presentation. A couple just from me left. One, it'd be great to get a sense of, in terms of the pitch activity and the wins in Q4 and Q1. I guess, you know, what's changed? What's been the feedback in terms of why you have, I guess, started to turn the tide in terms of those wins? Two, can you just remind us in terms of expecting these client wins to impact numbers going forward, just in terms of those forward-looking indicators and how we should think about that? Thanks.

Okay. Let me just start with the second one. In terms of the client wins, I've talked about, you know, the growth losses, growth wins, et cetera. I've talked about the fact that we expect, you know, that to have the biggest drag in Q1 in terms of all the quarters in 2026. As we go through the year, we'll start to see the benefit from those new business wins ramp up. It starts to ramp up in Q2, but really we'll see the biggest impact from those in the second half, and that's really reflected in that guidance of an improving trajectory and like-for-like in the second half. In terms of, you know, what's driving the improvement.

Look, I touched on a few things, and I'm gonna start with the media team and Brian and the team that he's leading. You know, we have, we've been working on improving the competitiveness and the performance of our media business since Brian joined around 18 months ago now, and we have made great progress on the competitiveness of that proposition, and that's really resonating both with our existing clients and also with new business, and as I said, you know, you can. The real lead indicator in that is our new business and also our client retentions. You know, Brian and the team have also been incredibly focused on building a much more effective and a much more agile operating model.

I guess most critically in that is our global media platform, which means that we have one way of delivering our work now across all of our markets, and that's really important. A huge lift has gone into that, and that is performing well for us. The third aspect of what, you know, Brian and the team have been doing is really developing a very clear and a very compelling data strategy. That was, you know, supported with the acquisition of InfoSum, which is now fully integrated into Open Intelligence. Again, that's really resonating with clients. We're using it in our pitches and with existing clients, and we do think that that gives us, you know, a differentiated data strategy. Alongside that, you know, we've been upweighting our talent in media.

I talked in my remarks about Nancy, Angela, and Andrea joining the team in North America and Latin America. I think that's a key factor in our performance because in the last couple of years, you know, a number of the client losses have really been in media. I would also add that Open Intelligence really operates across our business, and that leads me onto the real second driver of our better performance, and that's our integrated capability. We've been very focused with WPP Open on leveraging that to connect our capabilities. Open Intelligence is not just for our media business, but it serves all parts of our business, creative and production.

We are really showing up much stronger as an integrated proposition for our clients. That is really resonating. You know, we talked about JLR in February, but I would also call out Wendy's, where we had the creative business and we won the media business earlier this month. I think the third areas I'd call out is really our go-to-market approach. You know, Dev took on an expanded role in Q4 and has really been busy leading one approach to our go-to-market, a strong central team with solution architects really at the core of that. We've really leveraged more our ability to lead with media and data. That is really resonating. You can see that in the Q4 and the Q1 new business performance.

Finally, just to wrap up, Ciarán, the points on this. You know, we talked in February, and I alluded to today again, our North Star is really organic growth. Elevate28 is really built around getting our business back to growth. You know, we're making good progress on that and pleased with where we are against our plans. Albeit it's still early days.

Perfect. Thanks.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Adrien de Saint Hilaire from Bank of America. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Joanne, for the presentation. I've got a few questions, if you don't mind. Just to come back on your guidance for H1 mid- to high-single-digit decline. Are you signaling that you think Q2 will be more or less in line with Q1? If so, apart from the Middle East, why would that be the case given the comparatives seem to be getting easier? Secondly, I guess usually agencies tend to grow faster with their top clients. You just mentioned before that, you know, your revenue with top 25 clients would be down low single digits, excluding losses. I'm just curious, like, what's driving the reduction there? Is that a reduction in scope of work? Is that fee pressure or just broader cuts in their marketing budgets?

The third topic is in the last couple of weeks. I think we've seen a bit of a spat between the platforms like The Trade Desk and media agencies. Do you think that reflects a broader encroachment of DSPs onto media agencies and vice versa? Or is it just like an isolated incident with few couple of clients and just one platform? Thank you.

Okay, thanks for the questions, Adrien. In terms of your first question on, you know, Q2 being more or less in line. You know, if I come back to Q1 was very much in line with our expectations, and it was consistent with our guidance for H1 to be down mid to high single digits. Now, we expect trends to be broadly similar in Q2. You are right, the comps do ease from Q2, but as we shared in February, and as I've talked again today, you know, the trend of net new business through the year, that will ease and improve. Really the most of that easing we'll see in the second half.

We will still see, you know, a similar drag from net new business in the second quarter as we've seen in the first quarter. We've also talked about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, and albeit it's a small percentage of net sales, it was a drag in Q1, and it is driving heightened geopolitical uncertainty. You'll feel very comfortable with the guidance that we've set, you know, the mid high single digit decline in the first half and then that improving trajectory into the second half. In terms of you know the existing clients down low single digit. Look, I think a couple of things in this.

We've talked about a polarization of spend, and as I look at spend within our sectors, you know, that polarization remains with some clients, you know, investing with us and increasing their spend and others being a little bit more cautious. That trend is continuing, particularly in the tech sector, and in healthcare. I'd also add that, you know, we talked last year about the step down we saw in Q2, where in some of our creative agencies, we saw a reduction in client spend. That's, you know, continuation into Q1. We really did start to see that step down in Q2. You know, that's carrying forward into Q1. I think it's important to also note that in Q1 last year, our top 25 clients were growing at 7%.

It is difficult, you know, in our business when you focus on one quarter and try to interpret, you know, a longer term trend from that quarter. You know, the comps do have an impact. In terms of The Trade Desk and other DSPs, look, I shouldn't comment and I can't really comment on what others are doing. I think what's important for our business is that we work with a number of the DSPs and SSPs, and what's important for us is that we are optimizing our client spend. Sometimes that means a particular DSP will work well, and we will work with them, and in other cases, it won't work so well, and we won't work with them. We leverage those partnerships well.

You know, I'd say some of the DSPs, in particular, The Trade Desk that you mentioned, operates in the open internet, so it tends to be a smaller segment of the overall advertising market, but what's most important for us is effective investment of our clients' media spend and full transparency, and that's transparency for our clients and transparency for our partners. That's really what we aim to do and what I think we do incredibly well.

I appreciate the comment. Thank you, Joanne.

Thank you. Our next question is from Julien Roch from Barclays. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, Joanne, and Tom.

Coming back on net new business, you said Q1 was similar to Q4. Can you remind us what Q4 was? And also, at the time of the full year results, you said that the Group's wins would be 250. Today they're better than that, so what have they reached today? Is it 300? 350? 200 basis points? That's my first question. Then previously said most of their contract had an element of performance compensation, but that performance linked net sales was only 10% of total. How much is it for you? And then, coming back on DSP and The Trade Desk, what percentage of your client money goes through DSPs? Thank you.

Okay, Julien, so you're gonna ask me this question every which way. Look, what I just reiterate, our gross loss is 500-600 basis points. Last year, you know, the numbers that we shared were unfair, that our gross wins were around 250 basis points. We said in February that, you know, we were already exceeding 2025, and we've seen an improvement in the balance of year. You know, I don't want to give a number now on growth client wins because, you know, still very early on in the year. As I said, we have a healthy pipeline, you know, which we're very much focused on it continuing to improve that win rate.

As we go through the year and we get closer to the end of the year, we can share a little bit more on that. You know, I would repeat the comment that, you know, I do expect Q1 to be the weakest quarter in terms of our net new business. In terms of performance related spend, again, in the past, we've talked about performance-related spend being about 20%-25% of our overall net sales. You tend to see it higher in media than in other parts of our business. I think that's important because we are, you know, we are used to structuring performance related pay in a way that works for both our clients and ourselves.

What we are seeing is, you know, an evolution, a little bit away from purely time and materials to more output-based pricing, more performance-based pricing. You know, we're seeing that come into pitches and with existing clients more regularly. You know, we're building up the muscle to be able to do that. As well as performance and output-based fees, we are introducing more tech fees just given the offer that we have around WPP Open. WPP Open Pro is a good example of that. Really the way to think about this is an evolution of our tech fees. In terms of the percentage of our revenues that go through with DSPs...

Typically, I think that is the open internet, Julien, in the main. i.e., the sort of long tail. If you know, look at Kate Scott-Dawkins this year, next year, or as Shields points out, it's a relatively small proportion of the overall market. Actually, over time, forecasts get relatively smaller. Frankly, we don't have a specific figure for you. The only thing I would say is that, you know, the role of WPP Media is to work in the best interest of our clients, to do whatever it takes to deliver best execution. That's, you know, in some cases, will involve working with third-party DSPs, and we'll literally make those decisions, project by project, client by client, once again, all in the best interest of the customer.

If I could follow up. I understand you don't wanna give us gross wins going forward because it's early days. If you could come back and tell us what was the net impact in Q4, that's the past. When you say 20%-30% of net sales linked to performance, do you mean that 20%-30% of your contracts have an element of performance or is actually off net sales, i.e., performance is already 20%-30% of net sales, i.e., 2x-3x royalties?

Yeah. I said 20%-25%, just to clarify, and it's net sales. You know, Julien, I don't really want to get into giving quarter-by-quarter impacts on net new business because when I come back in August, then you're gonna ask me what Q1 was and Q2 was. I think we've shared enough information that you can probably get a good approximation of it.

Okay. Fair. Thank you.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. We currently have no additional questions, and I'd like to hand back to the management team for any closing remarks.

Okay. Thank you very much for all of your questions. Before we end the call, I would like to give you a small sense of what's next. As discussed in February, we're gonna be hosting a series of webinars to double-click on our key operating units, and we'll start with WPP Media, and we will be in touch in due course with some further details on that. Thereafter, we anticipate reporting our H1 results in early August, and at that point, Cindy will give a further update on our strategic progress. I'd just like to echo my comments from earlier. We remain relentlessly focused on execution of our Elevate28 plan.

While our like-for-like revenue recovery will of course take time, we are encouraged by the progress to date against our Elevate28 plans, and we very much look forward to sharing more in due course. In the meantime, I want to say thank you again for your interest and your engagement. As ever, the investor relations team and myself are available if there's anything further we can do. For now, thank you very much and have a great remainder of your day.

Thank you. This now concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.

Good morning, everyone. Good morning, and warm welcome to our 2025 preliminary results and strategy update. By the way, that's our new brand refresh. I hope you like it, created by Landor AMP and Man versus Machine, WPP agencies, all powered by WPP Open. So look, I'm delighted to welcome you all here to One South Work Bridge to our campus here in London, which in many ways is symbolic of the future of WPP. It's modern, it's adaptive, it's collaborative workspace for our talent, our clients and our partners. So the plan this morning is I'm going to start with some opening remarks, and then I'm going to hand over to Joanne Wilson, our Chief Financial Officer, to share our 2025 preliminary results. Then I'll share our strategy update, and then we'll open up to Q&A. Before we start, I'd like to recommend that you take a moment to read this cautionary statement while I get out of your way. So Joanne and I will be joined on stage later by Brian Lesser, who's CEO of WPP Media. When we get to the media section of the presentation, and most of my senior management team are here in the audience as well. Let me start by saying that WPP is an extraordinary company. We are built on agency brands with remarkable histories going all the way back to the 1800s. Some are still well known today. Others have evolved into new parts of WPP. But together, they have roots in creating iconic work that moves people and shapes culture. We serve some of the biggest, most demanding clients in the world, and we steward and grow some of the most well-known brands on the planet, several of whom you'll hear from and see referenced throughout today's presentation. And our business model is actually very simple. We exist to make our clients successful. We help our clients build brands that matter, drive meaningful engagement with their consumers and drive outcomes for their business. It drives growth for them and growth for us. However, it's really clear that what has made us successful in the past will not make us successful in the future. And as you can see from the numbers that we released this morning, our performance is not where it needs to be. Yes, of course, there are externalities we can point to market volatility, economic headwinds. But really, the results point to the need for us to embrace a single unified growth strategy to execute with increased rigor and evolve as the needs of our clients evolve. After several years on the WPP Board of Directors, I took this role with a clear thesis in mind as to what we need to do differently. We've spent the past 6 months as a team validating this thesis through rigorous analysis and by speaking directly to our clients and actively listening to their feedback. And the good news is we haven't been waiting for today's presentation to take action. We've already made several decisive changes, and you can see the positive results in our recent new business success. In the fourth quarter of 2025, WPP was #1 in JPMorgan's net new business rankings for the first time since 2020 with a series of excellent client wins across media, creative and our integrated offer. These include being appointed the U.K. government's lead media agency, Reckitt and Henkel Media in Europe, Kenvue and Haleon Creative globally, TruGreen Media in the U.S., Norwegian Cruise Line Global Media, Suncor Media, just to name a few. And I'm delighted to say we've maintained this strong momentum into 2026, winning Jaguar Land Rover, Global Media and Integrated Services. In fact, the impact from new business wins in 2026 already exceeds the impact of new business wins for all of 2025 combined, and it's only February. So while the turnaround of our business will take time, our momentum is undeniable, and these wins give me huge confidence that we are firmly on the right path. My team is united, committed and hungry to win. Today's session is the culmination of months of detailed work by our team. We have a bold plan to make WPP a simpler, more integrated company, one that's fit for the future, relentlessly focused on growth and brilliant execution. Personally, I'm very excited to be here at a time of such revolutionary change, and I feel quite privileged to lead WPP as we play a defining role in shaping the future. So I'll come back shortly and talk about our view on the evolving landscape and our growth plan for the new WPMP, which we're calling Elevate28. But first, I'm going to hand over to Joanne to take you through our 2025 results. Joanne?

So thank you, Cindy, and good morning, everybody. And can I add my warm welcome to you here today. So let me start by taking you through the main financial headlines for 2025. Our like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs fell 5.4% for the full year due to client assignment losses and spending cuts. Now this is slightly better than our most recent guidance for a decline of 5.5% to 6%, and it reflects a Q4 like-for-like decline of 6.9%, and that's a deterioration from the third quarter decline of 5.9% -- in the context of the weaker top line, we delivered a headline operating margin of 13%, in line with our expectations and down 180 basis points year-on-year on a like-for-like basis. Our fully diluted EPS was 63.2p, a decrease of 28.4% year-on-year, with the impact of reduced headline operating margin and a higher headline effective tax rate, partially offset by lower net finance costs and noncontrolling interests. Turning to cash flow. Our adjusted operating cash flow before working capital was GBP 1.2 billion, down from GBP 1.3 billion in 2024 and at the top of our most recent guidance range and includes GBP 82 million of cash restructuring charges. On my next slide, I provided some color on our net sales performance, both for the fourth quarter and across the full year. And please note that we have included more detail in the appendix to this deck. Now you have some of the detail here on trends by business, by region and by client sector, but I thought it would be more useful to unpack some of those trends by theme to help give a sense of what is WPP specific and what is more market driven. And when we consider what is WPP specific, the major negative impact to call out both for the full year and for the fourth quarter is the impact of gross client losses, which deteriorated through the year. Now this was driven by the impact of incremental losses in year in 2025. And by segment, this particularly weighed on media, by geography on the U.S. and the U.K. and by client sector on CPG and TME. Now against this, we had the positive impact of new business wins in 2024 and '25, which indeed contributed progressively through the year. The aggregate level of in-year wins, however, was lower than we initially expected and significantly below what we have experienced over the past number of years. This was in part because of a lower win rate, but in EMEA, it was because of a lower level of aggregate new business activity. Industry estimates are that global pitch activity was down double digit in the year. While we saw an encouraging new business performance in the fourth quarter with the wins of Reckitt, Henkel, the U.K. government, Pizza Hut, NCL and JLR, the impact on our like-for-like performance is expected to take time to ramp up, and we expect the overall net new business headwind to sustain into the first half of 2026. The final theme to call out is spend by existing clients. We characterize the year as one of more cautious spending from clients with a higher degree of volatility than we would typically expect to see. Now the impact was seen most strongly across the CPG, auto and the tech and digital services sectors. And while many of our businesses were impacted, it weighed most heavily on Ogilvy. The waterfall chart on this next slide bridges our headline operating margin from 15% in 2024 to 13% in 2025, a 1.8 percentage point deterioration on a like-for-like basis. There are a number of moving parts and starting with staff costs, including our severance and incentives on the left. Now these reduced by GBP 576 million on the back of lower permanent headcount, which ended the year down 8.7% and reduced use of freelancers, which was down 14% year-on-year. However, due to that lower revenue, this resulted in 180 basis points drag on our margin. This was amplified by the impact of increased severance and other associated costs, which was up GBP 89 million in the year, taking a further 100 basis points of margin. And we did increase investment levels in WPP Open in AI and data, and this was more than funded by a reduction in back-office costs, leading to a net reduction in tech spend and other costs of GBP 128 million. Again, with the impact from those lower revenues, this translated into a 60 basis point drag on margin. These drags on margin were offset by a 50% reduction in staff incentive payments to GBP 182 million, providing a margin cushion of 140 basis points, which is equivalent to 120 basis points like-for-like if we exclude FGS. And taken together, this resulted on that net margin move of 200 basis points on a reported basis and 180 basis points on a like-for-like basis, which includes 20% of the impact from the disposal of FGS and from FX. Now moving to my next slide, we show our headline income statement. Overall reported revenue less pass-through costs was GBP 10.2 billion, a decrease of 10.4% year-on-year on a reported basis. Our headline operating profit was GBP 1.3 billion, which was down 22.6% year-on-year on a reported basis and is consistent with that 13% operating profit margin. Our net finance costs of GBP 274 million were slightly down year-on-year on lower average net debt and lower interest rates. And our effective tax rate increased to 32% given that lower profit base and the impact of nondeductible fixed elements. By contrast, noncontrolling interest of GBP 43 million was down year-on-year, partially driven by disposals. Our headline diluted EPS, as I said, was 63.2p and down 28.4% on a reported basis. The Board has recommended a final dividend of 7.5p, giving a total dividend of 15p for 2025. Now while this is a reduction year-on-year, it represents a stable dividend from the first half, and it underlines our commitment to maintaining shareholder returns. We include a full reconciliation between our headline and our reported financials in the appendix. And the main items I would call out are the impact of restructuring programs as well as further goodwill impairments of GBP 641 million, which primarily relate to our integrated creative agencies and property impairments of GBP 114 million, both of which are noncash in nature. Now this next slide bridges the year-on-year movement in net debt, which ended 2025 at GBP 2.2 billion versus GBP 1.7 billion in 2024. Our adjusted operating cash flow before working capital was GBP 1.2 billion and reflects a lower level of cash profit, partially offset by a lower level of CapEx and a year-on-year decrease in cash restructuring costs, which came in at GBP 82 million. Our working capital saw an outflow of GBP 334 million, primarily driven by the temporary impact of reduced staff incentives, adverse FX movements and business mix. Within this, our trade working capital, excluding the impact from FX was broadly flat year-on-year. We remain disciplined on our working capital management and saw an improvement in underlying operating metrics year-on-year, including reduced overdues. We saw an outflow of GBP 17 million from earnouts of GBP 65 million and the net impact of dividends to minorities and from associates and earn-outs have decreased year-on-year and are expected to continue to progressively fall in 2026. Our net interest and tax contributed to a total adjusted free cash flow of GBP 202 million and note that the tax payment includes GBP 43 million of one-off taxes related to the disposal of FGS Global. And turning to the uses of cash, M&A spend was GBP 147 million and largely related to the acquisition of Infrum, while cash dividends amounted to GBP 343 million. Adding in the impact of buybacks at GBP 97 million to offset the dilution from incentives and other factors, including FX, our spot net debt was GBP 2.2 billion, up GBP 500 million year-on-year. Now my next slide provides more detail on our overall net debt and our leverage profile. As we've already said, we think it's more prudent to look at average adjusted net debt through the year rather than the year-end level, which typically benefits from a favorable working capital position. Now our average adjusted net debt was slightly down year-on-year at GBP 3.4 billion compared to GBP 3.5 billion in 2024. However, given that lower headline EBITDA, the average adjusted net debt to headline EBITDA ratio for 2025 was 2.2x, which was up from 1.8x in 2024. While our average leverage ratio has increased, our maturity profile stands at 5.8 years and the average coupon on our net debt is 3.5%. We, of course, also completed a successful GBP 1 billion bond issue in December 2025, which more than covers our GBP 650 million bond maturity in September 2026. We have no covenants. And as of December 2025, we had GBP 4.4 billion of liquidity, including an undrawn committed RCF of $2.5 billion, which does not mature until 2031. And furthermore, I'm very pleased to share that today, Fitch Ratings has assigned WPP a BBB rating with a stable outlook, reinforcing our investment-grade balance sheet. And on my final slide for now, I have shared guidance for 2026 across key financial metrics. Now we will talk about the impact of our strategy update later this morning. But for 2026, we're setting the following parameters in terms of our headline guidance. Our like-for-like net revenue growth is the most important metric for judging our business, but it is a lagging indicator with account losses continuing to drag for around 12 months after they first start to impact. And meanwhile, new account wins take time to bed in and move toward a steady state. For the year as a whole, we estimate that gross client losses will represent a 500 to 600 basis point drag, an increase from the 300 to 400 basis points in 2025. At the same time, the positive impact on like-for-like from gross client wins in 2026 already exceeds that for the full year 2025. Now while it is still early in the year to indicate the impact of new business in the full year, we do expect it to be a more significant drag in the first half in 2025. We are encouraged by the new business performance in the fourth quarter and the performance year-to-date and the nature of the pipeline. And as a result, we anticipate a progressively improving impact from net new business through the course of the year. Now reflecting all of this, we are guiding to like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs down mid- to high single digits in the first half of 2026 with an improving trajectory in the second half. And we also anticipate that the first quarter will see the weakest like-for-like for the year. On profit, there are a number of moving parts that will impact our headline operating margin. On the positive side, we will benefit from the annualized impact of cost actions, which were taken in 2025, alongside a part year benefit from the cost initiatives we are implementing as part of our new strategy. We also expect a lower impact from headline severance costs. Against this, we will continue to invest in WPP Open in AI and in data as well as our growth drivers and also expect to rebuild our incentive pools. Cindy and I will share greater detail on both the growth drivers and the cost initiatives as part of our strategy update. Taking all of that into account, we anticipate headline operating profit margin in the range of 12% to 13%. And turning to cash flow, we continue to focus on adjusted operating cash flow before working capital as the most important metric, reflecting the potential for volatility in the year-end working capital position, including both the anticipated costs associated with historical plans as well as the restructuring costs linked to the Elevate28 8 plan, we anticipate adjusted operating cash flow before working capital of GBP 800 million to GBP 900 million. This includes total anticipated cash restructuring charges of around GBP 250 million, of which around GBP 190 million are associated with the Elevate28 plan. Excluding these charges, we would anticipate adjusted operating cash flow before working capital of GBP 1 billion to GBP 1.1 billion. And finally, in terms of leverage, given the expectation of a further moderation in headline EBITDA, we would anticipate our average leverage metrics to move up further in 2026. We do, however, expect average net debt to remain broadly stable, and we note that any proceeds from asset disposals during the year will be used to strengthen our balance sheet, providing a greater degree of financial flexibility. Now you will find more detail on other modeling assumptions for 2026 in our preliminary results press release. And that is it for me for now, and I will hand back to Cindy, who I know is very keen to share our strategic update.

Thank you, Joanne. Thank you. Look, the first thing I want to say to you is that I fully recognize that recent years have been disappointing from a shareholder perspective. I acknowledge our performance on core metrics like net sales margin, free cash flow. It's disappointing. No one is more determined to turn that around than I am. And as I said in my opening remarks, I took this role with a clear thesis as to what we needed to do differently. We've spent the past 6 months as a team really validating that thesis with rigorous analysis and by actively listening to feedback from our clients. There are plenty of reasons for optimism, and I'm going to get to those in a moment. But first, I thought it's just appropriate to share with you some of the feedback that we have received from clients. It's clear and consistent and not only supports my thesis, but provides us with an excellent blueprint for what we need to do differently going forward. Clients pointed to the fact that our complexity got in the way of true client obsession. We were siloed. We were hard to navigate. We haven't been intentional enough about evolving our integrated proposition to adapt to the changing needs of our clients. It's taken us too long to land our data proposition and our media business has suffered as a result. Now the good news from my perspective is that all of these issues are fixable. And as I said, we've already started to do so. So while it's true that our performance hasn't been where we want it to be, it's also true that WPP is full of potential and has all the ingredients that we need to win. We have incredibly talented, hard-working people with deep domain expertise who do amazing things for our clients, for some of the most demanding clients in the world, I might add, every single day. We have world-class capabilities that span the entire marketing workflow from media to commerce, creative, PR, production, digital experiences, software engineering, data, AI and more. We've made really smart investments over the years in technology that have now enabled us to build WPP Open into a powerful future-facing agentic marketing platform, giving us a real competitive advantage. We have a presence in over 100 countries around the world, which means we can serve the most complex multinational, multi-client brands in the world. We have a scaled media offer and partnerships with every relevant player in the ecosystem. But maybe most importantly of all, we have an ambitious, competitive, high-energy team that is ready to embrace change and hungry to win. So notwithstanding the challenges, which are clear, I stand here with immense optimism because we're at a really pivotal moment in WPP's journey. We're not just adapting to change. We're actively shaping the future. We are building a WPP that is more agile, more connected, more powerful than ever before, a WPP that is simpler to work with, fit for the future and built to win. A WPP that is obsessed with the client -- the success of our clients and as a result, that drives better returns for our shareholders. So our strategy starts with a new mission, to be the trusted partner for the world's leading brands in the era of AI, valued for combining cutting-edge media intelligence, trusted data solutions, world-class creativity, next-generation production and transformative enterprise solutions to help our clients navigate change, capture growth and capture opportunity. Now there's 4 key objectives of our strategy, and we're going to unpack these in some detail. But just to summarize, our objectives are to drive superior growth for our clients, to become a simpler, more integrated company, to leverage our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open for competitive advantage and to create firm financial foundations for the future. As I said earlier, this is going to take time, but we've already made a promising start. And to support our growth strategy, we've built a very detailed execution plan that broadly spans these 3 distinct phases. Our immediate priority is to stabilize the business, make the structural changes needed, strengthen our execution, win and retain clients to sustain our current market momentum. The next phase is about building on these foundations and returning the company to growth sometime during 2027. And the third phase will be about accelerating our growth so we can capture our fair share of the market from 2028 and beyond. And just to summarize what you can expect from this plan in terms of outcomes, you can expect the stabilization of our performance in the near term, a return to growth sometime in 2027, gross cost savings of GBP 500 million over 3 years, a reallocation of investment against our key growth priorities and a more focused portfolio, an investment-grade balance sheet, as Joanne said, and greater financial flexibility. So that's the basic framework, the time line of our growth strategy and what you can expect in terms of outcomes. We're going to unpack all of this in more detail. But before we do, I would like to step back, if I may, and just do a bit of scene setting to offer some perspective on how we see the world changing, the needs of our clients evolving and the opportunity of AI. So for some time now, we've known that our industry is experiencing dramatic transformation. With the rapid diffusion of AI, we're not just seeing incremental shifts in consumer behavior, like this is a complete metamorphosis of the commercial ecosystem. Brands are now discovered in AI-driven conversational search. All the old barriers that protected established brands are gone. creators and influencers have reshaped consumer preference and can launch brands in an instant. Media is everywhere. It's in everything. It's no longer episodic and campaign-driven. It's continuous, always on, a stream where social, search and physical spaces all blend together. Commerce is the new organizing principle. Every action, every interaction is shoppable, and we're rapidly shifting to agented commerce where AI agents do the shopping on our behalf. Trust is scarce, right? It must be earned every day in this world of synthetic content and deep fakes. Brands need to balance hyperpersonalization with personal privacy. And as the world is flooded with AI-generated content, the demand for verifiable human creativity, craft, empathy, taste is increasing as key brand differentiators. These changing dynamics are not fleeting trends. The acceleration of AI is unstoppable. And as I said, it's driving a complete metamorphosis of the commercial ecosystem. And this is the reality our clients are navigating every day. The fragmentation, the complexity, the pace of change is dizzying for our clients and the paths to growth are much harder to find. He's never been more urgent to build compelling trusted brands that endure for generations and provide competitive advantage and long-term enterprise value. To cut through this noise and find new growth audiences in this environment, brands need to embrace new strategies grounded in deep data insights, real-time signals and AI that acts on these signals at the speed of light. In this perpetually changing environment, clients don't need more traditional marketing agencies. What they need is a new playbook for growth and a trusted partner who can help them build it and operationalize it. A partner that operates as an intelligent orchestration layer across creativity, media, commerce, data and tech who fuses technical expertise with breakthrough creative thinking into one cohesive approach to modern brand building. At WPP, we work with some of the most consequential brands and clients on the planet, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Nestle, Kenvue, Ford, so many more. We know how to navigate disruption. We know how to find signal in noise and help clients build new paths to growth. Now for many clients, this new playbook for growth means real transformation at every level. So I spent the last decade delivering large-scale technology transformation to enterprise clients around the world. And I can tell you, it's not easy. Clients need to have AI-ready data foundations and agentic tool and governance in place. They need to be trained and skilled. Processes need to be reimagined. There's really no shortcut when it comes to AI transformation. Every client I meet is going through it, and they all need our help. So for WPP to seize this opportunity, we need to evolve from being a collection of traditional marketing agencies to being a trusted partner for growth and transformation, helping our clients build modern marketing capabilities and move boldly and confidently into the future. A wonderful example of this kind of partnership in action is the Coca-Cola Company. Let's hear from Manolo. [Presentation]

Commerce and Retail media at 23% and high-velocity content production at 38%. These changes that we're making at WPP to integrate our client proposition will enable us to cross-sell more effectively and grow our share in these fast-growing markets. So that's my perspective on how the world is changing, what it means for our clients and the opportunity of AI. Thanks for indulging me in that. But I'd like to now unpack our growth strategy in a bit more detail. So as I mentioned earlier, we have 4 strategic objectives: to deliver superior growth for our clients by reorienting around an integrated proposition to become a simpler company moving to 4 operating units across 4 regions with common incentives across the company, to leverage the power of our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open for competitive advantage and to create firm financial foundations for the future. We've built a detailed plan that sets out the actions we're taking to deliver on these objectives, and the entire management team worked together to build this plan. This was the ultimate team collaboration. We're all behind it. We're all aligned and committed to its execution. There are 8 core pillars to the plan, which you can see on this slide, but I'm going to double click and I'm going to double-click briefly on each of them, but I do want to start with WPP Open, our pioneering agentic marketing platform because it sits at the center of everything we do. It's where all of our capabilities come together into one integrated end-to-end platform. It's the cornerstone of WPP's own transformation, and it's how we deliver services, transformation and growth to our clients. WPP Open is a platform that we've been investing and building for a few years now. We recognized that we needed an end-to-end orchestration layer to connect workflow inside of WPP. And the platform enables us to scale intelligence and best practice across our group and reimagine business process and client solutions with the agentic capabilities that now live inside Agent Hub, an important recent addition to the platform. But let me show you an example of the power of the platform with a recent example from Google Pixel. Using WPP Open and AI personas, we analyzed millennial conversations from across social media, uncovering a shift towards romantasizing everyday life and reframing mundane moments as cinematic moments. Guided by this insight, our brand agent recommended focusing on Pixel's camera coach feature to help users take control of their story. Thanks to specialized agents, our workflow moved from social listening to creative concepts in just 1 hour. With Google's advanced AI models within WPP Open, campaign assets were approved and live within 24 hours. And this delivered a 3% increase in brand uplift, demonstrating a new marketing flywheel where insight, creativity and production really move at the speed of culture. So recognizing the pace of technology change, we knew that the future of marketing would look very different than in the past. And to anticipate these changes, we've significantly enhanced the platform over the past 12 months. Open Intelligence is our foundational intelligence layer that securely connects trillions of live data points from clients, partners and WPP in a privacy-first way. And it's now integrated and powers the entire WPP platform end-to-end. We consolidated our technology and data solutions into one organization. We have one WPP development team, one integrated product road map and one set of design and portfolio management principles, which dramatically simplifies how we think about evolving this platform in the future. Our people work on WPP Open every day, and it features in every client pitch as the single unified agentic platform that clients need to deliver integrated marketing workflows and a collaborative workspace where humans and agents can work together to deliver a system of growth that clients can trust. There are many, many point solutions available in the market today that address pieces, fragments of the marketing workflow, and they're often tied to specific platforms, leaving clients to manage costly complex tech stacks with fragmented workflows. WPP Open solves this problem in a single end-to-end platform. It's an agnostic system built on a common data model. It gives clients one source of truth to integrate operations, optimize investment and drive growth at scale. It's really hard to explain technology, though. So let me show you how this works. [Presentation]

Great. So I talked about the importance of partnerships because in today's changing world, like no single company can go it alone. WPP Open, as the name indicates, is open by design. We will continue to enhance our own technology with the very best and latest AI models and agentic tool sets through our groundbreaking strategic technology and data partnerships with Google, Microsoft, TikTok, Meta, Amazon, Stability AI and more. These partnerships don't just give us access to new AI models and tools. They enable us to bring cutting-edge innovation resources to our clients and unlock important new routes to market, particularly important for our Enterprise Solutions business. You might have seen earlier this week, we announced a significantly expanded partnership with Adobe, embedding their industry-leading AI marketing suite directly into WPP Open. This is a powerful integration that delivers effective streamlined marketing operations for our clients, enabling them to scale personalization, optimize media and create on-brand content efficiently with agentic AI workflows. This build, buy and partner approach that ensures that WPP Open remains at the forefront of cutting-edge technology innovation so that our clients always have state-of-the-art capability at their fingertips. WPP Open is a significant source of competitive advantage for WPP. This platform puts AI to work to transform our clients' marketing function and enable new outcome-based commercial models, tying our success directly to client growth. So that's WPP Open. Now let's go back to the strategic plan and briefly step through the actions we're taking to deliver on our growth objectives. Our first key action focuses on media and data and positioning these capabilities at the core of our integrated client proposition. Brian Lesser joined WPP 18 months ago and has done a fantastic job spearheading the transformation of WPP Media. He's implemented structural change and led the acquisition and integration of InfoSum, which now underpins our differentiated data approach. We know there's more work to do, but recent wins in WPP Media that Brian and his team have secured give us full confidence that we're on the right path. So I'd like to invite Brian to the stage now to dive a bit deeper on WPP Media's transformation. Brian?

Hi, everybody. Good morning. And thank you, Cindy, for the introduction and for leading the way at WPP. 12 months ago, I promised a transformation, and we delivered. We have united WPP Media, placing our clients at the heart of everything we do, ready to unlock limitless growth in a media everywhere future. Our foundation is built on our proprietary open intelligence, driving real-time predictive decision-making. Today, I'll detail how we're now perfectly set up for success with the client always at the core of a truly integrated WPP, powered by a differentiated platform that sets us apart. This is our winning recipe, and I'll share tangible case studies proving this model is designed to win. From the outside, it might seem as if all marketers have the same basic needs. The truth is that every client is unique with vastly different context, growth strategies and audiences. This is why we have restructured the way we work to ensure each client's unique needs sit at the heart of our business. This radical client centrality is allowing us to unlock true integrated marketing across WPP. We have built a single financial and data ecosystem that eliminates siloed operations to bring the full power of WPP's people and tech to life. This empowers us to deliver seamless connected solutions that cut across the traditional ways of doing business like customer experience, commerce and social and influencer that accelerate client growth. Whether it's a media pitch, a creative pitch or a production pitch, more than ever, clients are looking for a single integrated solution. This is what we're now set up to deliver and why clients are choosing us. You can see the power of this integrated approach with Mazda. When creative is as intelligent as you're targeting, you don't just reach people, you move them. Mazda's first to the finish was a groundbreaking branded content series. It spotlighted trailblazing female racecar drivers connecting on a human level beyond motorsport. This innovative program became the first branded content designated a prime video original. It showed how media intelligence fuels powerful storytelling. The series achieved 16 million minutes watched, drove 93% new website visits, increased purchase consideration by 23% and contributed to Mazda's highest sales year ever. This is the type of results the new WPP media generates. Our data approach isn't merely an evolution. It's a fundamental revolution. Traditional marketing with its static definition of identity and commoditized view of audiences is increasingly obsolete and constrained by privacy risks. We ask a different question, what signals truly matter to our audiences. We unlock intelligence from diverse live signals, context, interests and behaviors to find new patterns in the consumer journey. This identifies new growth audiences and predicts their future actions to accelerate business growth. Central to this is our market-leading solution, enhanced by InfoSum, which establishes private data networks directly within our clients' environments. This enables secure multiparty data collaboration without any data ever moving. This decentralized approach breaks down silos, creating comprehensive AI-ready consumer insights from previously inaccessible sources, far surpassing traditional ID matching alone to deliver truly predictive intelligence. For the first time, clients can harness the full potential of their first-party data from any cloud or warehouse environment. including Adobe, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Salesforce, Databricks and Snowflake. This proprietary intelligence can then be connected and enriched with our comprehensive identity data and robust network of over 350 integrated partners, giving us access to quadrillions of real-time signals. This allows us to produce faster, smarter and more effective marketing across all leading global platforms like Amazon, Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Snapchat and TikTok. By synthesizing this vast data, we build predictive media strategies that deliver deeper engagement and superior client growth, moving beyond just reach and frequency and validating actual outcomes with historical performance data. To bring this to life, consider our work with Heineken. They needed a way to connect their first-party consumer data with ITV's on-demand viewing audience and Tesco shoppers. Powered by InfoSum, Heineken was able to identify relevant audience segments based on age and real-time drinking preferences. Crucially, Tesco provided closed-loop measurement of sales impact, all without moving or sharing any customer data out of Heineken's environment. In a world where measurable outcomes truly matter, the campaign success wasn't measured in brand uplift or impressions, but in real sales data from Tesco stores, which increased by an impressive 189%. Another real-life example of driving business results through our market-leading data and technology solution. Powered by Open Intelligence and enhanced by InfoSum's federated learning infrastructure, WPP Open offers a unique agentic marketing platform. This gives our clients speed, simplicity, scale and AI innovation to modernize marketing, optimize media and accelerate their growth. Our differentiated approach to data is helping move marketing beyond legacy static databases by enabling more connected and intelligent ways of working. For Coca-Cola, this means bringing together creativity, technology and real-time insights to create more integrated marketing experiences. There's no one better than Manolo to share how WPP Open and Open Intelligence are transforming marketing at the Coca-Cola Company. [Presentation]

Our strong Q4 2025 momentum continued into 2026. with WPP Media achieving its best January in 4 years for net new business wins, leading all media holding companies. We have an inspired, dynamic market-leading team of winners leading this charge. The change in our culture has been palpable. Major integrated wins like JLR and Estee Lauder confirm our strategy works. Our winning client-centric proposition built on this future-proof integrated foundation rapidly meets evolving client demands and delivers truly predictive intelligence. With media at its core, WPP is now exceptionally positioned to drive continued growth, sustain client relationships and deliver significant value for our investors. Thank you, and now I'll hand it back to Cindy.

Thank you, Brian. Thanks so much. So the next key action we're taking is to establish next-generation production and creative capabilities. And I'm going to start briefly with production. Just last month, we announced the creation of WPP Production, our new production unit led by Richard Glasson. And of course, we marked the occasion with a video. [Presentation]

So as I think you can see, production is being pretty radically transformed, and we're facing into this head on by fundamentally reimagining how it all works. WPP production, it's a mouthful. It's designed to solve for both volume and performance. We operate an end-to-end content orchestration through WPP Open as one unified content production engine. We're establishing high -velocity studios deeply integrated into WPP Media for real-time measurement and content optimization. And we're centralizing commissioning and supplier management to in-source more work where appropriate and create a more curated roster of external production partners. We're investing. We're investing in cutting-edge capabilities, high-velocity studios, as I mentioned, Gen AI studios, virtual production, video effect of virtual effects and digital twin pipelines. With WPP production, we are well positioned to support our clients as they look to transform and often consolidate their content production activities. And we're confident over time, we will take a greater share of this market. So next, I want to talk about creative. Like we know how critically important creativity is to our clients. I talked a bit earlier about the increasing demand for verifiable human creativity and craft in the era of AI. This is an important source of brand differentiation and value creation for our clients. And while the market for creative service is projecting limited growth over the medium term, creative capabilities are still a vital element of an integrated proposition, and there is significant opportunity for us to unlock white space across our client portfolio through joint propositions and cross-sell. So recognizing these factors, today, we are formally announcing the launch of WPP Creative, led by John Cook, and this organization will be home to our most iconic agency brands, VML, Ogilvy, AKQA, Berson, Landor, Design Bridge and Partners. I want to be very, very clear on this one. We are not merging agency brands. We are not consolidating agency brands. We are not sunsetting agency brands, okay? On the contrary, John and our agency leaders will unite them in new ways and empower them like never before. I've spoken to many clients. They all share with me how much they value choice and the unique perspectives and cultures that our agency brands provide. However, they also want to make it easier for those agencies to collaborate and efficiently access the whole breadth of WPP's capabilities. A simplified structure also removes barriers for our global client leaders, creating a frictionless path to our top talent so we can put the right resource in front of the right client at the right time without the constraints of the past. With WPP Creative, all of our agency brands will have access to the full modern stack of commerce, customer experience, digital platforms, enhancing their client proposition and expanding the go-to-market channel for these services. Much greater alignment with WPP Media and WPP Production will ensure that creative ideas are instantly adaptable and executable across the whole customer funnel. While agency brands remain, WPP Creative will have a more competitive cost base from a simpler, more unified operating model and greater shared infrastructure. I'm excited that WPP Creative will double down on our agency brands and arm them with the capability they need to make them more modern and more united than ever before. And we're already seeing the power of bringing together our portfolio in recent successes securing, for example, the creative mandate for Kenvue, the parent company to well-known brands like Listerine LSTERIN, Sudafed, BAN-AD and more, a strength also recognized by our client there. Next, I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about enterprise solutions. Because today, every global business needs a partner that can help them build, run and evolve their core platforms and systems in a world where AI is part of everyday operations. Businesses are being forced to rethink how they establish competitive advantage and the potential to reinvent workflows has never been greater. For some of our clients, the need is clear and well articulated. For others, the need is completely unarticulated. They know there's a better way, but they don't know what it looks like. To partner most effectively with our clients on their AI transformation, we are elevating our existing enterprise solutions capability into a new externally facing operated unit called WPP Enterprise Solutions, led by Jeff Geheb. Enterprise Solutions provides a complete enterprise transformation offer for clients that spans consulting, content, customer experience, commerce, CRM and platforms. We have a unique ability to fuse these capabilities with media intelligence and world-class creativity to build an AI-powered marketing operation end-to-end for our clients. WPP Enterprise Solutions benefits from multiple routes to market, including via our agency brands and both direct and partner-led go-to-markets as well. These multiple routes to market maximize our coverage and enhance our ability to cross-sell, capture white space, TAM growth opportunity within our installed client base and will drive more direct and partner-influenced revenue. The enterprise transformation market is huge. It's worth $230 billion and projected to grow cumulatively 7% over the next 3 years. Although our share of that market today is small, the opportunity is really significant. And actually, we already have really solid foundations to build on. Today, our Enterprise Solutions business employs around 10,000 people and generates around $1.8 billion of revenue. It's about 13% of our overall group net revenue. This business has quietly built a book of exceptional clients and has already earned notable industry recognition from Gartner, Forrester and IDC. In many ways, as I like to say, Enterprise Solutions is the hidden gem within WPP that we will now elevate to become the crown jewel. And if you ask our clients at Ford, it's already the crown jewel. We have a partnership with Ford that started with J. Walter Thompson 80 years ago, and we've continued supporting them with cross-functional teams as their needs have evolved. Let's hear directly from Ford. [Presentation]

Great. Okay. So we have talked about how we're going to deliver superior growth for our clients by reorienting around an integrated proposition that brings together media creative, production enterprise solutions, all powered by WPP Open. Now I want to talk about the organizational changes that we're going to make to become a simpler, more integrated company because these are key enablers for our strategy. And as I mentioned earlier, we haven't been waiting for today's update to change how we engage with clients. We know that when we show up as the new WPP, as the best of WPP, we win. But to build on our current momentum and make it sustainable, we need to radically simplify our organization really to unlock true client centricity. So to do that, WPP will no longer be a holding company. We will no longer be a shopping basket full of stand-alone businesses, hundreds of stand-alone businesses. We're going to move to a single company model. with 4 operating units across 4 regions with incentives that closely align to the overall performance of WPP. Being a single company with a simpler structure and common incentives are critical enablers of our strategy. As part of these structural changes, we'll also further simplify corporate functions, particularly in finance and people to reduce duplication, increase our use of shared services and redesign our processes, leveraging AI and Agenta capabilities. Alongside these structural changes, we're also focused on significantly strengthening our execution, both in terms of client service delivery and new business growth. At the heart of WPP's relationship with our largest clients are our global client leaders, our GCLs -- and our GCLs are already masters of creating value. But our existing operating model and our incentives and our internal processes have not always afforded them the agility needed to deliver seamless client-centric services that unlock new avenues for growth. I'm sure my GCLs in the room would agree. But we're transforming our approach. We're going to empower our GCLs with the authority and the resources to function as true leaders for their client portfolios, exercising strategic leadership rather than merely orchestrating a bunch of activities. This is going to include greater control over client P&Ls and the authority to make the best strategic decisions supported by streamlined internal processes designed to eliminate organizational friction and provide access to the right resource at the right time. We're also establishing a new team of client solution architects. This team will apply deep industry expertise to develop winning growth strategies for clients and then architect tailored solutions to deliver on those strategies, unifying technology, media data, all of our marketing capabilities to really drive successful execution. And finally, we're establishing more integrated growth operations, creating a stronger network of growth talent across WPP with a shared hunger to win. These changes will enable us to build on our current momentum, all of our recent wins as we strengthen our new business engine and champion a stronger winning mindset. And speaking of winning mindset, the next core priority for us, perhaps the most important of all, is to embed a high-performance culture to attract and retain the world's best talent, grounded in collaboration, client obsession, humility, accountability and a hunger to win. I know from experience that culture can be the biggest differentiator and competitive advantage of them all. Talented people choose to join companies and stay at companies that have strong cultures where they can thrive in their careers and be their authentic selves. I also know that changing culture takes time and persistence, and it's about both winning hearts and minds. I think winning hearts is about inspiring people with a new mission that feels fresh and relevant and clear. It's also about creating an environment that feels safe and inclusive, where creativity, where intelligent risk-taking are valued, where failure is treated as a path to learning and continuous improvement is celebrated. Now winning minds is about getting the basics right. So that's about clear communication and active listening to people, investments in learning and development. We've got to ensure that our people are building new capabilities with a focus on AI so they can deliver what our clients need from us. It's about common incentives across the company that just unlock collaboration and frictionless resource sharing. It's about performance management and feedback to allow us to build that culture of accountability and greater talent mobility and career progression opportunities. But what I really want is for people to have a world-class employee experience and feel proud to be on a winning team and proud to be part of WPP. Now the final pillar of our Elevate28 execution plan is about creating firm financial foundations for the future. And that's about creating capacity to invest in growth and building a WPP that's fully optimized to deliver for our clients. I'm going to hand over to Joanne now to step through the financial aspects of our plan. Joanne?

So thank you, Cindy. And okay, let me share the financial framework, which underpins our Elevate28 8 plan, including our approach to capital allocation. Elevate28 8 is first and foremost about getting WPP back to growth, and our financial priorities underpin that. In the near term, our focus will be on stabilizing the business, and that means improving our net new business performance and our client retention. As I mentioned earlier, net sales like-for-like is a lagging indicator, and that will take time to recover as we cycle through historic client losses. Now as we progress through the 3 years of our plan and we deliver strongly against the core growth building blocks, which I will talk to in a later slide, we anticipate a return to taking our fair share of the market. And in some areas and over time, we will seek to outperform the market. And to support this, we will unlock GBP 500 million of gross annual cost savings between now and 2028, enabling a reallocation of investment towards our growth drivers. And this will, in turn, support a rebuild of margins. And finally, we are setting out to make WPP a simpler and more focused business reducing the perimeter of the group and then still doing strengthening the balance sheet and providing a greater degree of financial flexibility. As you've heard today, we are already implementing many parts of our plan. However, it will take time to deliver and to realize the full benefits in our operational and in our financial outcomes. As Cindy indicated, we see delivery across 3 phases. In 2026, we will stabilize the operational performance of the business, leveraging the improved competitiveness of our media and our data proposition and our production consolidation. We will action our cost saving plans, and we will prioritize investment into the parts of our business, which represent the largest growth opportunities. In parallel, we will take a more proactive approach to our portfolio, unlocking embedded value and operating with a tighter and a more focused perimeter. This will require focused execution and a rigorous reallocation of resources to support our growth plans. Now as a lagging indicator, we expect organic growth to remain subdued in 2026, and we also anticipate margins to remain below historic levels as we reinvest savings to support growth. Alongside this, we expect an elevated average leverage ratio. From 2027, we expect to start to see a progressive ramp-up of the benefits from both our operating model changes and the investments we are making to enhance our new go-to-market, our integrated proposition and from scaling capabilities, including our full service enterprise solutions and production. It is our ambition for the group to return to growth during 2027 for margins to start to rebuild and for our leverage to start to come down. And from 2028, our plan assumes a significantly improved operational performance characterized by accelerating growth and improving margin and strong cash conversion. While we are not providing specific medium-term guidance today, rest assured, we are relentlessly focused on immediate stabilization and disciplined execution of the building blocks to return WPP to growth. And let me spend some time on those building blocks of growth, which we are, of course, aligning our investment priorities against. And I'll start with media. Now the market for Media Services is around $40 billion and is forecast to grow at a 4% CAGR from '24 to '28. And within this, commerce and retail media is a high-growth market, expected to deliver a CAGR of 23%. As you heard from Brian, we have been busy transforming our media and our data proposition and improving our execution. And this not only supports our ambition to improve new business and retention across our media business, but it will also enable us to deliver that improved integrated proposition for our clients with media at the heart. And our recent win with JLR is a great example of that. Now taking back our fair share of the media market is the most significant growth opportunity for WPP at a group level, and it's a core tenet of Elevate28. Now the second area is our next-generation production offer. Now while the overall production market is seeing muted growth, we are seizing the opportunity to take share, internalizing third-party production spend by our agencies, which is estimated at hundreds of millions over the course of Elevate28. We have also identified significant incremental opportunities from new ways of originating creative work, leveraging GenAI and BFX pipelines, which enable us to build next-generation studio capability and make much more of our client work directly. High-velocity content production is a great example of this, which despite being a relatively small proportion of the overall production market today is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 38% over the next 3 years. As the largest production agency globally and with our investment in dedicated capabilities, including content studios, we are well placed to take more than our fair share of this opportunity. We are working with a number of our large clients already in these areas, and we've leveraged innovative content opportunities in some of our recent new business wins. And finally, scaling our enterprise solutions proposition. The enterprise solutions market, as we define it, is forecast to deliver a CAGR of 7%. We play in this space already, but as part of a fragmented offering, existing within agency silos and as such, our current share of the market is low single digit. Now scaling our enterprise solutions across all of our creative brands as well as establishing it as a distinct pillar and investing in direct go-to-market capability, we believe will enable us to significantly grow our market share over the course of Elevate28. The strength of our capability in this area has been recognized by Forrester, amongst others. And with many recent client wins, we are confident we will see an improving growth trajectory. For 2026, the focus will be on consolidating these capabilities under one leader, establishing a strong direct go-to-market team and leveraging partnership opportunities such as the one announced this week with Adobe. Now cumulatively, these opportunities represent a significant white space gross revenue opportunity estimated at up to $900 million over the term of Elevate28 8. And delivering against our growth priorities will, of course, require investment, which will be self-funded from our cost initiatives. Our shift to a new operating model will yield significant efficiencies, building on what we have already done. Since 2024, we have removed GBP 300 million of gross cost savings and our Elevate28 operational plan unlocks a further GBP 500 million of gross annualized cost savings by 2028. Now we expect the associated cash restructuring costs to be around GBP 400 million and for those to be incurred across '26 and '27. It's important to emphasize that our cost actions are targeted at improving our execution and supporting our growth priorities as much as they are about simply removing costs from our business, and they will come from 3 key areas. The first area is that shift to a new operating model. It will drive a more simplified, more integrated way of working. It will enable us to scale our capabilities across the organization and support a stronger and a more effective client proposition. We will consolidate leadership at a global, at regional and at market levels, providing clear roles and responsibilities for our people. We will optimize spans and layers. We will remove duplication across our creative assets, driving a more aligned model, enabling a more effective cross-selling and providing a more holistic view of client success and outcomes. The second bucket focuses on structural cost savings. And as a result of our new operating model, we will deduplicate corporate functions, particularly across our finance and our people teams. We'll further leverage our shared service centers and create centers of excellence. This will set us up to unlock more scaled productivity savings from greater automation and the use of AI across our corporate functions. And the third bucket will come from rationalization opportunities. We will deliver savings from our real estate footprint and from across our long tail of markets and agency operations. In 2026, we expect to realize at least GBP 100 million of in-year P&L savings and GBP 250 million of annualized savings. The estimated restructuring costs associated with these savings in 2026 is around GBP 190 million. Now these targeted actions will improve our execution as well as enable a reallocation of investment into the highest growth opportunities across our business, supporting a rebuild of our margins over time. We will prioritize investment across 3 key areas. Firstly, we are bolstering the main engines of the Elevate28 plan, which you've heard about today. We are directing investments specifically into media and commerce into high-velocity production and enterprise solutions to ensure we capture demand in those high-growth areas. This will include investment in commerce and influencer and analytics talent and in content studios. Second, we are investing to upgrade our go-to-market approach with a focus on our client needs and our new business capabilities. Alongside this, we will rebuild our incentive pool, and we have redesigned our incentive model to align it to our new operating model and with the aim of disincentivizing the past siloed way of working. Third, we are sustaining our commitment to WPP open to data and to AI. To give you a sense of scale, in 2025, we invested more than GBP 300 million in this area, and we will protect this investment to ensure continued enhancements to our technology platform and our AI capability. In 2026, we are expecting to reinvest all of the in-year savings from the cost initiatives into the first 2 priorities, and this is reflected in our margin guidance for the year. Now these investments will be made in a disciplined manner, and we will fully leverage our more integrated approach to benefit from scaled capabilities and a rigorous prioritization in the areas that will drive the highest growth opportunities and returns for WPP. And let me move on to talk about our portfolio review. In recent months, we have conducted this review aimed at assessing opportunities to unlock embedded value and refocus our perimeter. Now this review has covered all assets that we own, whether an operating unit or a minority investment. We've evaluated how each strengthen our proposition and fit our future integrated offer. While we have many great assets within our portfolio, it may not be optimal for us to remain owners either in whole or in part of some of those in the future, and we've applied that best owner assessment to identify the assets where value is potentially maximized outside the group alongside a plan for continuing to rationalize noncore passive investments. Now this has also been an exercise in determining the areas we want to prioritize investment in and being rigorously disciplined in our allocation of capital. And of course, underpinning this is a disciplined approach to M&A with a focus on organic execution in the near term. With the review now complete, we are moving directly to action. And while we don't have specific transactions to announce today, the work is underway, and we will update you in due course. And that leads me to our approach to capital allocation, which is framed across 3 clear priorities. First, we are committed to our investment-grade balance sheet. This is our foundation. Our primary focus here is retaining strong liquidity, reducing our gross debt and improving our leverage ratios over time. As shared earlier, Fitch Ratings has assigned WPP, a BBB rating with a stable outlook, further solidifying our investment-grade balance sheet. Our second priority is funding organic growth. As you heard, we are prioritizing investment in the highest growth and the highest returning areas of the business. And crucially, we are funding this through our cost initiatives I shared today with a strict focus on scaling capabilities that support growth across the entire group rather than in silos. And third, we will share the proceeds of growth. We aim to balance consistent, sustainable shareholder returns over the medium term with inorganic investment. Reflecting this, the Board have proposed a full year dividend of 15p for 2025. We will apply a focused approach to M&A, deploying capital only when an acquisition is clearly more efficient than building that capability internally. And beyond that and as appropriate, any excess capital will be returned to shareholders. And finally, for me, a brief note on how we -- how our reporting is going to evolve to reflect this new structure. Now the current structure is shown here, and our ultimate objective is for our financial reporting to map directly onto our new organizational model. For segmental reporting purposes, the 4 operating units, which are the engines of our business will be included in an enlarged global integrated agencies reportable segment, which will now include public relations and our design agencies. For regional reporting, results will be broken down by North America, EMEA, Latin America and APAC. And over time, we want to give you better visibility into the engines of our business. And therefore, within global integrated agencies, we will provide specific disclosures on net revenue and organic growth for our key capabilities, media, production, creative and enterprise solutions. So that's all for me, and I will hand you back to Cindy to wrap up.

Amazing. Thank you, Joanne. Home stretch folks. So before we conclude and open up to questions, I just want to spend a minute on how my team and I will hold ourselves accountable and measure success. As Joanne mentioned, our primary focus is to return our business to growth. Organic growth is our most important success metric and getting back to consistent organic growth is our North Star as a management team. But as you know, organic growth is a lag indicator and will take us some time to deliver. So beyond the lag indicators, you can see on the right-hand side of the slide behind me, we've also included on the left a few leading indicators and success metrics that my team and I have as part of our own scorecard. -- that will provide tangible evidence along the way that the actions we're taking are working. I won't read them to you, but you can see there are things like new business wins, client retention, cost savings, asset disposals. These are the types of lead indicators we'll be rigorously managing, and we're confident that these will drive the outcomes that matter the most over time, consistent organic growth, supported by a solid financial foundation. I also want to reassure you that we're not going to just simply disappear and report back on KPIs in a year's time. We really want you to see the execution of the strategy in real time. We want to invite more frequent engagement with our investor community. So over the coming months, we'll be hosting a series of deep dive webinars to take you further under the hood of our key growth engines, specifically in the areas of media, next-gen production and enterprise solutions. So I know we've shared a lot of information with you today, and thank you for listening. But I have to say our mission has never been clearer to be the trusted growth partner to the world's leading brands in the era of AI. Elevate28 is a bold plan for a simpler, more integrated WPP. We will stabilize the business, return to organic growth, create capacity to invest and deliver attractive returns for our shareholders. And we'll do that by delivering growth for our clients by being a simpler, more integrated company by leveraging our agentic marketing platform, WPP Open for competitive advantage and creating firm financial foundations for the future. I am very confident that WPP has a bright future ahead. This is a WPP that is fit for the future and built to win. Now we're going to draw this strategy update to a close. We're going to invite questions from the audience for me, Joanne, Brian or any members of the senior leadership team. And I want to thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Cindy. My name is Tom Singlehurst. I head up Investor Relations for WPP. We're going to go to questions. We'll -- before we dive in, a couple of quick parish notices. For those in the room, we're going to bring a mic to you. So if you can just be patient. If you could state your name and which firm you represent, that would be fantastic. And to make sure we've got enough time for everyone, it would be hugely appreciated if you could ration yourself to maybe 2 questions and a follow-up. [Operator Instructions] But let's start with questions in the room. Laura, maybe start with you.

Laura Metayer from Morgan Stanley. Three questions today, please. First question on differentiation and competitive advantage. I'm curious, what do you think is the single differentiation of WPP. Obviously, we've heard from peers need to like have an integrated offering, a focus on data, driving leading with AI. So I'm just wondering what do you think is the single differentiating factor of WPP. Second question is when you talked about the JLR win, you said you pitched it as an outcome-based revenue model. Do you mind providing a little bit more details here, like any KPIs that -- and if you can also say maybe like telling us a little bit more generally, like how you think the revenue model will evolve and what sort of KPIs will be used to measure performance? And then lastly, on the Enterprise Solutions business, could you give us an example of a typical project of WPP here and how it differs from leading IT services consultants because obviously, it's part of an agency.

Sure. Thank you for your questions, Laura. They're great. I'll have a go at the first one and then maybe invite Johnny Horny to talk about JLR. He led the pitch and maybe Jeff Geheb to give an example of an enterprise solution engagement, if that's okay. So I think Brian was incredibly articulate on this. I tried to paint a picture of WPP Open as a very different proposition, right? And it's -- because it's integrated, it's not a point solution. It transforms the entire end-to-end marketing workflow. It's powered by Open Intelligence, which is our foundational data layer. And we've integrated InfoSum's distributed data collaboration capabilities, which means it's built for the future of marketing, not the past. And that is an incredible competitive advantage. Like we have all the ingredients we need to win. And what we really needed to do is pull it all together into an integrated proposition and then power it with this incredible platform that we have. And frankly, when clients see that, they see the power of it and its ability to drive growth without compromising on data ownership. We win in head-to-head competition. That's what you're seeing happen. But I don't know, Brian, do you -- is there anything you want to add?

I think one of the things I said was that every client is different. And there is no one approach to driving business results for clients. We've built a platform in WPP Open that is flexible that includes our own proprietary technology, but also partners effectively with other companies. So we're always ready for what's next. And we built a data model that similarly doesn't rely on a static data asset that is a legacy CRM solution. Instead, it relies on the ability to connect any and all data sources so that we can be more intelligent and more dynamic in understanding consumer behavior and driving those business results for our clients. So it's different for every client. But as Cindy said, it's really an integrated approach across all parts of our business grounded in that data and technology strategy.

Thank you. I would just add, we are still contracting with JLR. So there's a limit to what we can share. But Johnny, why don't you say a few words?

Yes, sure. Yes. Thanks for mentioning that. We haven't officially been appointed by JLR. We pitched throughout last year, went into a period of exclusivity with them through January, and we're now contracting and hoping that by March will be live. But at the core of our pitch to your question, I guess, what's our secret sauce? I think our secret sauce is where you put everything you've seen this morning together. So starting with Open Intelligence to be able to build cohorts and understand audiences in a way that doesn't require us to do simply old-fashioned ID matching, but to keep the data where it is, keep it safe and secure and then put that into a team that we're going to build with JLR, where we and they are all together on the open platform end-to-end. And it's the end-to-end integrated nature of this offer that I think then allows us to make what I think are becoming genuinely competitive offers when it comes to outcomes. So those outcomes aren't do you like the agency you work with, those outcomes are, are we selling more product? And will we get paid on being able to sell more product by being able to build their brands and measurably show that there's greater levels of desire for their products and the crown jewels of brands that they've got. So we haven't finished contracting, but those are the defining and that pitch was against all the major holding companies. I think those are going to be the integrated propositions that will see us win JLR and hopefully many more JLRs pulling these ingredients together.

Thanks, Johnny.

Can I just build on that because Laura, I think stepping back a little bit, your question is around what happens with a time and materials model with AI. And the story is really moving on. Hopefully, you picked it up today. Our clients are using us and it's for the industry really. They need brand safety. They need to know that they have got cultural nuances. They have the best creative and strategy talent, working with them on their brands to really differentiate. And also that they've got the access to the best talent. And navigating through what is an incredibly and ever more complex ecosystem is incredibly challenging for CMOs. It's getting tougher and tougher. And that's what they're paying us for. It's no longer they're paying for us to create 5 ads. In fact, we can create 1,000 ads, but it's how do you get those ads into the right audiences. And that's really what they're paying for, which is really enabling this output-based pricing, it's outcome-based pricing, and it's also shifting more to tech fees and licensing fees as well. So this will be an evolution, but we're making lots of progress in this area.

To answer your question about enterprise solution scaling. So let's just stay with automotive. This could be JLR. It's certainly true with Ford. So when you begin to solve a marketing problem around content transformation or a customer experience challenge for marketing and you start with the CMO, you quickly evolve that conversation and realize that's an enterprise problem you're solving. Content doesn't live in marketing. It lives as an asset of the entire company. Customer experience lives as an asset of service, brand of product development. And so the nature of our work usually begins with the marketer and then it expands further and further and further. And soon, we're in rooms with IT leaders, procurement leaders, service leaders. And instead of using their silos to define how we work, we're pulling them together. And with AI, that's collapsing at an even more increased rate of change. So AI platforms right now are -- they're collapsing the buying patterns with IT buyers used to buy a platform, implement it for years and then draw the business in. Nowadays, there's a really fast iteration cycle. So we're finding ourselves in rooms now starting with marketing, but really extends to all the stakeholder groups.

Can we go to Nico.

Nicolas Langlet from BNP Paribas. I've got 3 questions. The first one on the existing business with clients. which was definitely a weak part in the 2025 performance. Can you tell us a bit more about what happened? Is it related to scope reduction, pricing pressure? Or can you give us more detail about that? And what are the concrete actions you have already implemented to stabilize the business with the existing clients? The second question on WPP Open Pro. Can you give us an update regarding the rollout, the first feedback and what sort of opportunity you see in the mid- to long term? And finally, of the GBP 500 million gross cost reduction, have you included any benefit from generative AI tools in that GBP 500 million? And if you can share that? And of the GBP 500 million, how much do you plan to reinvest in the business?

Yes, why don't you take the first?

Okay. So look, Nico, it's absolutely the right question. If you look at our performance in 2025, we talked about a drag from net new business of about 150 basis points. So that points to just under 400 basis points from the underlying business. And the majority of the cuts that we saw really came from the creative part of our business. And as I said in my prepared remarks, it was really an overview, and we did see significant spending cuts, particularly from the start of Q2. Look, we can point to different reasons for it, but there was an awful lot of uncertainty, and we saw heightened volatility across clients. We've talked about the polarization. Many clients, we saw very strong growth during the year, but others cut significantly and at very short notice as well. And effective, we tend to have more project-based spend in our business. And of course, that's often the first places that get cut when we see that volatility. And I would also just add that as you heard from Brian today, Brian and the team have been incredibly busy in the last 18 months really setting up our competitive proposition for the future, redesigning how we deliver for clients. And that undoubtedly has had some disruption in the business and the underlying business. And we've been very deliberate in Elevate28 that Brian and the team have done a lot of the heavy lift and their focus is now on execution. So it sort of brings you on to the second part, what are we doing about it. So if you think about that for media. And then with the creative part of the business, we are building an incredible powerhouse within WPP Creative. We did get in our own way a lot of the time in the past with our silos. WPP Creative will enable scaled capabilities across all of our agencies. WPP Open as well will enable our creative teams to work in a standardized way, and that's everything from big large clients to smaller clients. So it will improve what we're delivering, and that will help both with our larger clients and that tail of clients where we've seen more reductions in spend. And I think that's really important with creative. Sometimes we get very focused on the headline cost saving, but it really is about creating a more agile organization with fewer silos. And just on the GBP 500 million of growth savings and how much we're going to reinvest. I talked about the in-year savings in '26 being GBP 100 million annualized savings will be GBP 250 million. All of that we're going to reinvest in 2026. I talked about this priority to stabilize and invest in the growth drivers, we will do that. Look, it's too early to say how much of the remainder we will invest, but I would assume that we will invest as much as we need of that to support our growth ambitions.

I'm happy to say a few words about WPP Open Pro. It's early days, right? We only launched a few months ago. But what we did was basically productize or SaaS-ified certain capabilities from within the WPP Open platform. And we did it to target the mid-market SMB kind of end of the client segment. The clients that would largely look to self-service that kind of capability. I'm very encouraged actually. We've got a number of deals with clients. We've got a very healthy pipeline against this, albeit it's small in absolute terms. I think the interesting learning from my perspective is our top 100 clients, say, are looking at WPP Open Pro as a way to software enable the long tail of markets that they service. So rather than having full teams on the ground, you can start to see a world where they can software enable their long tail. And that's kind of interesting.

Perfect. Maybe we can go to Adrien.

Cindy, this is Adrien from Bank of America. So I've got maybe 2 questions maybe for Brian and maybe one for you, Cindy. John, I know we're talking this afternoon. So I'll leave the financial questions maybe for later. But maybe, Brian, on -- you talked about all the business wins in Q4 and Q1 and well done on that. Can you tell us like what was the factor or what were the factors behind those wins? And how much of a factor price was behind those wins? And then secondly, I know we've talked about this before, but you put data at the core of your strategy. But how do you solve for the fact that you don't really have, as far as I know, at least a proprietary identity graph compared to competitors? And maybe more for Cindy. So today, we heard a lot about the opportunities. Sorry to come back on the risk. How much like revenue attrition would you expect in maybe in creative because of AI deflation around the revenue per head, for example, how much would you anticipate for the next couple of years?

Adrien, in terms of the new business wins, everything that I showed in terms of our proposition contributed to those wins. And without going client by client, what I said about every client being different applies to how we pitch business and then how we ultimately service business. So whether that was winning JLR or NCL or the various other wins, each one of those solutions was different. And the great thing about our platform is it allows that and it enables us to go in and do things differently for clients. So selling cars is different than selling cruises is different than various other clients that we have. So I think that contributed to it. The way that we're structured also helps quite a bit. So we're not going into these pitches as Mindshare or Wavemaker or one of our other agencies, we're going to these pitches as WPP media. And increasingly, we're going into these pitches as WPP. So we get a lot of help from our colleagues at VML and Ogilvy and AKQA and from WPP production. And the clients see that, and they know that while we're pitching one thing, we're going to offer a full breadth of services over time. All these pitches are competitive, so price is always a factor, but that wasn't a defining factor in any of these pitches. We have a proprietary identity asset. One of the things that you have to understand is that identity is pretty ubiquitous in the market. So there are lots of companies that provide identity solutions. And it's really an old-fashioned notion of what we need to do to join up disparate data points. So we also have an identity asset called MerLink. We see every adult in the United States and we use that. We also use other partners like Experian when we want to augment that. And because we have a solution that allows us to access any identity asset, it's really not a problem for us. Having identity is such a small part of what you have to do to understand consumer behavior. What we do have is InfoSum, which allows us to connect to hundreds of other data sources. And instead of those being household addresses or e-mail addresses, these are what are people consuming on TikTok? How are they interacting with creators on YouTube. Those signals are much more important than having a traditional identity asset, which again, is a legacy system and fairly ubiquitous and accessible in the market.

Yes. I would just build -- thanks for your question, Adrien. I would just build on what Brian said. I mean, I've never met a client that doesn't want more for less. That's not a new dynamic. We operate in a very highly competitive market and price pressure is a constant feature, right? But I would say that we probably accept on some level some downward pricing pressure from AI productivity, if you will. But what we're doing here is creating an organization that can cross-sell more effectively to address the white space within our installed client base and be more effective at converting new business. If you take our top 25 clients, for example, we probably capture at best 1/3 of addressable spend. When we unlock this collaboration and cross-sell opportunity for WPP, we have massive opportunity to offset and grow in those areas.

Why don't you pass it on to Steve, given he's right next to you.

Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis. Just on the -- some numbers, sorry. You said 5% to 6% gross hit from losses. Can you quantify the '25 and '26 to date wins to kind of give us some idea of a net number to work off as we stand today? So that's the first question. Second, Brian, in the new setup and the new kind of pitch that you're doing to clients, where you haven't won, why was that? I know things is different, but it would just be useful to hear some insights there. And you also said you had some more work to do as well in your comments. I just wonder from my perspective, how much is the pitch that you're going with the clients now absolutely the right pitch? And what more is there that you do have to do?

It's a very dynamic business. So it's very rare that the right pitch today is the right pitch a week from now or a month from now. So when I say we have more work to do, it's that we're on a constant quest to meet the needs of our clients in a rapidly evolving world, and that's never going to change. Structurally, we're set up to win, and we have been winning. From a data and technology standpoint, I feel great about where we are. We have the building blocks in place to evolve, not just win today, but evolve as the market evolves. So I feel great about that. In terms of why we didn't win, I say all the time to the team, you can be the best in a pitch, you can be the best on the day and you can still lose a pitch. And there are lots of factors that go into it. Sometimes it's price. Sometimes we don't feel comfortable with where a prospect is taking us in terms of commercial negotiations. Sometimes it's an affinity for one of our competitors between a CMO that knows a certain team. So there are lots of different factors that go into it. And we're not going to win every pitch, but we need to go into every pitch with the right solution for clients. And then I feel great about getting our fair share and actually exceeding our fair share and starting to win back the market share that we've lost.

Thanks for the question, Steve. I'm always hesitant at this time of the year to give a net new business because there's a whole year to play for, there's a pipeline, et cetera. But let me share some of the data that we've already shared and you'll be able to kind of broadly figure it out. And then I'll just give you some context around the pipeline. So last year, we said that our gross wins were 300 to 400 basis points of drag, and then we ended up at the top end of that. And we said that the net new business impact was about 150 basis points for 2025. Really encouraging, the gross win impact for 2026 exceeds and that gross win impact in 2025, and that really reflects in recent months, the new business, the better business performance that we've seen, and that's really encouraging. 2025 was a much lower activity year for new business. What we have seen in recent months is the pipeline activity building up again, which is also encouraging. And I would also often get asked, what's defensive and what's offensive? And it's very interesting when you look at the pipeline and the opportunities, it's less black and white than that. It's oftentimes you're defending some scope, but you also have an opportunity to win more. And so it's getting much more nuanced. But as I said, encouraged by the activity, the pickup in the pipeline and of course, the momentum that we've seen in recent months.

Perfect. I'm just going to do a couple of questions from the webcast, and then I will get back to the room. First one is on the broader strategic shift at WPP to become a more holistic partner to solve challenges for clients. Does this increasingly take WPP into competition with different competitors? And how well do you think you are positioned to win against them?

Yes, that's for me, right? Look, I think we have all the ingredients we need to win. Like we have, as I said, amazing talent, incredible capabilities, fantastic technology and technology partnerships. We have scale. We have the trust of our clients, which is super important. What we need to do now is pull it all together into an integrated proposition and lead with our agentic marketing platform. And when we do that, I think what you're seeing is we're pretty hard to beat for clients that are ready for that. Like all of our clients are on a journey. Some are really at the very beginning, some are way down the line and most are somewhere in between. But when you see the power of that, turn up in your office and the growth that we can deliver, again, without compromising on data ownership, it's a very strong proposition. So I feel very confident that we're going to be in a great position to deliver this on a repeatable sustained basis.

Perfect. And one more from the webcast before coming back to the room. It's on a very important topic, which is leverage. So I presume for Joanne. A question here about clarifying the leverage framework. You previously guided to a net leverage target of 1.5 to 1.75x. Has this target been withdrawn? And how do you manage the process with the rating agencies regarding an investment-grade rating?

Okay. What we've clearly shared today in our capital allocation framework is our commitment to an investment grade balance sheet and that feels more relevant as we progress through Elevate28 plan feels more relevant than the historic range that we had and we are very committed to that investment-grade balance sheet. And I think, as I said in my remarks, and that's reinforced with the Fitch rating. I want to spend a bit of time on leverage as well. Leverage is really driven by, obviously, EBITDA and net debt. And our net debt -- our average net debt through '25 has actually come down slightly. And so our elevated leverage as a result of that lower EBITDA. And hopefully, as you've heard today, and we presented a plan that is going to get us back to growth. And obviously, with that, we'll follow improved margin, profitability, improved cash generation and we'll help that out. We also talked about the importance of reducing our gross debt. We talked about the role that the portfolio review will play on that. And over the course of Elevate28 we expect our leverage to come down. We do have liquidity at the end of the year of GBP 4.4 billion. Our maturity profile is 5.8 years. We recently refinanced our bond, et cetera. So we're in a very strong position. In terms of the rating agencies, I mean, many of them are here today. And we have a very strong relationship with the rating agencies. We engage with the rating agencies, we listen to what's important from their perspective. And like all stakeholders, we take that into consideration as we ensure that we're making the right decisions and taking the right actions to ultimately deliver long-term returns for all of those stakeholders.

Let's come back to the room. Can we go to Julien at the back. Sorry, yes, when you get the microphone back. Sorry.

Julien Roch with Barclays. Looking at Page 41, you have a production CAGR over '24, '28 of minus 1% for the industry. I thought it was a growing part of agency services. So why the decline for the industry? And what can WP production can grow at? That's my first question. Then on organic, accelerate organic growth in 2028, previous CEO had a 3% plus organic guidance. So if everything goes according to plan, what's your cruising altitude? What is your ambition? And then lastly, moving from holding company to a single company, does that mean one P&L per country? Or will you still have separate P&L for the new 4 entities? Or will you still have separate P&L per agencies?

Sorry, Joanne, I think you're on.

I might need to repeat your second question, but let me answer the first and the third first, and we can come back to that. Yes, look, on production, and I shared this in my remarks -- prepared remarks that there's subdued growth in production overall. That's not the way to look at what production can mean for our business and how that can contribute to our growth. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars that our clients spend and their production today goes outside of WPP. It goes to a variety of third-party providers. And hopefully, as you saw today as well, production is being completely revolutionized and transformed by AI. We talked about particular parts of production, high-velocity production, which is growing at 38%. That's a very small part of the production market today, but it is a huge opportunity. And as the largest agency globally and with the investment that we're making in content studios and with our team, we're incredibly well placed to take advantage of that. And also with the WPP production consolidation, we are much fit for purpose to really internalize a lot of that client spend, which we can, in an integrated proposition, make it more efficient for our clients. So it's really, really a win-win and our clients are getting the very best of production capability in the market and that AI investment as well. In terms of the P&Ls, so how we will operate and maybe I'll start with WPP Creative and then look at it overall. So the WPP Creative will run on P&Ls. The regional and market models will mirror media. And in certain markets as well, actually, those media and creative and production operations and teams will be even more integrated. But we will have one P&L for WPP Creative for the markets. For the agencies, we will still measure them on their revenues and their contributions, but that will not be the lead P&L. And then across the other 4 areas, of course, they will each have their P&Ls that will roll up to WPP overall. I think the most important thing is as we talk today about the incentives, we have redesigned our incentive model so that it's much more aligned -- everybody is much more aligned on a WPP outcome, and we struck that balance right where it's still incentives that people can really influence as well. So a much simpler P&L structure even if I did.

Just to build on that because I'm trying to see what's behind your question. Please don't underestimate the enormity of the change that we're making. We're moving from hundreds of stand-alone operating companies to 4 operating units across 4 regions. And this common incentive that is linked to WPP's overall performance is going to change behavior in very dramatic ways. It's going to take all the friction out of the organization. It's going to make us much more client obsessed. It's going to enable us to put the right resource in front of the right client at the right time. So I just wanted to say -- please don't underestimate what's involved in making these changes that we're proposing.

And then, Julien, I think your second question was around our ambition on organic growth, if that's right.

That's right.

And I said we weren't going to give specific medium-term targets, and that was quite intentional. We talked about the 3 phases. The job that we have to do as a management team in '26 is to stabilize the business, continue to build on that new business momentum and improve our client retention. And that will get us back to growth at some point during 2027, and then we will accelerate from there. So I'm intentionally not putting a number on it, but you can -- that will give you a sense of what we're expecting in terms of the trajectory.

No, I understand that you don't want to give us like a '28 numbers, but it's more -- actually, it's probably more a question for Cindy, right, is what's your ambition in terms of growth rate in 5 years, in 10 years? What would you consider a success for WPP is achieving the previous target of 3% or you actually have more ambition than that? -- without giving us a year or whatever, but what's the...

I'd like to get to the end of Elevate28 capturing our fair share of the market and then go beyond. But look, we're -- in the short term, I'm absolutely focused on delivering growth for clients, building on our market momentum and stabilizing our performance. And that will remain our short-term focus.

Can we go with Annick?

Annick Maas from Bernstein. And first question is, as a company which is employing 100,000 people in a world where change is becoming more and more -- it's accelerating basically, how can you stay nimble and keep up with this pace? Or what are the challenges here? The second one is on AI, and this is probably for and it's more conceptually. I guess AI is leading to staff efficiencies in terms of absolute numbers of stuff, but you also have an unprecedented industry structure with one less players. So how do you think conceptually about number of staff and absolute and staff cost inflation in the next years? And then you spoke about the rationalization of the portfolio. I suspect you speak with a few players. Who are these potential buyers?

Good. Well, look, I'll say in terms of staying nimble, like that's a continuous process, right? We invest in skilling and building new capabilities in our employees on a continuous basis. We have creative technology apprenticeships. We have all kinds of formal AI coaching and training that we put our people through. But I think it also -- it's about also staying close to our partners. We have what we call forward deployed engineers. So we take resources from our technology partners. We put them into our organization. We train them on our platform. And then we send them into clients to co-innovate on new solutions. So I think just being in and around this environment creates a very, as I said, very AI native mindset where we can just continuously build these capabilities. These aren't capabilities you build through formal online training. You have to get your hands on it and actually put it to work for clients. And that's -- that's really how we're staying nimble and in front of things. But do you want to take the question on...

Yes. And exactly through the questions, I think. Nico, I think it was you asked me about AI efficiencies and I didn't answer. Look, as we look at the business going forward, undoubtedly, if nothing else changed, we can do more with less. So we can do a lot more with a lot fewer people, but it's never just as simple as that. What we're able to do now for our clients is before we might have created 5 ads and we were managing that. Now it might be 1,000 ads and they're very different how those ads need to be used to target audiences and drive returns. That's requiring different skills and different talent in the organization. Now some of that, we are upskilling our people, some of that we're bringing new talent into the organization. And if you think about the plan that we shared today, we will be reallocating talent around the business. So yes, we will be delivering cost savings. And in people -- in a business where most of our cost savings are people, that will mean a reduction of certain heads, but we will be reinvesting back into talent, different types of talent, commerce talent, influencer talent, much more analytics talent. We already have that at scale today, but really, those are the areas that we will be investing in and with that will come a different profile. In terms of how we measure it, the most important metric will be revenue per head, and that will reflect also our ambition to grow and do more with people, decouple our revenue model from our FTEs. And that's really all around our client delivery. In the back office, there's an opportunity, and we're already doing it in pockets. How do we leverage open, how do we leverage AI to drive productivity savings in our back office. And with the plans over Elevate28, we will do much more of that, much more at scale and on a standardized level. Just in terms of the question, is there AI productivity you asked built into the GBP 500 million. There is on the back office side. But on the front office, the way we think about it is we are creating productivity efficiencies in how we do things, but we're reinvesting that back into delivering even more value, even more outcomes for our clients. And then that feeds into the evolution of our commercial model as well. So that's all built into our plans. But we don't pull out and say we're going to deliver productivity savings from that delivery. We think about it much more holistic. There was a third...

Portfolio.

The buyers. Well, look, as I -- as we shared and particularly in the people business, incredibly sensitive, and we don't -- we're not at a point where we're ready to share externally. What is important is that we've seen an opportunity where we have embedded value of great assets that we have, and that will give us greater degree of financial flexibility and enable us to target our capital allocation more. And for some of these assets, there are many buyers, some of them are attractive assets.

We go with Ciaran.

A couple left for me. Joanne, maybe just on your comments on 2027. Can you clarify how we should understand the comments of growth during 2027? Should we think about that as implying a positive exit rate on like-for-likes rather than necessarily positive like-for-like growth for FY '27 in total? And then maybe, Cindy, could you just give us a bit more color on the new incentives? I guess, how do you kind of balance it between individual remit and kind of growth targets? And I guess, just in terms of what they look like versus the legacy incentive structures, how different are they? And then just finally, I mean, on the legacy structures, do they roll off over a period of time? Or what is that phasing period between the new structures and the old structures going at?

Very quick answer to your first, it's the latter. So it's during 2027. So you should think about it as a positive exit rate rather than for 2027 as a whole.

So on the incentives, basically, if you're sitting in an operating unit, your incentives are 50% tied to your operating unit and 50% tied to WPP. If you're in WPP as part of a corporate function, you're 100% WPP. If you're a GCL, you're paid on your client growth. It's that simple. And it's dramatically different from where we are today, where if you're in an agency, you're paid on your agency results primarily. So that is very, very different. And that's why I think it's going to unlock very different behavior, much different collaboration. In the past, our agencies competed with each other. That was the model. Today, when we go into a pitch, we cast the right resource for the right client at the right time and -- it enables that. It enables a much more client-centric approach to the business. Just to add, we're implementing that in 2026.

I got a couple of people in the wings. I'm going to start with Anna, I think, at the back, and then we'll come to you, sir.

Anna Patrice from Berenberg. A couple of questions from my side. So you were talking about the evolving remuneration part from time and material to project-based. So maybe how it has evolved in the past over the last couple of years? Like what's the share of time and material overall? And where do you see that going into the future? And what could be the impact on your profitability? That's the first question. The second question on the capital allocation, you were also referring to M&A. So just quickly, maybe what are you looking for? What are the things that are still kind of white spots for you that you would like to enforce within the overall WPP?

Shall I take the first one?

Yes.

So just in terms of that evolution, and it's -- that's the way you should think about it. This will be an evolution in our commercial model. And this is an evolution for the industry and for our clients as well. So there's 3 key areas that we look at. One is output-based pricing and where we see more and more of that is in our production business today. We then have performance or outcome based pricing. We've talked a little bit about that. I mean we've always had an element of that in our fee structures with clients, but that's becoming increasingly important, particularly as Brian had shared today how we can measure that outcome more. And the third element is just tech and labor fees as well. That can be through licensing fees, through bundles, through subscriptions, et cetera. And all 3 of those we have in our business today. So with many of our clients for parts of work that we do for them, we're working with our clients to understand what works best, what aligns structures. clients we have going much more major outcome and others, it's more of an evolution of it. So really that's the way to think about it. So -- but very, very much encouraged by the shift that we're seeing. And as we are more and more confident in what we can deliver for our clients, of course, that creates more stickiness with clients. We see a big opportunity to enlarge the scope of what we do for clients. And you asked specific on margin on a per unit basis, we often say, of course, if you just look at it and everything else is the same, it would be deflationary in revenue because we can produce units at a lower cost. But actually what's more important, what clients are paying a premium for is all of that brand safety, the culture strategic input that we're bringing and how we can drive more growth. We're able to do that in a much more efficient way. And so we're looking at this to be ultimately over time, margin enhancing for us.

Yes. On your question on M&A, again, I would just repeat that Phase 1 of our plan, we are really deeply focused on stabilizing our performance, delivering growth for our clients and building on the current market momentum that we have. As we get into later stage and free up capacity to invest in growth, we certainly will. And I would -- I stand by the statement we have everything we need to win. But as we create capacity to invest, I'll be looking to enhance in those growth areas that we mentioned, media, data, commerce, social influencer and the growth areas. But that's not the short-term focus. Short-term focus is on stabilizing our performance.

Gentlemen over here has been by patient.

Jerome Bodin from ODDO BHF. Two questions. The first one on the WPP creative. So just to make sure I have properly understood. Will the idea be to pitch from WPP creative or from at the network level? That's my first question. And then also still on WPP Creative. So I have understood that the idea is to improve the mobility in terms of talent between all the networks. So how do you plan to make the improvements from a pure HR perspective in terms of systems and HR architecture? I think it's not so easy. Second question on disposal. So I fully understood that you can't give any names, but could you maybe explain what could be the idea in terms of disposal? Will it be an asset disposal at 100%? Or could you partner with someone with a minority stake? And then linked to that, could we have an update on Kantar on the stake in Kantar, where you are? And what do you plan?

What was the last question?

Kantar.

John? You want to say a word on WPP Creative, our CEO of WPP Creative.

You can see where it came from. Thank you. Yes, first of all, on WPP Trade, it's -- after being at some of these investor meetings in the past, it's nice not to come and talk about a big merger that we're going through in the creative agencies. I've done that before. We all know that game. We've got -- in the analysis we've done in the last 6 months, we've got really powerful agencies. We've done that work in these last 5 years. And I saw that just this week, the drum creative rankings, #1, Ogilvy, #2 VML. It's not a super power we want to walk away from. So that's thing number one. And so I'm really excited about the strategy of not merging things, but getting behind our agencies. So that's a precursor to your first question, which is -- we're not using WPP Creative as a brand or an agency. It's not an agency. It's an operating system lets those great agencies, those very creative agencies operate together because we have a couple of beliefs, and we heard this from our clients. Our clients love our agencies. They love the choice. They love the creativity, they love the diversity, but they found it hard to work with them and found that either the clients or our GCLs, our global client leaders had to do the navigation, and that was difficult. So we're doing what we think is the best of both worlds, build around these great agencies, highly recognized, very creative agencies that make it easier to navigate. So WPP Creative is simply a way to navigate. It's an operating system. It's not an agency with a very light layer of infrastructure between them to make that happen. And if we do that, we will grow better than we ever have before as WPP and as creative agency. So if we unite them in the right way, which we are, -- we have the second part of your question, which is the ability for talent to move around between those agencies or to team up for client assignments. That's something we haven't had as well as we should have in the past. So that mobility, the second part of your question is key, and that's one of the reasons for the group. If we do this, we can also put better capability across all our creative agencies. Cindy talked about enterprise solutions. Jeff talked about it. This will be different than other holding companies creative agency groups, if you will, because of the embedment of everything Jeff and Cindy talked about with Enterprise Solutions. So to your point, WP Creative is not an agency. It's an operating system lets the great agencies. The creative agencies of WPP be great individually and be great together; and two, it allows for talent mobility.

Jerome, thanks for your question, and I hope you'll forgive me for not answering it. We're not going to name any assets or give any further guidance today. We've carried out a complete strategic review of our group. We've identified assets that we feel we're probably not the best owners for in the long term. We've started a formal process. And as soon as we have anything to report, we will. But thanks for the question.

And I'll just follow up with Kantar, which you asked specifically about. I mean, Kantar, obviously, they sold the media part of the business last year. And they now have 2 divisions, Numerator Worldpanel and Kantar Brands. And those 2 divisions, they've done a big lift in terms of those 2 setting them up to operate independently, and that will be completed in the next few months. Obviously, that gives more flexibility in terms of realizing value from that business for both ourselves and BN, and we're very aligned with BN on the time lines for that, but nothing really more to add. I mean I think just specifically to your question on could this look like minority sales? Yes, it could. So there may be some assets that we bring majority owners into as well.

And Richard.

I will keep it to 2 questions. Richard Kramer from Arete Research. Cindy, you mentioned productizing WPP Open and Pro and for the mid-market in particular, do you see offerings like Meta, Andromeda and Google Pomelli as fundamentally competing with WPP? Or do you see them as somehow complementary? And my question for Brian, there's been a lot of recent discussion and disclosure around principal trading and rebates. How are you going to address this question of transparency going forward? And is this an opportunity in the market for you to take some more share?

Thanks for your question, Richard. As I said, there's a lot of point solutions out there. Some are tied to specific platforms. I think when companies start to stack all these up, -- it becomes expensive, complex and you break the workflow. So I don't -- I think what we have is fundamentally different. It's an end-to-end platform. We are agnostic and independent in terms of how we invest our clients' media budgets. And we have relationships with all the major platforms anyway. So I think what's behind your question is, are we going to be disintermediated by the big tech players? I don't think it's that easy to just turn on a solution in a client environment and watch the magic happen. And this involves real transformation and our clients need help. As I suggested, their data is not always ready. Their people aren't always ready. Their systems aren't always ready. So I see a real opportunity in being that intelligent orchestration layer. I don't see -- we're not seeing a disintermediation dynamic play out in any way.

In terms of principal Trading, building compelling performance-oriented products has always been a part of our business, Richard, as you know. In fact, WPP was really a pioneer in building products that drive value for clients. In many cases, those are part and parcel of the services that we provide our clients. And in other cases, it requires us to invest, invest in technology, invest in our trading partners, invest in sources of data and then pull all of that together on behalf of our clients to drive performance. In a lot of markets for a lot of different channels that we service, we do sell principal media products to our clients. And those products are actually built with our clients. And they are asking us for more, frankly. Both Cindy and Joanne touched on the fact that our clients, in many cases, are CMOs, CMOs are under tremendous pressure to prove the value of marketing and grow their business. And so in many cases, they come to us and they say, how can you help us navigate addressable television? How can you help us navigate social media or commerce or retail media. And with our clients, we design products where, in many cases, we have to invest in those products. So it's a part of our business, and it's a growing part of our business, and I continue -- I expect it to continue to grow over time. In terms of us taking share, I do think that we can take share through our investment in those products. Again, if you come back to our strategy with respect to technology, we're not trying to sell assets that we acquired for billions of dollars. We're trying to work with technology companies, data companies, media companies to connect these things to build products that drive better performance. So in many ways, we are more impartial, more objective in how we construct our principal-based media products, and therefore, they're more compelling to our clients, and I expect they'll buy more of them over time.

Now we promised to get you out by midday. I've got a couple of questions, 3 from the webcast, and then we'll draw a line under it. But first one for Joanne, once again on leverage and the balance sheet. Could you please let us know if you intend to refinance the September '26 bond out of cash or by issuing another bond? That was the first question.

That's easy. We've done that. We refinanced in December, our GBP 1 billion bond, which covers that September maturity and our next maturity after that isn't until May '27.

Perfect. Second question, we've had a couple of these, and so I'm synthesizing them, but it's -- for you, Cindy, it's about the transition from moving from the Board to being a CEO. Can you talk about the challenges and surprises during that process?

Gosh, how long do we have? Well, look, I think on balance, it was a strategic advantage because I knew the team, I knew the business, I knew many of the clients. So I think I avoided the 6-month onboarding experience that perhaps an outsider would. And actually, I had -- as I said, I had a thesis even before I arrived in the role. And so I just think it was a strategic advantage and helped me get to where I wanted to get to faster and actually started making changes relatively quickly. So -- but there's always surprises along the way, right? We'll save that for another day.

Final question. A couple of people have mentioned the Enterprise Solutions capability, the fact that it's 13% of revenue, and that feels high. Where does it come from? Is it -- where are the assets based? And what's their genesis? It might be one for John and Jeff.

Jeff, do you want to take it?

Sure.

Okay. Go forward.

Yes. So the nature of where it came from is 10 years of acquiring companies, 10 years of building capability inside of our creative agencies inside of really every company inside of WPP to be relevant was expanding into new asks. So they were expanding into CRM. They were expanding into technology because their value proposition required them to do it. And so what it happened over the years is that we had distributed capability all over the company. And through the acquisitions, integrations, as John mentioned, specifically when VML and Wunderman Thompson came together, we began to pool all of these assets together, and we could bring them to clients in new ways that didn't require them to, I think Cindy said, shop. They could come together in a holistic offering. So where would you have found it? You would have found it in all the different P&Ls, all the different regions, all the different markets. And so really, what we're doing now is just we're bringing them together, and we're putting under a framework where not every company or a capability is competing on to itself. And so for the first time, you're going to find it seen outside of the context. This isn't a start-up. I mean we've been doing this for a while. We've been competing on this for a while, but you'll just find it under VML. You would find it in Ogilvy, you would find it distributed throughout the network. So that's where it came from.

So we're strapping rocket boosters to...

Yes. That's right.

WPP Enterprise Solutions. Good. Shall I wrap? Okay. Super. Look, I want to thank you all for joining us today. I mean I've met many of our shareholders individually over the past few months, and I'm genuinely always grateful for your insights and for your support. And thank you. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your trust in us. And we really look forward to sharing our journey as we move forward. So thank you all for coming and for listening. Thank you.

Thank you very much, and good morning, everybody. Welcome to our first quarter trading update. And thank you for joining us. I'm joined on today's call by Joanne Wilson, our CFO; and Tom Singlehurst, our Head of Investor relationships. Before we get started, please have a look at the cautionary statement, which you can see on Slide 2, and look at that carefully. So turning to the overview on Page 3, I'll quickly summarize where we are for the year. Joanne will take us through the financial performance. We'll review the strategic progress and then tackle the Q&A. So on the overview on Page 4. Firstly, in terms of the first quarter 2025 performance, when we met in February, we talked about the challenging macro environment as well as how the timing of our new business would impact the shape of growth at WPP throughout the year. And as you know, we had a challenging fourth quarter. And so we were cautious giving our guidance for the year as well as being aware of some of the tariff issues and discussions that have been taking place. We did highlight those in our release. And I'd say that our performance in Q1, we saw sales -- net sales down 2.7% is consistent with what we were saying at that time and therefore, very much in line with our own expectations. And at the same time, I don't want to give the impression that we're happy with these results. We're not. It's not where we want to be, and we have concrete plans to address the areas of competitive underperformance, including some steps like the acquisition of InfoSum that we have taken this quarter. The first quarter did include some encouraging signs. Our overall performance in the U.S. improved in Q4, albeit benefiting from a slightly soft comp. I'm also encouraged by the improved new business momentum at VML and Burson following the heavy integration work last year, and it was good to see Hogarth returned to strong growth after challenging fourth quarter. Against this, GroupM's growth step down in Q1, in particular in Europe, due to the impact of soft and medium environment. And while the U.S. business for GroupM saw growth in low mid-single digits, it's still below what we would consider to be our competitive performance. And we'll come later to talk about GroupM in more detail. The second point is, this is a more challenging macro environment with tariff uncertainty. And while WPP is not directly impacted by tariffs, they will undoubtedly impact many of our clients and where and how they prioritize their margin investments in advertising and promotion. At this point, we haven't seen any significant change in spending patterns from our own clients and our full year guidance remains within the range we set at the beginning of the year. We did anticipate broad macro uncertainty. We are very, very vigilant on the outlook and very disciplined on how we are managing the cost base. So in the immediate short term, we need to manage and protect the P&L. But longer term, what is important is that we continue to invest and make strategic progress, particularly with WPP Open, and that's what will underpin our competitive performance in growth longer term. And then finally in terms of strategic progress. In February, we talked about 3 specific actions: drive further adoption of WPP, we're seeing good growth in that, strengthen the GroupM proposition and get GroupM back to growth [indiscernible] InfoSum and importantly, win more new business. I do think there's some encouraging signs of progress on all of these 3 fronts. So I'll take you through details of those in a moment. But before I do, I'll hand you over to Joanne to take you through the details of the first quarter performance.

Thank you, Mark, and good morning, everyone. So let me take you through some more detail on our first quarter 2025 performance starting on Slide 6. Like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs fell 2.7% in the quarter, which is broadly in line with our expectations. Consistent with messaging at our full year results, the drivers of like-for-like performance were a continuation of the challenging and macro environment seen in the fourth quarter, coupled with the sequencing of historical client losses, a continued challenging environment in China and the mildly dilutive effect of the FGS disposal on like-for-like growth. The move in reported revenue was amplified by the full run rate effect of the FGS Global disposal, which represented a drag on reported sales of 3.3% as well as a headwind from FX moves, in particular the strong pound versus the euro in Q1. Overall, revenue less pass-through costs were down 7.6% in the quarter. Moving on to Slide 7 and looking at performance across our departments. Global Integrated Agencies saw a like-for-like decline of 2.8% for the quarter. Within this, GroupM was down 0.9%, which reflected growth in the U.S. offset by the impact of prior year client losses and performance in the U.K. and a more challenging media environment across Europe. GroupM saw good growth in India, which only partially offset continued weakness in China. Like-for-like for our other global integrated creative agencies fell 4.4% in the first quarter and compared to the decline of 6.5% in the fourth quarter of 2024. Within this, we continue to see an impact from continued weakness in project-based work, weighing on AKQA performance, a tougher comp, but there will be a further impact in a challenging environment in China. Against this, we saw a return to high single-digit growth within our production business, Hogarth, driven by strong trends across CPG, tech and also a new business. The reacceleration of growth here is particularly encouraging given the more challenging performance in Q4 2024. Turning to Public Relations. Like-for-like declined by 6.2% in the first quarter. While overall performance has not much changed from the fourth quarter, reflecting a more challenging environment for client discretionary spend, in particular in Europe, we are encouraged by improved momentum on new business of North America. Finally, Specialist Agencies saw like-for-like revenue less pass-through costs grew 1.2% in the quarter, with particularly strong growth from CMI Media Group, our specialist health care and media agency and moderating declines at Landor Design Bridge and Partners. Turning to performance by region on Slide 8. North America declined by 0.1% in the first quarter, locking a mid-single-digit decline in 2024. The automotive, TME and financial services sectors grew as well as technology client spend, which continued the recovery seen in the second half of 2024, while CPG client spend saw mild declines. GroupM [indiscernible] grew in the first quarter in North America, but were offset by declines at Ogilvy and AKQA. The United Kingdom declined by 5.5% in the first quarter of 2025, impacted by higher weighting towards project-based work and the impact of client losses at GroupM. By client sector, growth in tech, automotive and financial services was offset by pressure in CPG and [T&D]. Western Continental Europe saw an overall like-for-like decline of 4.5% versus a challenging comp from 2024. The region was weak across the board as a result of pressure primarily on our project-based [indiscernible] businesses and the impact of a more challenging media environment for GroupM. Rest of World declined 3.8% in the first quarter, largely driven by consistent pressures in China, which declined 17.4% in the quarter on the back of continued macroeconomic pressures and client assignment losses. We expect performance to continue to be challenging in China in the first half of 2025 with some improvement later in the year. Against this, we saw a strong performance in India, which was up 5.5%, driven by GroupM, Central and Eastern Europe also saw a robust performance up 2% in the first quarter. Slide 9 shows Q1 performance across our client sectors. This reflects growth across our designated clients, which represent 82% of our net sales. Despite the tough high single-digit comp from Q1 2024, CPG showed a stable performance during the quarter with growth of 0.3%, reflecting pressure in the U.S. and the U.K., offset by growth in the Rest of the World. The technology client sector showed further sequential improvement with growth increasing to 4.5% in Q1 from 2.5% in Q4 2024 with growth relatively balanced across the world. Healthcare started to stabilize with flat growth in the quarter as 2023 client losses start to roll off. Automotive and Financial Services performed well with growth of 5% and 2.6%, respectively. We saw a weaker performance from Telecoms, which was impacted by client losses, while Retail sector client spend declined by 2.9% compared to a high single-digit decline in 2024. The performance of our top clients continues to be robust with our top 25 clients growing 2.5% in the first quarter. And moving on to Slide 10, which shows the movement in net debt to the end of March, with adjusted net debt at GBP 3.7 billion, down year-on-year, but up from year-end, reflecting our typical cash cycle. Average adjusted net debt better captures the normal pattern of working capital moves across the year, and this is slightly down through the first quarter at GBP 3.4 billion and should improve as the impact of the FGS Global disposal annualizes. The average adjusted net debt to headline EBITDA ratio is expected to be within our 1.5 to 1.75x target range in 2025. The weighted average maturity of our GBP 3.8 billion of bond debt is 7 years, and this is an average coupon of 3.6%. Meanwhile, our total available liquidity across the group stood at GBP 2.9 billion at the 31st of March 2025, including a $2.5 billion revolving credit facility, which matures in February 2030. It is important to note that neither our bond debt nor our RCF have any covenants. And in March, Moody's reaffirmed our Baa2 rating with a stable outlook, coupled with our BBB rating from S&P, our credit is comfortably investment grade. And finally, turning to Slide 11, which shows our guidance for the full year. At the beginning of the year, we set our guidance based on a like-for-like range of flat to minus 2%. This reflected a degree of caution in light of what then appeared to be an uncertain macro environment as well as our expectation of the impact of net new business through the year. Since then, the macro environment has remained uncertain and is likely to be so for a large part of 2025. For now, we remain confident this is reflected in our like-for-like range for the year. We do think that heightened uncertainty on the macro outlook has potential to further impact second quarter performance. This, coupled with the sequencing of client wins and losses through the year means we don't anticipate a material change in trajectory in the second quarter compared to the first. We continue to expect like-for-like performance to improve in the second half as more recent wins fully ramp up. Overall, we expect to hold headline operating margin broadly flat, excluding the impact of FX, with the benefit of annualized structural cost savings and continued disciplined cost management, offsetting incremental investment in WPP Open AI and data. We expect GroupM to continue simplifying its structure to accelerate the move to a more client-centric operating model. The impact will be largely P&L neutral over the course of 2025. However, the timing of associated costs will weigh on H1 margins, which will also be impacted by the phasing of revenue growth. Looking beyond revenue and headline operating profit, we make no major changes to our guidance. On cash flow, we continue to expect a reduction in our cash restructuring costs to GBP 110 million versus GBP 275 million in 2024 and adjusted operating cash flow before working capital of around GBP 1.4 billion. The one change I would note is that we now expect the impact of FX moves to be closer to a drag of 2% for the full year versus around flat at the time of prelims, reflecting a stronger pound relative to the dollar. At current rates, we estimate this as having a circa 20 basis points impact on margin given the relative weighting of our North American business. So thank you, and I will now hand you back to Mark.

Thanks very much, Joanne. So turning to our strategic progress on Page 12 and then Page 13. Before we dive into that, I think we do need to deal with the broader market environment. I think it's fair to say that it is challenging. We're absolutely seeing much greater economic uncertainty impacting business and consumer confidence. So at our prelims in February, we made the point that the macro environment will be challenging. We've seen that in Q4. And I think it's fair to say that since then, this uncertainty has increased. The decision by the U.S. administration to initiate tariffs has created much greater uncertainty for all of our clients whether or not they are directly or indirectly impacted. And historically, in uncertain environment, not necessarily hugely favorable for investment of any kind, whether it be longer-term capital projects or investment in brand building or short-term investment in activation. But in the time I've been doing this call, we have had COVID, Ukraine war, inflation and now tariffs. There's nothing we're not used to dealing with. And clients, I think, as well have learned how to prioritize their spending. They see it to some extent as a cost in the short term and an investment in the long term. And when they do cut, we should have the confidence to know that they will come back into the market. The impact of tariffs is also going to have an asymmetric impact both in the U.S. versus the rest of the world also by industry. If we take our top 25 clients, 5 or so are most directly impacted by the tariffs on the cost of their product. Of the rest, around half have a more minor impact and the other half have limited direct impact, but may be affected by the broader economic impact in the U.S. and the rest of the world. So the pattern does vary by clients. And so what's the response we're seeing from our clients? I think as we said in February, we'd already seen a more cautious outlook from clients from Q4 onwards. We've not yet seen any major step down in spending patterns from this. At the same time, we do have to be vigilant and agile. There's no doubt that there's a range of economic and political outcomes over the next day, month, quarter that could cause clients to take a different view on spending. And while that creates an uncertain environment for WPP, I do think it's important to note that our absolute and relative exposures are somewhat different from peers. We've long seen our geographic exposure as a key strategic advantage with apparent global agency group with 60% of our business outside the U.S. And while the U.S. is an incredibly important market for us and always will be, geographic diversity does have its value. Likewise, WPP's balanced exposure by client industry is one of our key strengths. And while there inevitably disruption for some of our clients, our strong positions, in particular within CPG and technology should be supportive of our growth. I think you saw some of that in the comments over the last 24 to 36 hours from some of the major CPG companies. And thirdly, there's the nature of our clients to consider. In the first quarter, it's important that the spending by our top 10 clients up 4.6% and by our top 25 clients up 2.5%. So continued investment by major clients in marketing has continued into the first quarter despite the impact on specific markets and sectors. And the final point that I would make is in regards to the short-term uncertainty created by the macro environment. Our clients' focus on and interest in the impact of AI is undiminished. Indeed, if anything, based on my conversations with clients, the level of interest and focus has increased as clients consider how AI and automation can be used to deliver marketing effectiveness and efficiency, both in the short and medium term. On this point, I think the current macro uncertainty is actually acting as a catalyst for some advertisers to revisit how they approach marketing to deal with cost pressures. I think we feel more strong than ever that WPP via WPP Open has an enormous opportunity to help clients to drive ROI on their marketing spend as well as save money through deliver greater efficiency to reduce the number of suppliers and reduce costs, but also to embrace a new way of working with more strategic partnerships. And clients are looking, I think, at marketing partnerships much more like technology partnerships with more of the rigor and discipline perhaps the IT departments bring on supplier selection. And against this background, the industry moving from 4 players to 3 players is undoubtedly beneficial to us. And with that, we're being very proactive, as you would imagine, taking our integrated AI proposition to clients. So looking forward, let's cover priorities of 2025 on Slide 14. I think we met in February, we highlighted 3 priorities in which we were laser-focused as an organization; first, the importance of driving take-up of WPP Open within our organization and embedding it in our daily work; second, to support Brian Lesser and his team in reaccelerating growth at GroupM; and thirdly, to deliver and improve our new business success rate. Starting with WPP Open, we continue to see strong progress in take-up. The number of 48,000 users represents about 60% of our client-facing people using WPP Open last month, up from about 40% at the end of the year. It's important for a number of reasons. First, from a practical perspective, our people are using the platform and delivering greater efficacy and efficiency and understanding how they can do that. There are around 80,000 client-facing people within WPP, and it's our strategic objective that all of them are using this to deliver daily better work certainly by the end of the year. Secondly, our conversion in new business pitches does move up by around 10% when we put WPP at the heart of our offering, which we're doing in every pitch, not just because it increases the chance of success, but it unlocks the potential to explore more innovative commercial models, allowing us and clients to share in the value we create and dealing with some of the pricing pressures that sometimes we're seeing in the market. And I hope we'll see continued progress on this metric as the year goes on. Turning to GroupM. I mentioned at the prelims that the lion's share of the growth gap between us and our leading peers is attributable to the gap in performance of our media business, in particular, in the U.S. As Brian outlined in February, we see some encouraging signs of progress on the strategy we launched in January 2024 to simplify and integrate the GroupM offering, but it is important that we redouble our efforts, and there also have been some challenges. Brian talked about 5 key priorities he's pursuing around data and technology, people and talent, innovation, collaboration and the organization. But we're making good progress on each of these areas. But I'd summarize the overall progress of business. First, we have to make sure our go-to-market is as simple and integrated as it possibly can be. Further simplifying GroupM not only drives greater cost efficiency, but makes it a simpler and easier business for our clients to do business with, and that's what we mean by moving to a more client-centric model, taking out silos and barriers and costs within the organization to focus all of our resources on client success. Secondly, essential not only do we catch up, but leapfrog a competitive set in terms of how we use AI, data and technology to drive business outcomes. And I'll talk about InfoSum in a moment, but that's a significant step forward in that area. And then lastly, in terms of new business, it is lumpy, but I do think we're making progress. The loss of the Coca-Cola North American media business in the quarter was difficult, but we do have a very detailed debrief from the client and a good understanding of our strengths and challenges. We're making good progress towards renewing our broader agreement with that client. Meanwhile, in the first quarter, there are some important tangible signs of success, whether it be the win of the media mandate for EA, Godrej Consumer Products in India, the global consumer shopping market for Heineken and many, many other new business pitches, which are less public, but work through the system, including expansion of scope from our existing clients, which you do see in the results of our top 10 and top 25 clients. And an important common thread across all of this is WPP Open. We are putting that at the heart of what we're doing. So before we wrap up, turning on Page 15 to InfoSum and why we believe this is an important step forward. Now as you know, data is central to delivering best execution for our media clients, but actually more broadly across the work that we do with clients. And this transaction transforms the breadth and scale of data intelligence for WPP's clients in a way that we think leapfrog traditional identity-based solutions. Think of it as improving our access to more data and unlocking the power of AI on that data, connecting that data to more premium and quality inventory and doing so using privacy-compliant technology. So how does it do that? Well, InfoSum allows WPP's clients to maximize the value of their own first-party data with privacy-enhancing connection to data providers and media partners across the marketing ecosystem, and that's something that WPP can strengthen. In this context, it's important that not only does it have the world-leading cloud-based technology, but it's an established player with an extensive global data network. That includes hundreds of billions of data signals across multiple dimensions of data for media platforms, including Channel 4, DIRECTV, ITV, Netflix, News Corp, [Samsung Ads] as well as major retailers around the world and identity and data parts, including Experian, TransUnion, Circana, Dynata and NCSolutions. All of that data we're able to better integrate into our media planning and media activation and results measurement. So even before joining WPP and having the strength of our relationships to broaden that data set, it's a real world leader in data collaboration. But the power of the transaction what it means in the context of WPP Open and GroupM more broadly. And by integrating InfoSum's capabilities within WPP Open, our clients are able to unlock the full potential of their customer data enriched through AI in strong quality media environments that's not always available to people using legacy first-party data systems. And using federated learning techniques, clients are able to build, trade and deploy custom AI models that can use that in a privacy-compliant way. They can generate insights and audiences to create precise predictive models to optimize campaigns and deliver measurable improvement in real time. So the conversations we have with clients has been very positive, dozens of conversations over the last few weeks and the feedback very positive. And we're confident the deal alongside our broader simplification efforts will drive a step change in performance, particularly in competitive reviews. And it happens to be as well a business that Brian knows well. So the integration, I think, is proceeding extremely well. So to wrap up on Page 16, I think in summary, there's 3 key points that we wanted to make in this presentation. The first that our first quarter performance, while weaker than we would like, is in line with our expectations, and we remain confident on achieving our full year guidance. At the same time, there's some important developments in the first quarter that encourage our belief that we're on the right track, whether it be the strong performance of our top clients or the improvement in new business momentum of VML and Burson. Secondly, while the macro environment is uncertain, we view the diversified nature of our business, both by geography and by client as a key strength. It's an important hedge in the short term and will be a significant opportunity longer term. And thirdly, I said in February, there's 3 priorities in 2025, staying at the forefront of AI, fixing GroupM and winning more new business, and we are making progress on each of those. So I'm sure you all have questions, and we're ready to take them. So operator, maybe hand back to you and Joanne and I will take people's questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Nicolas Langlet from BNP Paribas.

I've got three questions, please. First of all, on GroupM. So you referred in the press release to acceleration of the simplification at GroupM. So does that mean you expect increased cost efficiencies compared to the previous plan? And when do you expect to see the full benefit the initiatives at GroupM? Are we talking end of '25 or more '26? Secondly, on net new business, what was the impact in Q1? And what phasing should we assume for the next 3 quarters? You said in the past, you expect a neutral impact for the full year. Is it still the case? And finally, on margin, it seems there is a lot of headwind in H1 and then better trend for H2. So what sort of margin decline should we assume for H1?

Okay. Well, I think I'll let Joanne take the questions from the financial business. Just one comment on GroupM. I think we are expecting strategic progress from today as a result of the actions that we've taken both last year, also this year with InfoSum. So that's ongoing. I think Joanne can talk to you about how you think about that from a financial question. And I think your first and third questions are largely related to each other, but Joanne?

Yes. Thanks, Nicolas. So on GroupM, Brian set out his 5 priorities in February, and he and the team are executing against those. And that will build on some of the simplification work that we did last year to simplify both how we operate, drive more client-centric operating model and simplify our go-to-market. There will be cost efficiencies as a result of that. But I think more importantly, it sets GroupM up to deliver market and above-market growth over time. In terms of the impact on the P&L, we do expect to see an impact on the first half margin from that for the full year, we expect it to be broadly neutral in 2025. And so most of the benefits will be in 2026 just from a pure P&L perspective. In terms of the net new business impact in Q1, it was slightly down year-on-year, and that reflects some of the loss and new business activity. In terms of the next 3 quarters, I would just reiterate what I said in February, where we said that we expect in the first half net new business to be a drag, just reflecting those historical client losses that we saw in 2024 and really seeing the full impact of those in H1. In H2, we'll benefit more from the ramp-up of recent new business wins, which will help offset some of those losses. So a drag in H1 and a better performance in H2 from that new business. And then in terms of margin, there's 2 factors as you really think about margin through this year. In H1, we talked about the impact of that, but also our performance, we've talked about it improving through the year. And therefore, that H1 top line performance will have an impact on our operating leverage and on margin. So those are really 2 factors to think about in H1. But I think it's important to reiterate that we are delivering -- we expect to deliver flat margin for the year, excluding FX, and that really is driven by the full year benefit of the structural cost actions that we took last year, continue to be very disciplined around our discretionary spend and delivering back-office efficiencies, which is also enabling us to invest in open AI and data.

Our next question comes from Simon Baker from Bernstein.

So three quick questions, please. Firstly, you mentioned the economic uncertainty has increased. I just wondered at a high level, what your thoughts are in terms of the way that the ad market behaved versus, say, the last major downturn in 2009. I mean clearly, social media is a lot more, digital is a lot more marketing funnels, et cetera. So the question really is, today, is it faster or slower to wind up and wind down in terms of marketing campaigns? And similarly, is it sort of sticky or less sticky today, please? And the second question is, any early thoughts in terms of the third quarter versus fourth quarter phasing, specifically in terms of the way that the China and net newness and improving tech spend factors all sort of interrelate whether the third quarter is sort of broadly the same as the fourth quarter or whether you would say anything in terms of the bias there. And finally, one for Joanne please, in terms of the Kantar Group tax reference base value. Have you made any comments on that? Can you give any indication on the tax reference value, please?

Okay. Well, I'll take the first question perhaps and as I think I've been around most of that time and Joanne can take second. Look, I think you referenced 2009 as the last major downturn. I think there was COVID in between. And then I think a couple of years ago, actually exactly the same point of the year we had what happened in Ukraine, maybe that's before the prelims. Look, I think that I don't know that we sit today looking at 2025 as we would have looked at 2009. I guess there's a very broad range of outcomes where we are today and at the most severe it could be, but I don't think that, that is what people expect to happen. I mean the major banks have a range of probabilities on a U.S. recession rather than a certainty. I do think that clients have learned from COVID and Ukraine. I said in the statement that the marketing is a cost in the short term and an investment in the long term. And there's no doubt that faced by pressures, they balance it out. I think you saw the results from Unilever, Nestlé, P&G yesterday, and you can see it in our top clients, they're continuing to prioritize sort of ongoing marketing investments and the pressure. I think as we identified in Q4 is more around the discretionary areas of spend. And -- but we have to see what happens with tariffs. I don't think things will be fast or slower than -- maybe they'll be a little bit faster because people had commitments maybe because people couldn't spend, I could argue it will be faster because people have commitments before and they couldn't change those commitments. I could argue that clients are more willing to wait and see because they can pull things more quickly if they need to. So you can make the argument one way or other. I think it's really -- until we get better clarity on what's actually going to happen with tariffs, I don't think people feel we have clarity now, we're not yet going to see a major pullback in spending until we have one, clarity on tariffs or two, clarity on the direction of the economy. And so I spoke to a number of clients over the last few days ahead of this call. I think to date, we haven't seen any major step down beyond what I think for us is already a relatively cautious outlook for the year. So I hope that gives you some sort of color on what we're seeing, Joanne.

Yes, Simon, we don't guide by quarter, but just as you think about H2, obviously, Q3 is a tougher comp of 0.5%, Q4 was down 2.3%. You specifically mentioned China, it's balance comps between 3 in Q4. And we'll see the impacts of net new business and that ramp-up as I've talked about as we go through the year. So overall, I think at this point, it's probably fair to assume that it will be very balanced between Q3 and Q4. And then on the Kantar tax reference, making good progress in Kantar. I think we need to see what happens with the remaining business. There will be some tax, but I don't think it will be significant just based on the structure of our business.

Our next question comes from Adrien de Saint Hilaire from Bank of America.

So a few questions or points if that's okay. So I think the link between the advertising market and the economy is pretty clear, but maybe what's less clear to me is the link between ad spending and the agency's organic sales growth. So could you just elaborate a bit in terms of how your fee structure has evolved? How much of your revenue is tied to actual media dollar spending or how much is based on retainers? Secondly, I think, Joanne, you highlighted that you assume that new business contribution would be a positive contribution in H2. But since you provided that guidance, Coke was lost. I think there were some headlines about PayPal the other day. Mars is under review, and I think you're defending that account. So what sort of elements do you have to be sure that H2 is going to be positive indeed for net new business? And then thirdly, if I look at your performance by sector, automotive was really quite strong in Q1. Do you think there was maybe some pull forward there in terms of spending ahead of tariffs or anything that you would call out because that seems a bit counterintuitive.

Yes. Look, I think, on your last question, just to tackle that directly. I don't think there was any sort of pull forward. I think that we've had some good new business success and expanded our assignments for some of our automotive clients, and they are -- they have been spending. I think it's fair to say it's one of the sectors that could be most affected, but that may not be the pattern that goes through the year. But to date, again, even in that sector, we haven't seen any specific pullbacks, the outlook is too uncertain. I think on your first question around the relationship -- the ad market and the economy on ad spend, basically ad spend organic. I mean ultimately, they're clearly related. I mean, clients' investments with us are linked to the overall ad spending, whether our fee arrangements are linked to business success or billings or indeed retainers, clients have the ability to vary those up or down at their discretion. And so I think that if clients pull back at spending in a major way, that would clearly have an impact on our fees, whether or not we have a retainer. I don't -- no retainer sadly is forever. At the same time, as I said, we haven't yet seen a degree of pullback from clients. Although we have been maybe more cautious than some of our peers from the beginning of the year, perhaps as we reported a few weeks later and perhaps because we saw some of the impact on discretionary spend in Q4 that perhaps others didn't see for the year overall. So I think that's a way to think about it. Joanne, do you want to talk about the new business phasing.

Yes. So just in terms of the comps to H2, I think I'll say a few things on this, Adrien. So first of all, we have talked about that ramp-up of new wins from H2 last year, which we'll see a fuller impact from that in H2 than we have done in H1, which will help offset some of those historical client losses. Second thing I'd say is you talked about Coke and PayPal, but we've also seen new business wins in the first quarter. So Electronic Arts, Heineken, obviously that we've shared in the release. And linked to that, I'd say the pipeline is healthy, so broadly at the same level as last year. And we have seen good momentum of VML and Burson that has come through a lot of the merger activity that they were focused on last year. So we'd expect to continue to improve that new business performance as we go through the balance of the year. And I think the final thing just to say is we talk a lot about new clients and new client wins and losses, but there are other factors. So we talked about growth with our existing clients, top 25 growing at 2.5%. There is plenty of headroom with our existing clients. We're seeing our existing clients move more towards integrated opportunities. And so we see an opportunity to continue to grow with those existing clients. I think we need to think about that as well as new business wins as we look at the second half.

Our next question comes from Steve Liechti from Deutsche Numis.

Yes. I've just got two left, actually. One is on GroupM in the first quarter. Can you just explain your comments on Europe a little bit more. Just I guess that minus 0.9% could be a bit by surprise. And what's the danger that European pressure continues through into further quarters. So just more clarity there. And then the second question is your comments on Healthcare like-for-like being relatively more stable. I don't know if I got it wrong, but I thought Pfizer was still a drag into the first quarter and a bit into the maybe the second quarter as well. So just help me there in terms of that better performance than I expected.

Yes. So on healthcare, I think Pfizer was a drag in Q1. I think it stoped -- I mean amazing decision was made in May 2023 was still a drag in Q1. So I think it stops from Q2 onwards. But we have had some success with other health care clients. And so I think that's provided a better environment on healthcare. Joanne, do you want talk about GroupM in Europe?

Yes. In Europe, I think if you look at Western Continental Europe rather the U.K. where the U.K. was really impacted for some of these client losses. We have a tougher comp. But in media, specifically, we saw some weakness in the environment, particularly in Germany and France. I'm not vague on, I guess, the share of clients that we have in media, and we have a weaker comp in Q2. So we'll have to see how that plays through in the second quarter. But it was really that tier where we just saw softness, which is more macro related than anything else, Steve.

Our next question comes from Lisa Yang from Goldman Sachs.

I have a few questions, please. So firstly, just on the cost. I mean, you mentioned the cost flexibility that will help you mitigate the macro uncertainty. Can you maybe talk about the actions you're taking currently? And what are the main sort of levers you have if the top line were to deteriorate further? Maybe you maybe quantify the size of your -- the freelancers, how much discretionary spend, the size of bonuses, I think that would be helpful. That's the first question. Secondly, just in terms of the actions taken at GroupM since the start of 2024. You mentioned you've seen some encouraging signs. Maybe can you give us a bit more detail in terms of how that has fed through in terms of client retention or expansion of scope or that new business wins, why accelerating the simplification today or this year? And how much more simplification is there to come in other years? Or do you think this is the last leg and help just to understand like how that could basically help the GroupM return to growth. And just the third question, just on the level of new business. Do you expect to see any sort of slowdown in the overall lab marketing pitch given the level of certainty? Or do you expect to see maybe a pickup going forward? And how do you think -- how do you assess potential risk versus opportunity for WPP for the rest of the year?

Okay. Well, I’ll tackle the GroupM and new business question. And look, I think on GroupM, as you know, as a reference, Pfizer, decision made in May 2023 is still weighing on our results in the first quarter of 2025. So the impact on the business is very long term. And I think GroupM didn’t perform as we had wanted in Q1. And some of that is a result of decisions made some time ago. If you look at the sort of the big new business wins in GroupM last year, we did retain and expand our Unilever relationship. We did win J&J in North America, and we did win Amazon outside the United States. And those are 3 of the world’s 10 biggest advertisers. So we are not without our success in new business, and we did retain EA in Q1, again, competitively. We won that business against some of the toughest competition in the industry. Now it’s true. We didn’t retain Volvo after pitch. And while we’re renewing it overall Coca-Cola relationship, we won’t be working with them in North America. So it is balanced, but I do think that we are seeing more competitive success in new business, and we can beat the best when we’re at our best on the best day. And the InfoSum transaction has – is going to strengthen significantly our data proposition and we’re seeing that with clients. So I think greater clarity on that is perhaps the thing that we have been missing a little bit. And one of the reasons we brought Brian back was to strengthen the growth of proprietary media, which would drive both financial success and a little bit greater financial flexibility. So I think we know what we need to do in our media business, and I think we can start to see some of the impacts of that, although we’re not seeing it necessarily in the quarter-by-quarter numbers. On net new business, look, I think that the pipeline might be a little bit smaller than last year. And as ever, there are some things with a risk and some areas of upside. I do think that clients – I think major clients are starting to look at and review bigger, more integrated assignments. Many of those things, I think we tend to overfocus perhaps on some of the big media reviews because with the billing numbers, they look much bigger than they are and they’re more public. But I can assure you, we take part in more than I would like to imagine. I think we’ve done 6,000 or 7,000 new business pitches this year, very few of them hit the headlines. So there’s a daily cadence of new business opportunity. And I do think we’re seeing some bigger consolidation from clients, things that are not necessarily in the headlines and things people don’t necessarily know about that support what we’re doing. And again, within that, I think we’re seeing the advances and our ability to demonstrate what we have operating today in WPP Open, not a sigma – not a mockup on sigma, but an actual operational pool has been very compelling to clients who take the time to really dive into what we’re doing. Joanne?

Yes. So Lisa, thanks for the question. So on -- I think in 2024, we demonstrated an ability even when the top line is softer to really manage up through the P&L, and we set the margin forward in 2024. As we look at this year, we will benefit from the annualization of the structural cost actions that we took last year. But in addition, we continue to take action on headcount where we see that softer top line. We have a flexible cost base, and I think we've demonstrated, as I said, that we do that well. You specifically asked about freelancers. Freelancers make up about high single-digit proportion of our staff costs, and we manage those tightly. We've seen improvements in that as we've gone through the last 12 to 18 months. And the other bucket to look at and that we've talked about before is the back office efficiencies. I'm encouraged by the progress that we've made in those. We've seen back office costs coming on and there's an opportunity to do more of that, and we're focused on that. And that's partly enabling us to make the right investment in our business over the medium term. And we've called out that investment in open AI and data. And finally, just as I'd say, on discretionary spend, we are very disciplined. I think we've all learned how to be disciplined as we work through COVID on discretionary spend and we carry that into the business. And we have a number of levers around discretionary spend that we can pull as we go through a tougher external environment.

Our next question comes from Adam Berlin from UBS.

I've still got three questions, if that's okay. My first question is when you look across now you're the fourth of the large agencies to report, the growth across all agencies on average was about 0.5%, which was the lowest quarter we've had since, I think, the first quarter 2021. Do you have any theory on why the sector was so weak in this quarter? I know there's been a lot of business changing hands, but really appreciate any thoughts you have on that and why it should improve in the rest of the year? That's the first question. Second question is another quarter where AKQA continued to be very weak and was depressed growth in creative agencies. Is this -- should we be thinking this like an R/GA Huge situation that we saw at IPG? Like do you -- is this an asset that you may need to dispose off to kind of improve the growth? Or are there some reasons that you can explain about why things should improve, and it's different from what we saw within those assets in IPG? And then the third question I had was what you're saying about Q2 is similar, so let's say, minus 2.7% again, H2 would need to be positive to get to the midpoint of the range. I'm just trying to understand, is that realistic? Should we be thinking more at the bottom end of the range? Or is the change in new business wins very material in H2 and therefore, that allows you to have a positive second half even as macro potentially toughens?

Yes. I think on your last question, I know you've been looking at a sort of change in new business quarter-by-quarter balancing the balance of the year, but I'll let Joanne tackle that. I think on your first question, why is it 0.5% and why is it the weakest quarter since Q3? I think that's the economy. I mean you only have to look at what's going on and we saw some of it in Q4 maybe ahead of our peers weighing on discretionary spend and maybe smaller companies. We are seeing, as you've seen in our numbers, strong spend from our biggest clients. Maybe we're gaining some share with our biggest clients, but also I think that big companies continue to invest behind ongoing marketing, but things are a little bit tougher around sort of digital technology areas, more discretionary spend. . I think that links to your second question, and there have been management change to AKQA. Actually, although we haven't yet seen it in the results, AKQA had a very good first quarter in terms of new business wins. We are looking at performance of that unit improving over the year. I don't think we want to do what IPG did with R/GA and Huge. Frankly, our job and the reason we get paid is to fix businesses that we have in our portfolio. I think that AKQA is a very strong business. Joanne has built an amazingly strong agency with a very strong brand. They get amazing access to new business opportunities and talent. And the read-through from R/GA and Huge, I'd say is the economic outlook on that sector has been tough. But within that, I think that we have a really strong asset, and our job is to put the right management in place and get the business growing. And that's what we're very focused on, not just disposing of it. We're not ready to surrender yet. I mean, Joanne, do you want to talk about the guidance and expectations for the first half?

Yes, our guidance for the full year, which we're reiterating today is really based on no net new business impacts. We've talked about the sequencing of that and client spending plans as they are today. And as new business ramps up, we'll see a benefit in the second half. And we also talked about existing our largest clients, the growth of the largest clients. We were very thoughtful when we set our guidance for the full year, as we talked about at the time, we started to see talk of tariff, and we exited 2024 a little bit softer than what we were expecting. And so we built a range of outcomes into that guidance for the full year. It's too early to narrow the guidance or reiterating today. I think we'll have to see how events -- recent events play through in the balance of the year before we look at narrowing the guidance.

Our next question comes from Laura Metayer from Morgan Stanley.

Two questions from me, please. The first one is on InfoSum. Do you mind talking a little bit about the competitive environment? Who do you consider is the closest competitor to InfoSum? And how quickly do you think you can integrate it to WPP and GroupM more specifically? And how -- like when do you expect to see benefit from it? And then the second question is more on the visibility that you have into revenues. I think you've talked about this, so it's more of a follow-up question. Is there a proportion of the revenues that are in '25 that is guaranteed today where you have full visibility? Or do you mean that all of the revenues could basically be impacted by the macro environment?

So on InfoSum, I think that actually, their 2 biggest competitors, both been bought by cloud providers to integrate into their cloud data platform. So I think it shows the attraction of the sector. There’s not necessarily stand-alone businesses out there that do something similar. It takes a different approach to the application of data from classic first-party data systems. The classic sort of CRM-based system is you see a cookie or you see a phone number or you see an e-mail address and you try to use it identified to link one dataset to another. InfoSum takes a more AI-driven, federated learning is a technical term, approach to combining those data sets. It’s both more privacy compliant but also more nuanced. And because of that, it enables us to take that data into more premium media environment. Some of the social platforms don’t let sort of traditional systems integrate into them. So it gives us a broader range of media environments for our clients, which is important. In terms of the integration, I mean, given the relationships within the business and the CEO has taken on a role with GroupM. I think it’s pretty seamless. It’s as fast as it takes to integrate InfoSum into a client, which I believe can be done in a matter of days and weeks. So they’re already working with existing clients. I mean they work with Coca-Cola in Europe already and many of our media partners. So I think it’s really sort of integrated from Day 1 and it will only get stronger as time as we bring more data sets and more media owners into the ecosystem. Joanne, do you want to take that?

Yes, of course. Thanks, Laura. So in terms of visibility, the vast majority of our clients and large global clients, and we have multiyear contracts with them. So to that extent, there is a good level of visibility into their spending plans for the year. But of course, when the macro environment changes, those spending plans cut and we've seen that in past tougher macro environments. But as we said, our guidance for the full year reflects that because we saw some of that in Q4. We also talked about project-based spend. So that really impacts some of our smaller agencies and agencies like AKQA who tend to do more digital work. And that is more discretionary spend for clients, which it is -- there's more flexibility for clients to either delay those projects or cut those projects. And that's not something that we've seen in the last 12 months or so. But obviously, good visibility into the next quarter and also in terms of the net new business that we have secured already on the pipeline and that visibility improves through the year.

Our next question comes from Julien Roch from Barclays.

Three questions, please. Revisiting a full year new business, now that you have more clarity, is that fair to say that new business was about minus 2% last year, it should be about 0 this year based on what has been done so far and excluding future wins and losses? Second question is how bad does organic need to be before you cannot be around flat margin? Is it minus 3%, minus 4%, minus 5%? And then on kind of macro and reiterating guidance, now it's pretty obvious to everybody that you are a macro-sensitive business, right? And IPG yesterday was very clear that their guidance reiteration was based on current performance and clients not changing behavior. But if macro is weakening, it could change guidance. Now what about you? I mean, normally, the answer is pretty obvious. But you said many times during that call that you had put in some conservatism in your full year guidance because you've already seen that macro is weakening. So what kind of conservatism and anticipation of macro weaknesses in the full year guidance is kind of my question.

Yes. Look, I think to some extent, all those 3 things are related. I think we said new business was a headwind last year and it will not make a positive contribution this year and the more negative contribution is at the beginning of the year, we'll have to see how things go throughout the year. I think that sort of tackles the first part. I think the second question is we've given the guidance as it stands. And so those things hang together. And then in terms of changing the guidance, I think you're trying to get me to say something I don't want to get. I think what we've been clear is we did build some caution. I think it's very difficult to be scientific about the level of caution we built in. But having seen where we were in Q4 and having seen where we started the year with pressure on discretionary spend, leaving that level of pressure to continue for the rest of the year is the basis on which we gave the guidance. And we're not anticipating within that a massive recovery in the second half of the year to make our guidance. And I think it's very -- I don't think you can push us to say what would cause us to change it at this point. I can only see the world as we see things today. We don't see the need to change the guidance, but obviously, there's a range of outcomes. We are, as you put macro sensitive, where it would need to change. I think that the range back to the tariffs, both positive and negative indeed. So I think like many companies, we're saying that we are where we are at the moment. And that does bake in because of when we reported in our experience in Q4 into Q1, a somewhat more sensitive macro environment, which is why we're holding our guidance as at today's date. If that helps you understand our thinking, I think.

And just on the second question on how far does it need to get before margins start to see impact... Sorry. Julien, did you want to say something else?

No, no. Go ahead.

Yes. If we just step back and look at the industry as a whole, maybe during COVID and 2008, ‘09, the peak to trough was 8% and the margin impact was around 150 to 200 basis points. But the more important thing is the margin bounces back because of that flexible cost base that exists in our industry. I mean, for us, we’ve guided 0% to minus 2%. We said we’ll hold margins flat at the bottom end. Obviously, that requires more action around that flexible cost base and given the negative operating leverage. But beyond minus 2%, I don’t really want to go there because that’s not really our guidance. And if we were in that situation, we’d have to look at what other actions made sense for us to take on the P&L. It’s important for us as well as being disciplined around our cost base, making sure that we’re investing for the medium term and making sure that we’re continuing to reallocate investment into open AI and data. So that’s very important for us as we go through this year. And we think about both the near-term and the medium-term priorities.

We currently have no further questions. So I hand back to you, Mark, for closing remarks.

Well, thanks very much, everybody. So I think we've discussed the main points on the call, particularly related to the economic environment. I think there's no doubt that it is challenging. Overall, I think we're making good progress strategically and we'll see the benefits of that. So we look forward to updating you on the current over the coming months. Thanks very much, and we look forward to seeing you soon.