WPP CEO Mark Read said Thursday that artificial intelligence has already become “fundamental” to the holding company's business and that clients are beginning to think about returning to Twitter.
Read's comments came as WPP forecast sales that will rise more than analysts anticipated in the coming year, indicating that companies will continue spending to reach consumers. Shares rose as much as 6.4% in London on Thursday.
“Clearly it’s a great use in our media business,” Read said of the AI technology, “where we can use it to find relevant audiences and measure the impact of our work. We’re using it a lot creatively in our production processes to accelerate how we produce work and reduce the cost of doing that. So it’s pretty fundamental.”
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Read said AI subsidiary Satalia has worked across clients and agencies after London-based WPP acquired it in 2021. He said the group has to build AI into everything it does, mentioning work such as a video for Nike, which showed tennis champion Serena Williams playing past versions of herself.
He also said he’s been personally experimenting a lot with OpenAI’s ChatGPT as chatbots and image generators fuel surging interest in the technology.
“The best technology is like magic,” he said of the Microsoft—backed platform. “At the same time, is it perfect? No,” he added, “but it’s brought to life the potential of generative AI in a way that’s really captured people’s imagination.”
In an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday, Read said “Twitter seems to be a lot more stable the last few months than perhaps it was towards the end of last year,” adding that “I think clients want to start to look about how they can come back onto Twitter.
Top media agencies pulled clients’ ad dollars from Twitter in the days after Elon Musk took over the company, leading to a 46% year-over-year decrease in ad sales, Ad Age reported in January.
