Dave Rolfe, global head of production at Hogarth, and Elav Horwitz, chief innovation officer at WPP, unpack a new operating model for how agencies can shift campaign delivery from months to days by using AI to accelerate strategic relevance at the pace of culture.
The clock is ticking on traditional creative pipelines. A new consumer trend can explode and disappear within a week, yet many agencies remain locked into monthslong campaign cycles of handoffs and revisions, a fundamental disconnect that renders traditional creative slow, reactive, and ultimately irrelevant once it reaches the market.
This gap is taking place against the backdrop of the biggest platform shift our industry has ever seen: AI. As a result, our clients are recalibrating the value they expect from an agency. For WPP, we realized we couldn’t just tweak our existing playbook; we had to fundamentally redefine the agency’s role.
This meant shifting from a resource supplier to a real-time strategic partner that delivers relevance at the pace of culture. This pivot was made possible by integrating AI acceleration into the operational DNA of our agency.
Refining the creative timeline, from months to days
To make this shift, we committed to reengineering our entire operating model from the ground up.
The engine for this change is WPP Open, our proprietary AI operating platform that integrates Google AI. WPP Open takes the best of Gemini’s multimodal intelligence and incorporates it directly into every creative step, driving a radical acceleration of our production timeline – effectively shifting campaign delivery from months to days.
The path to speed isn’t rushing the final steps; it’s changing the start. WPP Open combined with Google AI helped us push the production cycle upstream in three ways:
- Quality and strategy: Instead of spending weeks debating static slides, we use AI to generate high-fidelity, near-final prototypes much earlier. This amplifies the unique potential of our human strategists and storytellers, focusing their talent on deep concept refinement and creative quality.
- Process and speed: AI automates low-value tasks, freeing up human hours. This speed allows us to shift idea generation from days of manual work to hours, enabling us to skip costly, time-consuming preproduction tests and gain instant audience feedback.
- Operational volume: We built proprietary pipelines around generative AI to produce content efficiently and at scale. This allows us to not only increase asset volume but to rapidly localize core creative across hundreds of formats and languages.
Verizon’s blueprint for real-time production agility
For Verizon, every promotional campaign demands strategic flexibility to outpace competitors. The central challenge for them was how to deliver resonant campaigns at market speed, not the old pipeline speed.
To help Verizon achieve their goals, we built an AI-infused promo pipeline using WPP Open and Veo. The first promo campaign — 15 videos — was delivered from ideation to execution in 70% less time.
Crucially, when a competitor launched a similar offer mid-campaign, our new pipeline allowed us to pivot in real time, redeploying assets without sacrificing craft. Now Verizon has committed to strategically integrating AI where it makes sense into its entire holiday campaign workflows, enabling us to triple the amount of creative assets — a volume previously unheard of.
The new math of creative efficiency
The core principle here is reinvestment. AI automates the manual work, freeing our expert creatives to focus their unique human judgment on strategic thinking and pushing creative boundaries.
Our internal data confirms the impact: 50% to 70% time efficiency gains across the production cycle and adaptation and a 2.5X increase in asset output, without increasing headcount or hours.1
The future is not about cost-cutting but about who can reinvest the time and resources saved by AI back into high-value strategic thinking.
Key takeaways to building the agency of the future
Our model offers three core lessons for transforming our marketing.
- Stop optimizing, start redefining. End the era of attempting incremental fixes on a broken cycle. Instead, use AI to push production upstream, collapsing the distance between insight and execution to redefine the entire creative timeline.
- Prioritize human judgment. Use significant time and cost savings to liberate your human creatives. Their strategic vision and craft must be the focus, ensuring every efficiency gain translates directly into pushing creative boundaries.
- Reassess agency value. Move beyond seeking AI for simple efficiency. Integrate it across your value chain to amplify human potential and successfully complete the transition from a resource supplier to a strategic partner.
This workflow is our blueprint for the modern production cycle, blending AI acceleration with human craft to deliver campaigns that flex as fast as the market. Ultimately, this is the new creative math: AI accelerates the timeline; your talent elevates the idea.
