$WPP Tape Reports
Per Ticker.id: $WPP Tape Reports — 2 podcast mentions across 1 podcast (30 days), latest 2026-08-06 08:27 UTC.
Shares in WPP have jumped by as much as 30% this morning as the advertising group reported first-half profit that beat analysts' estimates. Operating profit came in at just under £400 million as CEO Cindy Rose's cost-cutting helped offset a weak advertising market. The company is overhauling its business in an effort to revive growth after losing its place in the FTSE 100 last year.
Stephen Carroll — Bloomberg News Now · Hedge Funds Face Cyberattacks, WPP Shares Jump 30%, More · 2026-08-06Though Brink was speaking via a translator, the German Interior Minister added that there will be an investigation and hinted that foreign powers may have been involved. The airport is used by the German army and NATO allies to transport military goods. Western officials have accused Russia and its proxies of staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, uh, more than 4 years ago. Russia has denied involvement in those incidents. And those are our top stories for you this morning. Right, let's get to the markets then, uh, this hour as we are looking at European stock exchanges that are up about 0.2%. So there is still some positivity even though we had an AI chip-related sell-off in Asia, and there was pressure from the likes of, well, after earnings effectively overnight. So there was quite a bit of pressure on memory making from memory makers like SanDisk. Right now, looking at markets, so you've got after earnings WPP rallying actually a huge amount by 17, almost 18%. Deutsche Telekom also up this morning and Siemens down by 5.4%. 1% this morning. So those are some of the individual stocks moving. Oil prices below $80 a barrel for Brent crude futures. Gold rallying 0.3%. The euro trades at 1.1546, down 0.1%. There's the market.
Caroline Hepker — Bloomberg News Now · Commerzbank Teases UniCredit Collaboration, Hedge Fund Attacks, More · 2026-08-06And also then they get to manage the money. And so they use AI, an incredible marketing team of people, some of the brightest people at JPMorgan and Goldman working in high net worth. They call these people, they build an unbelievable book. They go back to the CEO and say, look, this is a once in a lifetime branding event. And even though you risk some additional dilution that you wouldn't have had to have taken if you price it to perfection to be able to say your stock's up 20% or is up 40% as Bennet Moons was yesterday, is worth the additional dilution. So there's all this, there's all these stars and moons that line up around engineering a first day pop of this sort. I thought this one was gonna beat SpaceX because I thought the story was good. If you look at the PE, it's actually trading at a relatively, you know, a relatively modest PE. If you look at the revenue per employee, it was actually greater than Meta. I personally wanted to pimp this stock a little bit because I'm just so sick of talking about American AI companies. And I like their model and they, they have a great narrative. They say that they get something like 400,000 applications for jobs and they hire, you know, 8 people or, you know, a small point. They say they're the most selective company in the world. Some of that is spin because basically what they do with these companies is they replace a 40-year-old making $300,000 a year with a 25-year-old who I'm sure is very bright, making $140,000 a year. And they essentially, like a private equity shop, clean up the backend. A lot of these companies probably overspent, but it's essentially, it, it kind of reminds me of the old WPP model pioneered by Martin Sorrell. And that is their ability to maintain this valuation and increase it will be their ability to find good companies trading at X, X multiple of EBITDA, and then present it to the market and get 1.3X in the marketplace. And that's what Martin Sorrell did by taking out key man risk, a little bit of synergy on the back end, not as much here, but he would basically buy these key man risk ad agencies for 8 times EBITDA and then turn around to the market and he would get 12 times. It was essentially a market arbitrage or consolidation arbitrage. So it's a little bit of WPP, a little bit of private equity, I thought the small float, the excitement coming out of the SpaceX IPO, and just what felt like an insanely cheap valuation was going to handily beat the 20%. And it was up, I think, 40%. It's checked back a little bit today, but I thought this was a really interesting company, neat business model, kind of beloved brands but forgotten a little bit, uh, sort of the Berkshire Hathaway of beloved forgotten brands, if you will. I just liked it.
Scott Galloway — Prof G Markets · OpenAI Wants A Government Bailout · 2026-07-06It's, it's orphaned internet companies with a lot of margin power that have been forgotten, and they're rolling it up. And this is a callback to the most profitable disruptive company that used to own Kantt. This is a callback to WPP. They used to buy companies for 7 times EBITDA, uh, cut costs on the back end, uh, reduce key man risk, so to speak, and then take it to the public markets at 12 times EBITDA. I think this is an incredible company. It's outta Italy, which is interesting, really good human capital. And there's about 1,000 of these companies. That never quite made it across the goal line. And the most fascinating thing about their numbers is 88% of their revenue is recurring revenue. All of these companies are subscription. So basically this is SaaS meets Berkshire Hathaway. I like the fact that it's out of Italy. I like the fact that it's not AI.
Scott Galloway — Pivot · Meta’s Prediction Market App, Europe vs. Big Tech, and Hollywood’s Comeback · 2026-06-26Thanks for the question. I get this question a lot, so I think a lot of it is words. I think that they should change the name of the degree to marketing or customer acquisition or, I don't know, something that feels a little bit more new age. Because advertising, when people hear advertising, they think of a 60 second spot telling you have opioid induced constipation ads in the middle of CBS News. The broadcast advertising business is just in structural decline. It just is. And probably the, I would argue the kind of pivot moment that illuminated it was that Steve Jobs decided to take $6 billion out of broadcast advertising and go further down the stack and open 550 temples to the brand. And that was Apple stores. So he invested in distribution as opposed to pre purchase branding. Effectively the way you build brands from kind of 1945 to 1995 was Americans were sitting in front of a TV five hours a day and watching one or three channels so you could literally reach the entire public with two or three nights of advertising. That has obviously fragmented. There are now hundreds of channels and hundreds of other options where vying for your attention. In addition, the cost to advertise on the Academy Awards has gone up fivefold, despite the fact the audience has declined by two thirds. So one of two things has happened. Either broadcast advertising is a terrible value now or back when I was growing up, it was an unbelievable value. And the reality is it's mostly the latter. And that is you could have a shitty shoe, a shitty car, a shitty salty snack, a shitty sugary beverage. And if you created these associations of European elegance or American masculinity, or paternal love or maternal love, choosing moms choose Jif, you could put out a mediocre market, capture all of the emotions of the majority of the nation on a fairly limited advertising budget and then sell 30 or 20 cents of peanut butter paste for 2 bucks. So that was the kind of the algorithm for creating shareholder value. And then with Google and weapons of mass diligence that came out from TripAdvisor to AI, you've seen a vast migration of capital out of advertising into distribution to above Apple or post purchase branding, which is either influencer, social media warranties, customer service, CRM, all that good stuff. So I don't like the term advertising, but marketing or whatever you would call customer engagement, customer roi, we need better terms. I do think it's a decent education learning how to communicate with people. And actually communication is a better word. And try to create emotion that results in margin. And that is brand is kind of Latin for margin or emotion. And what you want is irrational margins from consumer. So I want to drive something with a stallion logo on the hood of my car, a Ferrari. I don't own a car actually because it says something about me. It says I'm masculine, successful, European Grace, have the money to buy a Ferrari, please have sex with me. And I think the majority of really high margin brands are doing one of two things. Making you feel closer to God or giving you the sense that you'd be more attractive to a broader selection set of mates. But I think that the skills you get in communications is the Strong one. How to figure out a market, how to figure out what moves people, figure out distribution, figure out technology, different channels to reach them. So I think that you have, I think this is what I call. It's not the default career path it used to be, but you know, it is, it does teach, I think really strong skills. So the ad model, when, when I was coming out of business school, the, the titans of industry were Maurice Levy, Martin Sorrell, John Wren, so ipg, Omnicom, wpp. And these companies are kind of meaningless now. When I go to Cannes Lions, they used to be the masters of the universe. Now it's Google, Meta, Pinterest, Spotify and these guys are basically like running Irish bars and hosting 10 or 12 people. You know, it's just not. If you're under the age of 40, I would suggest not going or getting out of the ad supported ecosystem. I just think that system is getting harder and harder every year and the oxygen continues to get sucked out by Google and Meta. If you're already doing well in one of those businesses that still, you know, agencies aren't in the advertising business anymore and they're in the kind of client management business, helping them navigate a very complex world and helping them do good media buys. What your daughter is talking about, where I think there's huge growth is events and that is activations. And so I speak at a lot of these events and I just spoke at RBC in Vancouver, Canada. They easily spent two or three million dollars on a 36 hour event for their most important clients. I'll speak at Dreamforce, they probably spend 10 million. I just got off a live tour for profit and markets. There were six people managing the venues, the events, the lighting, the guests. You know, I think activations and people wanting to get out and touch grass if you will, and events. Netflix will do a pop up at Cannes Lions featuring their latest shows and they'll spend a ton of time and money and energy. So we'll snap, we'll have something really cool. They'll take over a big chalet. So I think that if you're organized, creative, a good manager, I think event marketing is going to boom, if you will. But traditional advertising, wow, watch out below. And by the way, what I would tell my daughter is don't follow your talent. I wouldn't be like, oh, just do what makes you happy. I would say find something you're really good at, that's your job. And going to college, just find subject material you think you're great at. Take a bunch of classes you otherwise wouldn't take to see if something surprises you, try and throw in some stem. Try. I would very much try and figure out a way to take classes that force you to write English or communication, because I think that's the basis of all storytelling, which I still think is the enduring skill. But boss, let's be honest. We can tell our daughters whatever we want, they're going to do what they want. But if your daughter, these are good problems. If your daughter's headed to college, you're obviously an engaged father. You know, I think that's kind of 90% of success right there. Thanks for the question. We'll be right back after a quick break.
Scott Galloway — The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Anthropic's Insane Valuation + The Future of Marketing · 2026-06-17So I can't tell him what to do because he's clearly much different than me. What would I do? Make sure that I would probably use this as a platform to go roll up a bunch of other podcasts. That's that. I think the play in podcasting is what Martin Sorrell did in the ad business in the 80s and 90s, and that is there are a lot of good businesses. You don't even remember these businesses, but Martin Pura started a company, Ogilvie and Mather, Fallon McElfott, Wayne Kennedy, which remained independent. All these little agencies. J. Walter Thompson and the Problem with these things was they weren't saleable assets because there was too much key man risk. If Martin Purus left Amarati Puris and they had one big account, BMW, if he bought the company, it was just too much risk. And so what he did was he went to all these companies and said, I will give you seven times your ebitda. You will sign very onerous employment contracts, and if I sign up enough of you, I'm going to be able to take it public and it'll trade it 12 times. So there's an arbitrage, because you could say to the markets, Martin Puris and Shelly Lazarus aren't the business, because I own 12 or 15 of the agencies, and if anyone leaves or the biggest client goes away, we're still okay because we've got 12 or 13 other agencies. The play here is the following. Go get a bunch of podcasts, whether it's Huberman Lab or Modern Wisdom or Plain English or Mel Robbins or Smartless, and roll them up such that there's no key man risk or key woman risk. And you can get some synergy on the back end, although you always overestimate that, and then either take the thing public or sell it for a lot of money or just have the cash flows. But it's a business that's growing. It's a business that. You know, the thing about podcasting is that there are 1.6 million podcasts. 600,000 produce a podcast every week. Generously, 600 make money. So what you're talking about is 0.1%, 99.9% unemployment and podcasting. Now, granted, a lot of people do it for psychic income, or they do it to drive business to the McKinsey Business Transformation Group. So they have a boring as shit podcast with someone with a Northern European accent and a PhD. But the top 50 podcasts are the top hundred. He should try and start two or three with celebrities, and he should go buy five or six of the top 50 and say, you really have no liquidity strategy unless we go WPP here. And that is we combine, scale and get big. I would use this platform right now as a platform to go roll up a bunch of other podcasts and see if I can find synergy between New York Magazine and Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel. And also just be really, really, really good to the talent. That's what I would do. And I would invite them on your yacht. I would invite them to every premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival. You know, that's what I would do. If I were, if I were James Murdoch.
Scott Galloway — Prof G Markets · Bond Investors Are Panicking — And They May Be Right · 2026-05-25Yeah. And I also like that you're not afraid to put your, some of your losses up front. WPP, I know, has been not your favorite experience in the world, but you don't dodge it and you write about it. And I find the process to be quite upfront and honest. So kudos to you for that.
Bill Brewster — The Business Brew · Notes From The Beauty Contest · 2026-03-21