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WPP stabilized legacy CPG with Coke while capturing the **$80B** DoorDash-Instacart logistics economy, offsetting Publicis's **$10B** LiveRamp data play with merchant-level inventory scale.
£400M
in lost billings across North America and Europe
$13.5B
acquisition of Instacart in October and now controls
$80B
in combined gross merchandise volume across
$4B
in annual global spend
WPP Media reported organic growth for the first time in eight quarters, ending a contraction that began in Q1 2023 and cost the holding company roughly £400M in lost billings across North America and Europe. The reversal arrived on two retention events: Coca-Cola's renewal of its global media-planning mandate and an expanded partnership with DoorDash, which closed its $13.5B acquisition of Instacart in October and now controls $80B in combined gross merchandise volume across 40 markets.
The Coca-Cola win is structural. WPP has serviced the account since 2018 through GroupM's Choreograph data unit and EssenceMediacom's planning desk, a relationship worth an estimated $4B in annual global spend. The retention signals stability in packaged goods, a category that has shrunk 6% of total ad spend since 2021 as DTC brands and performance marketers claimed budget share. Coca-Cola's commitment to traditional planning infrastructure suggests the CPG giants have stopped experimenting with in-housing and returned to scale arbitrage through holding-company negotiation.
DoorDash presents a different calculus. The company spent $1.8B on advertising in 2023, most of it performance-driven and programmatic. Instacart added another $740M, weighted heavily toward retail media and first-party audience products. The merger creates the second-largest on-demand logistics advertiser in North America after Amazon, and DoorDash has already indicated it will consolidate media planning under a single agency structure by mid-2025. WPP's expanded remit likely includes retail-media activation across Instacart's 14,000 grocery-partner storefronts and DoorDash's 600,000 restaurant merchants, a combined surface area that rivals Walmart Connect in SKU-level targeting inventory.
The timing matters because Publicis completed its $10B acquisition of LiveRamp this quarter, giving Omnicom and WPP's competitors a data-spine advantage in identity resolution and cross-platform measurement. LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe exits with a $32.5M golden parachute despite shareholder opposition, a payout structure that suggests Publicis views the acquisition as essential rather than opportunistic. WPP's answer is client velocity. If DoorDash-Instacart becomes a $3B annual account by 2026, GroupM neutralizes LiveRamp's technical lead with sheer billings weight and merchant data access.
Operators should watch three follow-on events. First, whether DoorDash consolidates creative work alongside media planning by Q2 2025, which would pull an additional $400M in production spend into WPP's ecosystem. Second, how Coca-Cola allocates its $600M North America digital budget between GroupM and in-house teams after the company announced headcount expansion in its Atlanta data-engineering office last month. Third, whether WPP's media growth translates into GroupM's commerce division, which posted flat revenue in Q4 2024 despite retail media growing 22% industrywide.
WPP Media's next earnings call is scheduled for March 13, when the company will disclose whether Coca-Cola's renewal includes expanded access to its first-party loyalty data across 200 markets.
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