WPP has taken a significant step in redefining how brands understand consumers, becoming one of the first media and marketing services companies to integrate Google Earth AI models and datasets directly into WPP Open, its agentic marketing platform.

The announcement was made at Google Cloud Next ’26 in Las Vegas. The integration follows WPP’s $400 million partnership with Google Cloud, announced in October 2025.

At the heart of the move is a simple but striking statistic: more than 80% of retail sales still happen offline. WPP is betting that closing the gap between digital data and real-world behaviour is the next frontier for marketing effectiveness.

By integrating Earth AI, the company aims to give clients the ability to anticipate consumer needs and understand in real time how physical factors such as traffic, weather and neighbourhood movement patterns are shaping purchasing decisions.

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Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP, framed it as a fundamental shift in how the industry approaches consumers. “As an industry, we have had access to enormous amounts of digital data to understand human dynamics, trends and what content people consume,” he said. “But people don’t just live in the digital world, they live in the physical world. By integrating this foundational physical-world data with our marketing data, we are changing the way the marketing industry thinks about consumer journeys.”

The integration is expected to deliver impact across three key areas. Through Population Dynamics Insights from Earth AI, brands can connect how consumers buy products and perceive brands with real-world physical dynamics such as weather and community health trends.

In media planning, the results are already tangible: WPP worked with a large multi-market automotive client to develop an “Electric Vehicle Readiness Index” using Google Maps Platform data to understand charger availability, achieving 77% higher performance relative to a standard designated market area, at 15% lower cost to conversion.

On the creative side, Cultural Insights, a WPP Open product built with Google Cloud, uses Places Insights and Maps Imagery Grounding to help teams produce culturally contextual creative content grounded in real-world locations across 100 cities, allowing brands to identify emerging cultural trends and generate in-market imagery and video at speed.

Yael Maguire, VP and GM of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth, said the collaboration represents a meaningful application of the technology: “Google Earth AI brings together our decades of modelling the world, along with Gemini’s advanced reasoning, to help businesses achieve much deeper insights about the planet. WPP is using Earth AI datasets in novel ways that can transform industries.”

The move positions WPP ahead of rivals in the race to bring physical-world intelligence into the marketing stack, as holding groups increasingly compete on the strength of their technology platforms rather than creative talent alone.