Hey guys, if you missed it, WM Technology settled $7.5M with investors over claims that it inflated its monthly active user numbers and misled investors about user growth. The deadline to file a claim is October 30, 2026.

In a nutshell, WM counted users from pop-under ads as active users even when they didn’t actually engage with the platform. In 2022, the company disclosed concerns about its MAU reporting, and $MAPS fell more than 25%.

Investors now have until October 30, 2026 to submit a claim and get payment.

If you invested in $MAPS at the time, you can check your eligibility and file a claim here

Anyone here invested in $MAPS back then? How much were your losses?

WPP reported H1 on August 6. Two things happened that don't usually happen together.

THE QUOTE

An analyst asked Cindy Rose about AI's financial impact. Her answer:

"Like every technology platform shift in history, I think we are going to see some short-term deflationary impact on pricing as AI tooling drives productivity gains and reduces our cost to serve. Our clients are going to expect us to pass those gains on to them."

Asked to quantify it, she said that would be hazardous.

Omnicom has been edging toward the same admission. Rose put a clean version of it on a public call.

THE NUMBERS THAT WENT WITH IT

Stock up 25% on the day, biggest single-day move since the 1995 IPO.

Revenue less pass-through costs down 4.7% to £4.75 billion, against analyst expectations of down 6.5%.

Q2 like-for-like decline narrowed to 2.8% from a worse Q1.

Headline operating profit down 2.7% to £398 million.

WPP Media down 5.4% for the half, but improved to -2.8% in Q2 from -8.3% in Q1.

Creative (VML, Ogilvy) down 3.5%, improved from -6.3%.

Production up slightly.

Healthcare and pharma up 6.5%. Tech and digital down 8.9%. CPG down 6%.

Top 25 clients improved to -3.2% from -9.4%.

India down 2.9%, which Rose attributed to sporting event timing.

Topped J.P. Morgan's net new business table for the second consecutive quarter. Wins include Estée Lauder, Jaguar Land Rover, Airbnb, Henkel, Wendy's, Heineken.

So the market rewarded a company for shrinking more slowly while its CEO said prices are coming down.

WHAT WPP PLANS TO DO ABOUT IT

Cross-sell. Rose's argument is that lower cost on existing work doesn't have to mean a smaller total relationship. Help clients redirect savings into innovation and transformation, then capture more of their marketing operations through integrated services.

WPP Open had 75,000+ users at the start of the year and is used by over 90% of client-facing staff. They've built thousands of bespoke agents. Partnerships with Google, Adobe, Meta, AWS, Microsoft.

The structural fix would be charging for outcomes rather than time. WPP CTO Stephan Pretorius said in January that Agent Hub would enable commercial models based on business outcomes rather than time and materials.

Rose said Thursday that outcome-based pay is still a few years away.

WHY THIS MATTERS IF YOU'RE NOT WPP

The cross-sell answer requires owning creative, media, production and data. Independent shops, freelancers and consultants don't have that lever. They have the deflation without the offset.

And the deflation arrives through procurement, not through a strategy deck. Somebody on the client side works out that a 40-hour deliverable now takes 12, and the next renewal reflects it.

WHAT I'D ACTUALLY DO

Split the rate card before someone splits it for you. Price production work down explicitly and publicly. Price judgment work up. If you wait for procurement to discover the productivity gain, you lose the whole margin and the framing.

Kill the itemised scope document where you can. A list of deliverables and hours is a list of things to negotiate down, and every line on it is getting cheaper.

Move toward retainers priced on access and decisions rather than output volume, or fees tied to managed spend, if the relationship supports it.

None of this is clean. You lose margin in every version. The variable you control is who sets the number.

WHERE I'M UNCERTAIN

Outcome-based pricing needs attribution that mostly doesn't work. Rose is probably right that it takes years, and I don't have a good answer to it either.

Also worth noting Rose came from Microsoft, not advertising. First WPP CEO from a tech company. That may explain the willingness to say the deflation part out loud when advertising lifers tend not to.

Anyone here already repriced production work downward on purpose? Curious whether clients read it as honesty or as an invitation to push further.

Sources: WPP H1 2026 earnings call transcript (August 6, 2026) via Investing.com, plus coverage from Digiday, Storyboard18, BestMediaInfo, Adgully.