WPP’s T&Pm agency scales video creativity with generative AI from Sora on Azure OpenAI

WPP's T&Pm sought new ways to expand creativity—not just in ideas, but in how they’re concepted and delivered. Legacy workflows made it difficult to demonstrate early video concepts then scale production to varied audiences, channels, and use cases.

WPP's T&Pm used Microsoft Azure OpenAI and the Sora video generation model to bring early creative concept to life and streamline the creation of high-quality, personalized video content at scale.

Using Azure OpenAI and Sora, WPP's T&Pm not only accelerates production timelines, but also reimagines the role of technology in creativity—enabling teams to experiment, iterate, and build ideas in ways that weren’t previously possible.

WPP’s T&Pm Agency Scales Video Creativity with Generative AI from Sora on Azure OpenAI

Part of WPP, T&Pm is a global creative and media agency focused on blending talent and technology to kickstart creativity, performance, and growth. Their work spans brand building, storytelling, and campaign development—grounded in the foundational belief that communications work better when they strike an emotional chord with consumers.

“If we can establish real personal relevance to consumers in the content we create, it’s more effective,” says Oli Egan, Chief Strategy Officer at T&Pm.

Achieving that resonance isn’t easy, especially early in pitching ideas when creative teams are tasked with translating abstract ideas into compelling visual expressions. Then comes the task of versioning approved ideas across formats, languages, and markets. That production lift pulls time and focus away from where creatives add the most value: inventing, refining, expanding, and elevating ideas.

“The exciting thing about Sora is we can tell stories in ways that wouldn't have been possible were it not for the technology.”

Oli Egan, Chief Strategy Officer, WPP

The challenges of turning creative visions into moving visuals

The inability to easily show early concepts and scale big ideas through production in video has long been a creative and operational bottleneck for T&Pm's strategic and creative teams. For decades, teams relied on stock photography, online references, or creating time-consuming illustrations to pitch ideas. Often, without a clear, visual artifact, bold ideas were harder to sell—and sometimes abandoned before they had a chance to be realized. “Being able to create that visual early on and get that into our heads and into our clients' heads is super important,” says Stuart Foy, Creative Innovation Designer at T&Pm.

Video has always been a challenge to prototype. “It’s the most immersive and emotive format,” says Egan, but early concepts were often reduced to stitched-together stock images, basic animatics, or rough storyboards—rarely enough to convey the full creative vision.

Even once an idea made it past the pitch, production hit another wall: scale. Audiences expect content tailored to their culture, lifestyle, and platform. That level of specificity was expensive and slow to produce, making it difficult to deliver the volume and precision today’s campaigns demand.

“Having access to Sora through the API has made me think in a totally different way, it’s extremely liberating. I can make many ‘mistakes’ very quickly to get to what I need.”

Stuart Foy, Creative Innovation Designer, WPP

Video workflows, retooled with Azure AI Foundry

T&Pm turned to the Sora video generation model in the Azure OpenAI on Azure AI Foundry to address these challenges. With Sora, they “pre-vision” campaigns and create fully animated examples early in the process. These richer, more tangible expressions make it easier for clients to grasp the concept from the start, leading to stronger alignment and higher approval rates in the first round.

“Sora, and in particular the Azure OpenAI Sora API, is transforming the way we use generative AI tools,” says Foy. “It integrates seamlessly with our workflows and tools we use in Azure, letting us build custom solutions for our clients.”

By accessing Sora through the API, T&Pm can embed video generation directly into their creative development pipelines, like WPP Open, WPP’s AI-powered marketing operating system. The solution uses a node-based interface to quickly assemble the components of visuals and sound, then iterates them into different versions.

“I can choose a subject, the location, the camera angle, then chain those selections together with Azure LLMs to generate a video expression,” says Foy.

One standout example of this new approach is T&Pm’s work for a rice brand with international presence. Adapting a creative idea around like rice to feel authentic to audiences in the U.S., China, or India often made production complex, slow, or prohibitively expensive.

“The Sora API shifts our mindset, so we can dream bigger and move faster.”

Wangxin Liu, Creative Technologist, WPP

With the Sora API, Foy can supply the guidelines of the rice brand to an Azure OpenAI large language model, which generates consistent, brand-safe prompts for creating videos featuring rice dishes appealing to varying tastes. “I could press a button, walk away, and come back to five new videos,” he says—each customized for a specific recipe, audience, language, or platform. The process transformed video creation from fixed and labor-intensive to dynamic and automated. “It almost feels like I’m working with a tool from the future,” Foy says.

Using the Sora API to power personalization

“We can also now imagine and create tools and experiences that put video generation in the hands of individual consumers to create completely bespoke video,” says Egan. Previous campaigns that would have been difficult to produce due to cost and complexity, WPP is now executing with the Sora API.

That potential came to life in in a campaign for a brand of dog food, where the team built an interactive experience that turned a user’s own pet into the star of an animated story. A photo and a short narrative were transformed through the latest GPT-series models and Sora into a comic-style video, generated automatically on the back end.

“Users input an image and the story of their dog,” says Wangxin Liu, Creative Technologist at T&Pm, “and we feed that through Sora on Azure OpenAI to generate a fully customized video.” Designed to support the brand’s mission of helping more dogs find loving homes, the experience offered a deeply personal, emotionally resonant and interactive experience for users, one that would have been nearly unworkable to deliver at scale using traditional production methods.

Responsible AI, built in

Personalized video experiences like the dog food brand's example require not just creative power, but trust—especially when user-supplied content is involved. “The Sora video generation model on Azure OpenAI provides enterprise-level security while having a robust, responsible AI safety stack,” Liu says. “That ensures our applications are built safely and securely.”

The security within Azure OpenAI and the Azure AI Foundry is vital to WPP and its clients, which have strict protocols consistent with Responsible AI (RAI) principles. T&Pm's teams can experiment with new kinds of consumer interactions, confident they're staying within privacy, security, and ethics guardrails built into the platforms they're using.

Expanding the range of what's possible

While T&Pm’s work with Sora is still evolving, the benefits are already clear. Tasks that were previously manual and time-intensive are now streamlined through the API. The ability to imagine and scale interactive, personalized video concepts is innovating how WPP and its client brands can interact with consumers.

"The exciting thing about Sora is we can tell stories in ways that wouldn't have been possible were it not for the technology," Egan says. “With its robust trust framework, comprehensive API, and the Video Playground, we can really unleash our creativity and productivity," Egan says.

WPP is expanding what creativity means. It’s not only about the final concept, but how teams use AI to build and apply new tools during the creative process. Combining powerful models and approachable workflows enables a wider range of teams to push ideas further and unlock entirely new modes of making.

For WPP's innovation-driven team, Sora on Azure OpenAI has been transformational. "Having access to Sora through the API has made me think in a totally different way, it’s extremely liberating. I can make many ‘mistakes’ very quickly to get to what I need.” Says Foy.

Sora on Azure Open AI is helping WPP create at the speed of their imagination, enabling and enhancing their creativity and process through WPP Open. "The Sora API shifts our mindset, so we can dream bigger and move faster,” Liu says.

Learn more about Sora on Azure OpenAI. Discover more about WPP and T&Pm on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Learn more about WPP Open.