LONDON, Aug 26 (Reuters) - WPP, the world's largestadvertising group, reported a 1.5 percent rise in first-halfheadline pretax profit to 532 million pounds ($882 million),slightly ahead of forecasts, and reaffirmed its net salesoperating margin improvement target for the year of 0.3percentage points in constant currency.
The group, which was created by Martin Sorrell and employsalmost 175,000 people in 3,000 offices around the world, saidits net sales margin for the first half was 13.0 percent. Thatwas in line with its full-year target.
WPP, which has agencies including Ogilvy Group and JWT,lowered its margin guidance for the 2014 year in February due tocompetition in the industry. It has, however, gained extra workin recent months from rivals Omnicom and Publicis, who were engaged in merger talks which broke down.
WPP announced a 2.7 percent increase in reported revenue to5.47 billion pounds.
Analysts had expected pretax profit of 521 million pounds.
($1 = 0.6029 British Pounds)