3 items in Cindy Rose’s in-tray at WPP
Analysis
Cindy Rose, WPP’s new CEO, began her tenure this week with a global town hall on Thursday.
Her first few days on the job have already been rocky: chief operating officer Andrew Scott announced he was leaving after 26 years, while another top executive, head of data and technology Shaun Prazao, exited to take a role at a PR agency.
The relative financial health of the company is also in question as its share price sits at its lowest level since the 2008 financial crisis. In its latest earnings report, WPP said revenue less pass-through costs — the company’s way of reporting net revenue — fell 4.3% on a like-for-like basis to £5.03bn. Operating profit also nearly halved to £221m in H1.
Subsequently, WPP halved its dividend and will launch a review of its future capital allocation policy under Rose’s leadership.
A spokesperson for WPP declined to comment.
In an earlier welcome video leaked to Adweek, Rose called herself “a mega-fan of WPP for more than 15 years” and expressed excitement about writing WPP’s “next chapter”.
“Our next chapter will be fantastic. Now, I won’t sugarcoat this, we have a lot of hard work ahead and of course it won’t be easy.
“But when I think about the assets we have as a company, the brilliant people we have, the multi-award-winning creative work that we produce, our beloved agency brands, our amazing clients, our global reach, our world-leading technology capabilities — wow, like, I cannot help but feel excited about our future.”
What will Rose’s early priorities be at the helm of WPP?
Make WPP Open a credible proposition
WPP Open, the company’s “AI platform for marketing”, has been core to its future-facing business proposition. As part of WPP’s AI strategy, it acquired InfoSum in April and unveiled a “large marketing model” in June. Dubbed Open Intelligence, the model aims to apply generative-AI assistance to practices across media and creative.
Since the announcement of the “large marketing model”, several industry leaders have expressed scepticism to The Media Leader over not just whether it works but what it fundamentally is.
WPP Media — rebranded from GroupM in May — has touted the platform as an industry-first model trained on the world’s largest set of audience, behaviour and event data. The group claims the model is derived from “trillions of signals from 350 partners in over 75 markets” and that it can reach up to 5bn adults globally.
As The Media Leader columnist Nick Manning wrote last month, these are bold claims. “A significant proportion of the world’s population is wondering where the next meal is coming from, not which brand of rice to eat,” he suggested.
“To be charitable, it is just about conceivable that WPP’s new systems may have a potential reach (note the ‘up to’) of 5bn adults. But that’s not the same as connecting with them effectively, or at all, and most advertisers wouldn’t want or need to.”
On WPP Open’s website, the holding group also claims the offering has led to a 29% year-on-year increase in productivity, 86% reduced delivery times and 75% reduced costs.
Those statistics are based on an internal study of strategic and creative development time and a comparison between AI-enabled content and a non-AI version.
But they have yet to convince many potential clients and agency leaders; as one former WPP agency executive told The Media Leader, it all sounds “too good to be true”.
They added: “I’ve heard of a few clients where they love the look and the ambition of [WPP Open], but they can’t see the reality and are worried about being the test case. Whether it’s true or not, Publicis and OMG seem to have a perception that they have a living breathing platform in a way that WPP don’t quite yet.”
Ultimately, the success of WPP Open will depend on whether it genuinely does create good work that makes other clients envious.
Get the culture right
Rose succeeds Mark Read following what has been a tumultuous 12 months, as a high degree of turnover has doubtlessly spooked staff.
In WPP’s H1 earnings report, the company said it had reduced headcount by over 7,000 since June 2024 — equivalent to a 6.3% decline. Staff costs also dropped in part due to a 60.1% year-on-year drop in staff incentives.
The company’s strong embrace of AI has concerned employees across media agencies. If WPP tells the market it can achieve the same quality work more efficiently, it raises the question: does the holding group need as many people?
At the inaugural SXSW London this summer, Read admitted the answer, at least in the short term, is no. There is “no doubt”, according to Read, that there will be “fewer people involved” in the work media companies do today, thanks to AI-driven efficiencies.
“But I think there will be many, many more and many, many different things that people will do that will bridge that gap,” he added.
For Rose’s part, in her introductory video, she praised the “tireless work” of staff: “What you do every day to deliver impact for our clients is just extraordinary.” Rose added that she is “so excited to co-create the new WPP together”.
While she is right not to sugarcoat the state of the business, saying “it won’t be easy” likely won’t be enough to reassure anxious employees unless there is a clear plan to grow the business through turbulence.
Another former WPP employee told The Media Leader that there is a sense among current and former staff that WPP will eventually transition to a software-as-a-service model through Open.
If that’s the case, “they just need to be honest with people”, the source said.
The balancing act Rose will be tasked is thus pleasing City analysts that want to hear how AI can deliver improved profits while also communicating, with conviction, that AI can be used in service of making exceptional work for clients. And doing so without shedding too much talent.
WPP CEO Mark Read: ‘No doubt’ there will be ‘fewer people involved’ in work due to AI
Sell a story
As the highest-profile position at a company, CEOs aren’t just business leaders, they’re also chief spokespeople. And WPP is in sore need of a positive narrative after years of managed decline relative to its rivals.
That likely means a cohesive PR effort aimed at positioning WPP as not a laggard to Publicis and the soon-to-be-merged Omnicom and Interpublic, but more exciting than them.
As CEO, Read often made statements comparable to other holding group leaders like Publicis’ Arthur Sadoun, yet Sadoun “would come across as more exciting and more of the moment”, according to the ex-WPP executive.
Leapfrogging competitors ultimately comes down to the strength of the work and thus the believability of the story being told by Rose.
And the story WPP is currently telling of AI transformation could use refinement. As the ex-WPP executive explained: “CMOs just want to know what time it is and WPP spends hours telling them how they built the clock.
“The industry is less far forward than it thinks it is. When you start telling people that ID-based systems are yesterday before a lot of clients have even worked them out, you just lose people.”