Cindy Rose is the right choice for a CEO (but maybe not at WPP)
Opinion
WPP’s new CEO has an extraordinary CV. But Rose’s appointment signals a deeper crisis in advertising: the people running it no longer believe it’s a creative business.
By any reasonable standard, Cindy Rose is a great executive.
WPP’s incoming CEO has worked at some of the world’s most powerful companies, built high-performing teams, turned around faltering businesses and earned a reputation as a principled, precise, no-nonsense leader.
“UK tech’s most powerful woman” has also achieved things that most of us never will, like an OBE and dressing up as Pluto at Disneyland.
And the fact that she will be one of only 10 female CEOs in the FTSE 100 is significant (but how on earth is this still the case in 2025?).
Yet, this decision raises all manner of questions for WPP.
Such as: has this company lost faith in what made it valuable in the first place? It signals a retreat from creativity, a surrender to the language of transformation and a deepening belief that advertising can be fixed with operational discipline and enterprise software.
WPP is already restructuring under Mark Read. But it still needs an overarching reason to exist when it is soon to become the smallest of three global holding companies.
“Sticking to the plan” is not going to be enough.
What her appointment tells us
Breathless reactions to Rose’s appointment last week focused on how WPP is “betting on transformation” with a leader who understands cloud computing, AI deployment and digital enterprise models.
Rose certainly brings all that. She’s spent the last decade inside Microsoft helping clients figure out how to modernise their operations. Before that, she was at Vodafone rebuilding a consumer business that had seen 12 consecutive quarters of decline. At Virgin, she led the deployment of TiVo and helped lay the groundwork for what would become Virgin TV Anywhere. At Disney, she spent 15 years climbing the ranks, from PR to EMEA MD.
It was during this period that she donned the Pluto costume, we’re told, to understand the Disneyland customer experience.
So, yes, she’s impressive. But advertising isn’t like other industries. It resists efficiency. It thrives on friction. It demands irrational leaps of faith, not just incremental improvements.
While WPP’s press release lauds her ability to “lead multibillion-dollar operations across the UK, EMEA and globally” and chairman Philip Jansen praises her “track record of growing large-scale businesses”, it’s telling that no-one mentions a single campaign or idea she’s ever championed.
And therein lies the problem.
WPP has lost confidence in what it sells
It suggests that WPP’s board no longer believes creativity is the central engine of growth.
If they did, they would’ve hired someone steeped in the business of making work that moves people. Someone who’s spent time inside agencies, studios, brands. Someone who knows what it feels like to sit across from a CMO and sell an idea.
Instead, they hired someone who knows how to manage digital transformation at scale.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. WPP needs to evolve. But if transformation becomes the goal rather than the means, then the creative soul of the business gets lost.
Rose has said that her appointment “feels like coming home” because she “began her career in the creative industries”. That’s a generous interpretation of her years at Disney, where her roles largely focused on digital strategy and commercial development.
The fact that she chose to dress up as Pluto to experience the brand’s emotional connection with audiences is telling: she is an observer of creativity, not a driver.
A safe surprise?
What’s most impressive about this appointment is that Rose’s name was nowhere near any press speculation about who would replace Read.
This is despite the fact that it took precisely one month to name Read’s successor after he resigned. Surely Rose was already a — if not the — contender in the mind of Jansen?
Assuming most editors received Thursday’s press release with the question “Who she?”, the element of surprise gives WPP some cover to position Rose as a fresh voice. A tech-savvy outsider.
It won’t go unnoticed that she’s been on WPP’s board since 2019. She was in the room during the entirety of Read’s tenure: years of client churn, consolidation and sliding market confidence. She helped oversee the strategy that led to today’s crisis. She is not a clean break.
There’s a reason the share price inched up on news of her appointment on Thursday, only for it to fall back to where it was, a 16-year low, after the previous day’s profit warning.
This isn’t the move you make if you’re ready to blow up the challenged holding company model. This is the move you make if you want to quietly professionalise the back end, modernise the tech stack and keep the lights on.
Even Rose’s most enthusiastic defenders have described her as “precise”, “methodical”, “authentic” and “well-networked”. Great qualities, but not the kind of adjectives anyone ever used for Lee Clow, Sir John Hegarty or even Sir Martin Sorrell.
If those comparisons seem unfair, you’d be right. It’s not fair that these holdcos should be judged against their past personalities and the era of being high-margin, high-spending and, in some cases, just high.
This is still a business with creativity at its centre, because creative ideas lead to effective advertising, which helps brands sell stuff.
What’s at stake is reminding people why that matters.
The AI risk
Which brings us to one of the main justifications for Rose’s appointment: her deep knowledge of AI.
WPP, like every other agency group, is betting big on automation. In fact, just days before her appointment, WPP touted its new partnership with Nvidia to accelerate generative-AI capabilities.
Rose brings clear credibility here. from her time at Microsoft. She understands the risks and possibilities better than most agency leaders.
But what happens when your AI capabilities are no longer unique? When every holdco has a partnership with OpenAI, every pitch deck references Azure and every piece of copy is templated from the same generative model?
You end up with commodified creativity. And commodified creativity is what drove clients to in-house and platforms in the first place.
Technology may transform how we work. But it doesn’t answer the question of why we do this work in the first place or why clients should care who does it.
WPP needs more than tools. It needs values. A point of view. A human reason to exist.
Leadership isn’t just what you know
I know many people will disagree with this view.
This is the quiet tragedy of modern advertising: the people running it no longer believe it’s a creative profession.
That’s why the agency business is on the ropes. Holdcos are consolidating into grey, bureaucratic monoliths. Clients are confused about who does what. Talent is bleeding to tech, consultancies and independent studios. Trust is at historic lows. Creativity is being sidelined in favour of performance metrics and automated outputs.
If you buy into the idea that this is just a services business, interchangeable with IT or consulting, then you will conclude that all clients want is efficiency, scale and automation.
Even though the proliferation of digital in our lives has meant more crap content, delivered at scale? It makes no sense.
So I repeat: Rose is impressive. She will bring focus, discipline and operational clarity to a company that sorely needs it.
But leadership in advertising isn’t just about what you know. It’s about what you believe.
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.
