Cindy Rose doesn’t start as chief executive of WPP until 1 September, but she has already been spending a lot of time at the company’s Sea Containers HQ, meeting board members and senior agency executives in the days since her appointment was announced on 10 July.
Rose, who has worked at Microsoft for the past nine years, most recently as chief operating officer for global enterprise, has dual US and UK citizenship. She also has the benefit of having been a non-executive director on WPP’s board for six years.
The British agency group’s decision to recruit an existing board member as its new CEO echoes a similar move by Interpublic 20 years ago. Michael Roth was a non-executive director of IPG for two years before becoming executive chairman and then, a year later, CEO in 2005.
But the similarities don’t end there, because Rose, like Roth, is a New York-trained lawyer and has not worked in agencies prior to landing the CEO role. Both were also a similar age, just shy of their 60th birthday, when they got the big job.
Roth, who had previously worked in financial services, went on to serve as CEO of IPG for 16 years, stabilising the US agency holding company’s troubled finances and turning it into the best performer of the big six groups before the pandemic. That’s a potentially auspicious precedent for the new WPP CEO, even if IPG has ended up selling to Omnicom in the post-Roth era.
However, Rose has spent more time than Roth had in the media world, having previously worked at Vodafone, Virgin Media and Disney.
She takes over from Mark Read at WPP in tough circumstances, just weeks after it issued a shock profit warning on the eve of her appointment – ahead of Q2 results on 7 August. Revenues are now expected to fall by up to 5% in 2025, the third year in a row of poor performance.
In theory, Rose was meant to be helping to recruit the new CEO because she was one of four members of the nominations committee on the WPP board, according to the annual report, but she applied for the job herself.
WPP avoided leaks during the search and no internal or external frontrunner emerged publicly during the process.
The fact that Rose’s appointment came on 10 July, barely four weeks after Read’s departure was first announced on 9 June, suggests the board was ready to move quickly. It already had a “readiness” index to assess internal candidates as part of succession planning, according to the annual report.
As a non-executive director, Rose will certainly have had an inside track on what the board was looking for.
There were five key qualities that the new WPP CEO needed, according to a private letter sent by Philip Jansen, the chairman, to shareholders, which Campaign has seen. These qualities were: technology and AI acumen, marketing and client credibility, US market focus (because WPP has underperformed in its biggest market), leadership and cultural change agent, and operational excellence.
However, prior experience of leading a company on the stock market was not essential, according to the letter. Jansen might fill some of that gap because he was previously CEO of BT.
Personal strengths
Rose has a number of obvious personal strengths: she is said to be smart and evidently has good knowledge of tech and media and has talked for years about the potential of AI.
One WPP agency leader, who has presented to her at a board meeting, says: “She’s a smart cookie — I respect her brain.” She is also a good listener, this person adds.
Rose knows WPP well and has high-level contacts in both the UK and US. She also has an insight into what WPP staff think about hot-button issues such as working four days a week in the office because she has been the board representative for workforce engagement.
She will bring “discipline” from her nine years at Microsoft, according to an executive at another tech company, who predicts it could be something of a culture shock for staff at the agency group.
It was notable that in Jansen’s letter to shareholders he emphasised the need for WPP to become “more performance-driven” as an organisation.
Rose can come across as “a bit corporate”, one former WPP executive says, although a company insider maintains it would be more accurate to describe her simply as “professional”.
Another current WPP executive says, in reference to Rose's early career at Disney: “I hope she brings a bit of Mickey Mouse as well as Microsoft.”
It is clear that Rose feels comfortable inside large client organisations, which should help WPP as revenues from its top 25 clients, which include Coca-Cola, Ford and Google, grew 2% last year, in contrast to an overall decline of 1%.
She is also well placed to help WPP get the best out of WPP Open, the company’s technology and AI platform, which appears to be a genuine point of differentiation versus competitors. However, improving WPP’s data offer looks to be a pressing need — a point Jansen made at the annual shareholder meeting in May.
Rose deserves time to draw up her plans and share them with staff, clients and shareholders, as was discussed on the latest episode of the Campaign Podcast examining what the Cindy Rose era will mean for WPP.
But investment banking analysts have already been speculating about Rose’s likely “strategic options”.
JP Morgan Cazenove said she could further simplify the group or be more radical and sell off assets, cut the dividend in order to reinvest in the business and/or acquire to reshape the group.
A sale of WPP cannot be discounted as a possibility, given the share price has been under pressure since at least 2022 and has halved since the start of 2025.
Campaign reported last week that Accenture and WPP discussed a potential M&A deal earlier this year. The conversation seemingly came to nothing, but showed at least that WPP was willing to consider the concept.
WPP can do better
Rose could be seen as a continuity candidate because she has been a director since 2019. She must know the board as a whole carries a degree of responsibility for the company’s worsening performance in recent years as WPP has undergone endless, internal restructuring and lost ground to arch-rival Publicis Groupe. For example, the failure to get a proper grip of Group M, now known as WPP Media, following a restructure in May, went on for years.
There are many areas where WPP can and must do better. Most importantly, WPP urgently needs a transfusion of new blood, both in the executive ranks and on the board, to reinvigorate the business, which still employs more than 100,000 people, after losing close to 10,000 roles in the past 18 months. Rose will need to recruit smartly, quickly and well.
Winning business is fundamental to the agency world and Rose starts on the back foot with the recent loss of Mars’ global media account, which will be a significant headwind in 2026. Given her lack of direct experience of agency pitches, it would make sense to pick a client-facing warrior or two to support her.
Various insiders, past and present, also say WPP needs to speed up decision-making and reduce layers of approval, although one person close to the company dismissed the suggestion the agency group is overly bureaucratic.
A new CEO would be expected to articulate a new strategy at an investor day before long, and the chair and non-executive directors should show up and support the boss, unlike the last event in London in January 2024 when they did not attend.
Rose’s WPP needs to be clear about what it stands for and how it goes to market.
Much has been made of how WPP has struggled in the US since before the pandemic, but I would worry if the company’s leadership thinks it needs to become more American to succeed. Publicis has done well in the US without becoming less French and the new Omnicom will be an all-American giant after completing its takeover of IPG.
Indeed, I have often wondered why WPP has not made more of its British roots in recent years, given the UK is a global champion in creative industries.
Rose may speak with an American accent but is well plugged in to the UK. She is a former UK CEO of Microsoft, has advised the UK government on technology issues and has an OBE. She has refrained from making public comments since her appointment but has a supportive network, judging by some of the high-powered endorsements she received in a well-informed BBC Sounds profile, which portrayed the incoming WPP CEO as thoughtful, tech savvy and unflappable.
Still, corporate honeymoons don’t tend to last long and FTSE-100 investors often lack patience. Hein Schumacher lasted fewer than two years before stepping down as CEO of Unilever in March. Debra Crew was CEO of Diageo for barely two years before she exited earlier this month. Both had originally joined as non-executive directors.
Rose deserves a summer holiday before she gets started as CEO because she has a huge to-do list to get WPP flowering again.
Gideon Spanier is UK editor-in-chief of Campaign
