Wins, setbacks, and rivalries: Inside Cindy Rose’s first 100 days as CEO of ad giant WPP

Cindy Rose marked her 100th day as CEO of WPP this week. She faces a challenge in stabilizing an ad giant that has fallen behind its rivals and must adapt to the age of AI.
WPP/Jillian Edelstein
WPP CEO Cindy Rose marked 100 days in the role this week.
Rose has received plaudits for owning some of WPP’s past mistakes and signaling change ahead.
She faces a make-or-break challenge as she prepares to roll out a revamped strategy.
When Cindy Rose took the helm at the advertising agency giant WPP in September, she inherited one of the
most challenging jobs
on Madison Avenue.
Battered by a period of big account losses, internal restructuring, and thousands of layoffs,
morale had sunk
. So had
the share price
. London-based WPP was trading at lows not seen since 2009, and the company had warned investors that the remainder of the year would continue to be rocky.
Insiders and shareholders were hopeful that Rose,
a US-born executive
most recently at Microsoft, could serve as a kind of Goldilocks porridge compared to her predecessors. She was widely seen as a happy medium between Martin Sorrell, the outspoken British business mogul who had built WPP from the ground up over 33 years, and Mark Read, the more introverted operator who took over in 2018.
Rose was described by one analyst as a “peacemaker,” and her
tech background
and experience in maintaining client relationships were viewed as positive attributes that would help bring about much-needed change.
This week, Rose marked her 100th day in the role. Darren Woolley, CEO of the management consultancy Trinity P3, scored Rose a “7.8 out of 10” for her performance so far.
“She’s saying all the right things and has sent some signals to the market. The big test will be what happens early next year, as she sets out her strategy,” Woolley said. “Cindy will not last a year if they don’t believe the strategy can be delivered.”
Rose’s wins during her first 100 days — some major new business, key hires, a big partnership with Google, and an oversubscribed bond sale — have been dampened by bad news.
On her first earnings call, in October, Rose described the company’s performance as “unacceptable.” Shortly after delivering its second profit warning of the year and downgrading its full-year growth forecast, its shares spiraled further downward, and WPP was demoted from the FTSE 100 index of the UK’s largest publicly listed companies. Shares of the London-listed company have dropped by about 18% since Rose became chief executive.
Adding to Rose’s overflowing in-tray, WPP was hit with
a lawsuit
from one of its former executives who said he was fired in July of this year — before Rose’s arrival as CEO — after he raised concerns internally that the group’s media investment division was allegedly running a kickback scheme. WPP said in November it would “vigorously” defend itself against the allegations made in the suit. The case is ongoing.
WPP has fallen behind the sector’s star performer, Publicis Groupe, and it faces a new titan following the combo of
Omnicom and IPG
this year. Agencyland also faces a bigger, existential quandary: What is the role of a large advertising
agency holding company
amid the rise of tech and the emergence of
AI solutions
that claim to automate much of the work agencies charge top dollar for?
This account of Rose’s tenure so far draws on interviews with more than a dozen current and former WPP staffers and clients, competitors, marketing consultants, and industry analysts. They said Rose deserves credit for delivering a positive narrative about WPP’s opportunities while also owning its problems. Much of her fate will rest on a strategy plan that she has said she will outline fully next year. Insiders and analysts said her strategy will need to be bold and visionary, given the challenges ahead.
Rose told Business Insider in a statement that in her first 100 days, she has actively sought feedback from WPP’s top clients to help create a blueprint for what the company needs to do differently in the future.
“I’m most proud of our WPP employees for their incredible resilience, client obsession, and passion to win, which is already making a difference, and you can see it in the business that we’re winning: Mastercard, Reckitt, Henkel, and more to come,” Rose said.
Rose has planted the seeds of her strategy
This past September, from the company’s 3
World Trade Center
campus in New York City, Rose laid out a three-pronged blueprint for what she called “a new WPP” at her first global town hall as CEO. Her first priority was “putting people first” by creating an environment for employees to thrive. She said WPP should be famous for “being completely client-obsessed” as part of her “winning for clients” principle. And she said WPP should be “harnessing our AI advantage,” telling staffers to become “AI superusers.”
Her opening address to employees was received well internally, insiders said.
“We were pleasantly surprised,” one current senior WPP agency staffer said. They added that Rose is “so much better at the human stuff” than her predecessors and said she had kept the company regularly updated with videos talking up the agency’s wins.
Rose opened WPP’s new São Paulo campus in November, a site that will house about 4,000 people across 21 agencies.
WPP
WPP has been heavily pitching WPP Open, an internal AI-powered platform that integrates with technology from companies such as OpenAI, Meta, and Salesforce. It connects signals from clients’ own first-party data, partners, and WPP’s data on the performance of thousands of campaigns to help plan and place ads, and measure the results.
In October, with Rose firmly in situ, WPP announced WPP Open Pro, a self-service version to give clients their own access to the platform. The aim was to grow WPP’s client base by appealing to smaller advertisers or direct-to-consumer companies that tend to handle much of their marketing in-house. WPP told staffers internally that more than 400 brands had proactively contacted the company about Open Pro in the three weeks after it launched.
Douglas Hayward and Gerry Murray, analysts at the research company IDC, described the Open Pro launch in a report as “a smart move that shows that WPP is prepared to be bold and innovative and even to cannibalize its revenue in the short term.”
However, some analysts questioned whether WPP would be able to invest enough in marketing Open Pro to appeal to this sort of audience, which is accustomed to using tools provided by tech giants like Meta and Google.
Nearly all of WPP’s rivals are also leaning heavily into their tech investments and offerings as part of their pitches to clients and investors.
One former WPP agency executive, who left last year, said they felt Rose should be more proactive in emphasizing the company’s
creative prowess
as something that sets it apart from other agency holding groups and the broader tech sector.
“Creativity is the only thing that human beings have got to make a difference,” the exec said.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, weighed in on the AI hype.
Candice Ward/Getty Images for Google Cloud
Agency relationships with tech platforms are an important part of the mix as they try to differentiate themselves from competitors. This fall, in Mountain View, Rose signed a key deal with
Google Cloud CEO
Thomas Kurian, which sent a signal out to the market, clients, and its rivals about the strength of WPP’s relationship with Google. The “expanded five-year partnership” was billed as going far beyond typical agency-Google setups. WPP said it would commit to spending $400 million on Google’s tech as part of the partnership, which will give it “preferred” access to Google’s latest AI models and data. Google is also WPP’s largest client.
A low-profile start
Save for her welcome address to staffers, which was posted on YouTube, and her first earnings call, Rose has kept a fairly low public profile.
In November, she appeared at an AI conference in New York City, hosted by Microsoft and Luma Partners, an investment bank. Attendees — who included roughly 100 high-profile tech, advertising, and media executives — said she was whisked away by her handlers into the green room before her talk, a session with Google Americas President Sean Downey, and made a swift exit afterward.
Three attendees said they felt Rose missed an opportunity.
“Martin, in the old days, would have worked the room for one hour,” one person said, referring to Sorrell, the former WPP CEO.
At the moment, WPP is a company that “needs more visible leadership for the market, for the staff, for the shareholders, for the clients,” Trinity P3’s Woolley said.
Operating in the shadow of Sadoun
Rose enters an advertising agency landscape that has fundamentally changed. For years, WPP was the top dog. WPP under Sorrell built a formidable empire, acquiring creative agencies and PR shops around the world, and building GroupM (now known as WPP Media) into a huge force, responsible for planning and buying billions of dollars in media across TV, print, out-of-home, and digital.
The market dynamics shifted, largely due to the emergence of tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon, which offer self-service tools that let advertisers bypass agencies. AI has only sped up the disruption. In recent years, clients have pressured agencies to produce more work at lower costs. Agencies have had to respond by retooling to offer marketers more services than just producing and placing ads.
Rival
ad firm Publicis
recognized these shifts early. It made first-party data and technology services its citadels and simplified its pitch around a “power of one” operating strategy. In 2024, the French company became the biggest holding company by revenue, and over the past 18 months has won a string of clients — including many from WPP.
Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun, right, seen onstage with the CEO of French multinational retailer Carrefour’s CEO Alexandre Bompard, a key Publicis client.
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images
Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun
is described by many in the industry as a charismatic and omnipresent force of nature with clients, and a fierce competitor to Rose as she seeks to retain major accounts and acquire new ones.
During the pitch process this year for Mars’ $1.7 billion media business — before Rose was in-post as WPP CEO — the confectionery giant summoned all the agencies involved to meet on a cold January morning at
the M&M’s Store
in central London.
Sadoun turned up about an hour earlier than the scheduled time. The Mars clients hadn’t arrived yet, and the doors to the store were locked shut. He waited outside on Leicester Square. Once Mars’ marketing team arrived, Sadoun greeted them, and they duly invited him in for coffee — much to the chagrin of the competing agencies, who weren’t able to take advantage of the opportunity to get extra face time with the clients. Mars this summer moved its media account from WPP to Publicis.
“There are two types of people in life: The ones who are five minutes early and the ones who are five minutes late. It’s a personal choice, and Arthur has decided to use these rules for unfair advantage by arriving 10 minutes early,” said Richard Robinson, executive director of Ingenuity+, an agency search consultancy that wasn’t involved in the Mars pitch.
Three marketing consultants involved in client pitches said Rose is also visible and warm with clients, delivering passionate addresses and asking personal questions. They say Sadoun takes it to the next level.
Wins, hires, and the outcome of a strategic review
Focus now turns to 2026 after WPP’s annus horribilis.
WPP has appointed the management consulting firm McKinsey to assist Rose in conducting a strategic review of the business. Rose said in October that she would detail the outcome in the new year.
Insiders and analysts predict further layoffs amid a shrinking agency landscape. Jay Pattisall, principal analyst and VP at the research company, forecasts a 15% reduction in agency jobs across the industry as automation and AI force agencies to “pivot from selling services to selling solutions.”
The open question is whether WPP can be optimized to success, or whether it will have to sell some or all of its business in order to best position itself for the future. Or could WPP even pull an Omnicom and acquire a rival? Two people with direct knowledge of the matter said WPP had multiple conversations about a potential acquisition of the US-centric media buying company Horizon over the years, but that the talks never came close to a deal. A Horizon spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment on speculation.
“They need to do some kind of jujitsu,” a second former WPP executive said, referring to an unexpected M&A move to outmaneuver rivals.
As insiders await the outcome of the review, WPP is expected to soon start feeling the impact of some recent sizable new business wins. It secured more than $1.5 billion in billings in November alone, including the consumer goods company Reckitt appointing WPP as its media agency of record and Henkel awarding WPP the media duties for its European consumer brands. WPP was further buoyed this week after its Wavemaker media agency secured a four-year contract, worth up to $2.6 billion, to produce the UK government’s ad campaigns — an account previously held by Omnicom.
Rose has also made some key leadership appointments and formed a new executive management team that could help rally the troops and boost momentum. In one notable hire — and a poke in the eye to rival Sadoun — she persuaded Laurent Ezekiel, who was formerly WPP’s CMO, to reverse a planned move to Publicis and become CEO of the
WPP agency Ogilvy
instead.
Some investors appear optimistic that Rose can steer the company back on course. This month, investors ordered nearly €3 billion (about $3.5 billion) of WPP’s 5.5-year bonds, even though the company only issued €1 billion (about $1.2 billion). The strong oversubscription suggests these institutional investors believe WPP will stay financially stable and meet its debt obligations.
Rose, in her statement, said that her vision for WPP is clear and that AI would usher in a “golden age of marketing.”
Looking ahead to 2026, she said WPP’s greatest opportunity is “to enable our clients to move boldly and confidently into the future and help them fully embrace AI innovation to reimagine growth and unleash their true potential.”
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