By Suzanne Vranica | Photography by Philip Vukelich for WSJ
For five days every June, ad agencies try to out-splash one another in a rosé-fueled competition to woo advertisers at the Cannes Lions ad festival.
WPP spent $23 million last year on the French Riviera. The ad giant ferried clients and potential clients by private speedboats to the secluded Saint-Honorat Island, where they enjoyed an al fresco paella and zucchini-flower lunch.
Steps from the famous La Croisette promenade, WPP created "WPP Beach" as its home base for meetings and client entertainment. Guests were serenaded by musicians such as Corinne Bailey Rae, while others enjoyed the hospitality aboard a private yacht.
That party is now over.
WPP's new chief executive, Cindy Rose, has cut the yacht, the beach and the island. There will still be fabulous locations, but this year's agenda is highlighting AI capabilities with a client lunch at Cannes hot spot La Petite Maison with speakers including DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and a space atop the Hôtel Martinez.
Rose took over in September from Microsoft, where she was chief operating officer for global enterprise sales.
She is the first woman to lead a major ad holding company. Her assignment is formidable: right-size the workforce and cut costs while winning new accounts and adapting the agency to an AI-driven future. She must build up WPP's tech offerings while keeping the creative class engaged. And she must do it at a company that is weary from prior restructuring efforts.
There's a term Glass Cliff, coined by two British researchers about two decades ago, to describe a woman's ascent to the top role only at a moment of crisis and organizational decline, elevating her risk of failure.
Rose isn't buying it. "This idea that boards offload risk onto women is a really demotivating idea," she said in a recent interview. "Most transformations succeed or fail because of people."
The firm behind such iconic marketing campaigns as American Express's "Don't Leave Home Without It" and Dove's "Real Beauty" stood unchallenged for more than a decade as the world's largest ad company by net revenue. Today, it is No. 3 behind Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe after losing assignments from a string of big brands including Mars and Coca-Cola.
Artificial intelligence is starting to wreak havoc in the ad business, as brands can now create and target ads way faster and cheaper using technology.
WPP stock has plummeted about 73% over the past five years, leaving it with a market cap of just $4 billion. WPP was dropped from the FTSE 100 index of top London Stock Exchange companies in December.
Rose was born in Buffalo, N.Y., the daughter of a biochemist and a dental surgeon. She studied political science at Barnard College and went to New York Law School. After working at several New York law firms, where she worked on the bankruptcy of Eastern Airlines, she headed to London and landed a job at Allen & Overy, becoming one of the first American attorneys in its U.K. practice. She now holds dual British and American citizenship and has spent most of her career in the U.K.
The 60-year-old is a mother of four, ranging in age from 20 to 31, with two based in London, one in New York and one in Mumbai. Her husband runs his family business in Mumbai.
One of her first in-house roles was at Walt Disney U.K., where she protected the entertainment giant's intellectual property as vice president of legal and government affairs. She pivoted to corporate leadership roles, first at Disney, and then Virgin Media and Vodafone UK.
Then, Microsoft called with a job offer. It was an attractive prospect: the tech giant had a new CEO, Satya Nadella, who was focused on changing the culture. She stayed for almost 10 years.
She was named to WPP's board in 2019 and was involved in the search for a replacement for CEO Mark Read last year. During the process, she says, several people urged her to raise her own hand for the job, noting her background in technology and track record of corporate overhauls. At Microsoft, she revitalized Western European operations by changing the office environment, which had been riddled with internal rivalries and a lack of collaboration, work that was chronicled in a Harvard Business Review case study.
Culture clash
Rose has never penned an ad slogan or crafted a jingle. She routinely refers to herself as a technologist. In an ad industry known for flashy personalities and casual business practices, Rose is building a reputation as a more traditional corporate executive who tries to stick to a schedule and surrounds herself with a chief of staff and a business manager.
She spends one or two weeks a month at the New York office, hosts town halls -- occasionally accompanied by her cockapoo, Virginia Woof -- and sends out monthly video updates dubbed "The Download" to keep WPP's global workforce informed.
Rose unveiled a s weeping three-year turnaround plan earlier this year, targeting $676 million in annual cost savings by 2028. WPP shrank its workforce by nearly 9% last year, and staffers are bracing for more cuts.
Rose has tried to assuage such concerns, telling staffers in March that the company is still working through the plan, but much of the savings will come from reducing real estate and supplier spending, consolidating some leadership roles and regular attrition. All changes would be "handled thoughtfully with empathy, professionally, and communicated clearly," she said in one of her staff video messages, according to a copy viewed by The Journal.
She presents herself as an outsider coming in to help a company that has fallen behind catch up. But she was on the WPP board for six years.
"As a member of the board, you can advise, you can guide, you can ask questions, you can interrogate, you can disagree, but you don't have the authority to execute," said Rose. "Only the CEO has the authority to execute."
A big piece of Rose's reorganization plan involves untangling WPP's unwieldy operating structure, the result of a decadeslong shopping spree in which founder Martin Sorrell bought hundreds of agencies globally. Those agencies competed aggressively for clients, with leaders undercutting each other and sometimes trading petty insults, according to people familiar with the company.
Rose is forcing collaboration by establishing a single umbrella group to house the creative firms, consolidating profit and loss statements and making executives from different agencies pitch potential clients together. The goal: pull together the best talent to serve clients, regardless of which internal brand they represent. It is a business model that has worked well for her rival, Publicis.
At Microsoft, Rose brought in outside experts and organized workshops to destigmatize failure and end internal rivalries, according to the 2024 Harvard Business case study. Senior Microsoft executives had "failure parties," confessing their biggest professional mistakes.
She recently had performance psychologist Michael Gervais, known for his work with Microsoft and the Seattle Seahawks, run a workshop for about 170 top WPP leaders to rebuild executives' confidence and agency morale.
Attendees in one session were directed to write down their "unproductive thoughts" and assess if they were based on facts, according to a copy of the workbook seen by the Journal. Some then shared their answers with colleagues.
Technological changes
WPP is now playing catch-up.
Google, Meta and Amazon control more than half of the $428 billion U.S. ad market, and data-armed quants and automated systems increasingly manage ad buying.
Rival Publicis has outspent others, pouring billions into acquiring technology, data, e-commerce and digital consulting firms.
Rose said that once WPP returns to organic revenue growth, which she expects in 2027, it will allocate more funds to dealmaking and bolster such areas as commerce and social-influencer marketing.
Under Rose's drive to deploy technology, WPP recently launched a self-service version of its AI platform that will let small businesses create and publish ad campaigns. The move pits WPP, which typically works with Fortune 500 companies, in competition with Meta, which dominates small-business advertising. Rose estimates the project could generate several hundred million dollars in revenue within five years.
WPP's stock is down roughly 30% since Rose became CEO, and she is facing a messy legal battle with a former executive alleging wrongful termination -- before Rose took over. WPP has filed to dismiss the lawsuit and said the claims are without merit.
WPP has had a string of client wins, including Estée Lauder and Tylenol-maker Kenvue. Ad buyer WPP Media beat out rivals in new business wins for the first quarter, racking up about $1.9 billion in ad spending that it will oversee for clients, according to research firm Comvergence. In 2025, the agency ended the year in negative territory while rival Publicis Media won more than $10 billion in spending.
Rose has been joining senior client meetings and many new business pitches, ad consultants and WPP executives said.
During a recent pitch for a healthcare company, Rose was willing to cut the agency's fee for the work it was being asked to do, tying part of its compensation to performance goals such as hitting specific sales lift targets. That helped the agency win the business, says Greg Paull, president of global growth for MediaSense, a firm that matches advertisers with agencies. "Showing that they are putting skin in the game has not been a hallmark of that holding group," he said.
Write to Suzanne Vranica at Suzanne.Vranica@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 07, 2026 22:01 ET (02:01 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Comments