WPP appoints Microsoft executive Cindy Rose as new CEO, aiming for digital transformation?

On Thursday this week, British advertising giant WPP announced that it will appoint board member Cindy Rose as the new Chief Executive Officer. According to the relevant announcement, the new CEO will officially take office on September 1st, which means that Mark Read, the current CEO of WPP, will leave his position four months earlier than originally planned.

Notably, one day before the announcement, WPP released an unscheduled financial report update, significantly lowering its full - year performance forecast, which caused the stock price to plummet by 18.09% in a single day, the largest single - day decline since 2020. This is likely to make people have some associations - Mark Read is most likely to be held accountable for WPP's declining performance.

After all, 2025 can almost be said to be a year when WPP's performance suffered an unprecedented setback. First, in March this year, WPP lost Coca - Cola's North American media business. Subsequently, Paramount also announced the end of its 20 - year partnership with WPP. In June this year, Mars, the fast - moving consumer goods giant, also chose to transfer its $1.7 billion advertising business covering more than 70 different markets around the world to Publicis Groupe.

This means that in just one year, WPP has lost several long - term giant clients. This is obviously not a good sign. After all, most brands do not change their agents frequently, which means that WPP may not be able to regain these lost orders for at least the next 3 - 5 years.

In addition to the lost clients, the competitive pressure WPP faces is also increasing. Even if we don't mention the digital advertising sector that has been continuously squeezed by various Internet companies, in the traditional agency field, with the completion of the merger of Omnicom and IPG, WPP will obviously face more challenges in the second half of the year.

At this time, the only good news may be that with WPP's announcement of a leadership change, WPP's stock price immediately rebounded in the short term, rising 3.58% to $30.39 in pre - market trading. This relatively positive signal seems to indicate that the market views this appointment as a relatively positive sign. Of course, from a pessimistic perspective, it may also be that the market believes that WPP's current dilemma has reached its limit, and as long as there is a change, it may be a good thing.

So, who exactly is WPP's new CEO? Why does WPP's board of directors believe that Cindy Rose will be the key leader to pull WPP out of the mire?

Why Cindy Rose?

All the information about Cindy Rose can actually be summarized in one sentence - she is a new leader with rich "transformation" and "technology" backgrounds.

In fact, looking at Cindy Rose's entire work experience, we will find that her career path is very different from that of the current CEOs of other 4A groups. Whether it is Arthur Sadoun, the CEO of Publicis Groupe, or John Wren, the CEO of Omnicom Group, they almost all worked in advertising companies before joining their respective groups. Hiroshi Igarashi, the current CEO of Dentsu, has been working at Dentsu since graduation and took over as CEO in 2017.

In contrast, Cindy Rose's work experience is almost entirely cross - industry. After joining Disney in 1995, she spent 15 years working her way up to the senior vice - president of the Interactive Media Group in the EMEA region (a combination of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). In 2010, she joined Virgin Media in the UK and promoted the innovative model of bundling broadband and TV services. Then in 2014, she joined Vodafone, an old rival of Virgin and one of the world's largest mobile communication companies, to be responsible for the transformation of its mobile communication business. In 2016, she joined Microsoft as the president of Western Europe and the CEO of the UK, and in 2023, she became the chief operating officer of its global enterprise business, leading the digital transformation strategy in the European market.

If we analyze further, we will find that whether it is Disney, Vodafone, or Microsoft, these companies seem to be "digital industrial companies" in their respective fields. Disney can be said to be the first traditional film and television company to accept and try the streaming media business. Vodafone has the world's most complete enterprise information management system and customer service system. In fact, many people believe that this is the key for Vodafone to maintain its strong competitiveness.

Microsoft is even more of Cindy Rose's career peak. If we organize the relevant information, we will find that from 2020 to 2023, in just three years, Cindy Rose promoted the implementation of the "cloud - first" strategy in 17 Western European countries at the strategic level, increasing the market share of Azure cloud services in this region by 8 percentage points in three years. She also established Microsoft's first industrial AI R & D center in Munich.

In 2023, after Cindy Rose took office as the chief operating officer, she began to further promote the organizational structure reform of Microsoft. On the one hand, she designed a new operating model called "Customer Success Units", restructured the global enterprise customer service team into 12 industry vertical units, and promoted the in - depth integration of the sales and technology teams, shortening the solution delivery cycle by 30%. She also participated in optimizing the product roadmap of Azure Stack HCI and designing the architecture of the multi - cloud management solution.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said when evaluating her - "Cindy Rose successfully brought Microsoft's global enterprise business into a new AI - driven stage."

This is why we say that Cindy Rose is a new leader with rich "transformation" and "technology" backgrounds. So, is this new CEO really suitable for WPP at present? Or why has she become the "savior" in the eyes of WPP's board of directors, and why are they so eager to have her become the new captain of WPP, this advertising giant?

Is WPP in a Mess?

Obviously, WPP's current dilemma is exactly the type that Cindy Rose is good at. But to explain this in detail, we need to go back to an earlier time.

In 2018, Martin Sorrell, the founder of WPP, left the advertising empire he built. Mark Read became the second captain of WPP. However, the advertising group he faced at that time was not an aggressive and united one. On the contrary, due to Sorrell's radical merger and expansion strategy in his era, WPP at that time was a huge organization formed through capital integration and mergers, with more than 400 agencies covering multiple marketing fields such as advertising creativity, media placement, public relations, and market research, in different regions and sub - fields.

This made the recognition of the group brand even lower than that of its well - known agencies in many cases. A current executive of WPP once told the American financial media "Business Insider": "WPP has long been regarded as an investment tool aimed at acquiring agencies and rewarding shareholders. To put it bluntly, it has a rather 'dispersed and chaotic' atmosphere."

Of course, in Sorrell's era, this chaos did not really affect the company's performance. After all, at that time, the clients were also in a state of disunity. Different clients in different industries and fields had almost completely different ideas, which meant that for WPP at that time, even if it could integrate different agencies into a perfect whole, it was still difficult to form effective synergy.

However, with the increasing popularity of digital marketing, especially the rapid maturity of discriminative AI, data - driven digital marketing has gradually become the most important channel in the marketing industry. At this stage, as Internet companies began to build their own walled gardens through data, WPP's traditional decentralized model made it difficult for the group to fully integrate the data and technical capabilities of different agencies. Not to mention the low efficiency in communication and collaboration caused by this traditional decentralized structure.

As the global CMO of Procter & Gamble, the world's largest advertiser, once complained at the American Advertisers Conference:

"Too much management, high rent, and indirect costs of many advertising groups make advertisers feel overwhelmed. The business of agencies has become more complex, with layers of account managers to convey information, resulting in advertising companies no longer focusing on creativity, and spending too much time on phone conferences, off - site activities, business trips, and PPT presentations."

And this was exactly when Mark Read officially took the helm of WPP in 2018. Perhaps Sorrell realized that he could no longer drive WPP, the world's largest advertising group at that time, into deeper waters with old methods in the new era, so Read became the new captain.

From today's perspective, the strategic approach Read formulated at that time did conform to the direction of market evolution. On the one hand, he promoted in - depth integration within the company, proposing "One Company, Not a Group", and merged many well - known agencies except Ogilvy to some extent. He even sold the equity of some agencies and non - core businesses.

In 2025, he restructured the media agency brand GroupM into a unified entity called "WPP Media", laid off up to 40% - 45% of the staff, and brought media subsidiaries such as Mindshare and Wavemaker under unified management. At the same time, he began to acquire a large number of technology companies and made heavy investments in the AI field, investing nearly £300 million per day. He built a self - developed intelligent marketing operating system called WPP Open, which integrates the full - link capabilities of creative production, media placement, and data analysis and embeds generative AI tools.

As for the final effect, opinions vary. Many current and former employees of WPP have complained about Read's decision to discontinue many well - known creative brands. For example, in November 2018, Wunderman and JWT (J. Walter Thompson) merged, and the JWT brand became history.

A former employee of Ogilvy told Morketing: "This move is as ridiculous as deleting Lincoln from American history."

However, there are also positive aspects. As the most heavily invested intelligent marketing operating system in WPP's history, by March 2025, WPP Open could cover 48,000 employees (60% of the customer service team), generate 130,000 personalized advertisements for Cadbury's Indian market, reach 94 million people, and reduce costs by 90%.

However, Read still failed to solve the old problems of organizational bloating and cumbersome processes caused by WPP's years of mergers. But the era has once again reached a new crossroads. The era of artificial intelligence is just around the corner, and the confrontation between technology giants and advertising groups has reached a critical moment. As a person with rich experience in technology giants and corporate transformation, Cindy Rose, just like Mark Read when he took over the helm from Martin Sorrell in 2018, has become the new helmsman of this huge ship.

And the problems WPP is facing now are exactly what she is good at, just like the work she did during her tenure as the chief operating officer at Microsoft - through organizational structure reform, deeply integrating the sales, technology (and now creativity) teams, and shortening the entire advertising production and delivery cycle. At the same time, truly commercializing AI and integrating it into the group's processes.

Her experience is a key asset that WPP Group urgently needs to cope with industry changes.

This article is from the WeChat official account "wj00816" (ID: Morketing), author: Innocent Roland, published by 36Kr with authorization.