Can Cindy Rose rebuild WPP?

Intro – WPP: from giant to a shadow of its former self

WPP used to dominate the global marketing communications landscape. It owned many of the world’s leading ad agencies, including Grey, JWT, Ogilvy, Wunderman and Y&R. Its media buying arm, GroupM, had huge media buying scale – at its height it reported total media billings of £55.798 billion and claimed to be buying one in three TV ads globally and at the helm sat Sir Martin Sorrell.

But today all is not well at WPP. It is a shadow of its former self;  the dominance has gone, many of the agency brands have gone  – absorbed into meaningless initials, the scale has become almost irrelevant in the self-service media age and the engine house of its growth, Sir Martin Sorrell left in 2018.  WPP’s market cap numbers closely mirror this fall from grace;  crashing from £24bn in 2017 to around £2.95bn, just over one tenth of its peak value (see table below). The current market cap is the lowest it has been since 1998.  If all that wasn’t bad enough,  in late 2025 WPP issued a profit warning, spooked analysts, and dropped out of the FTSE100.  The latest results revealed a revenue drop of 8.9%, the ninth consecutive revenue decline from WPP.  As a result of these events, WPP’s share price has collapsed from over 1500p to less than 300p today, it has even been suggested it may be a takeover target.

Today, WPP presents a thirty-year history that has included rapid growth through acquisition, market dominance through massive acquired scale and, since 2022, an almost non-stop decline.

But as of last July, WPP has a new CEO, Cindy Rose a former senior executive at Microsoft, and WPP board member. Rose now has the brief to turn the business around.

This article will explore whether Rose, or anyone, can recover WPP from its current tailspin.

Some history

First let’s summarise the history of WPP as an advertising services group. The advertising business of WPP was the brainchild of Martin Sorrell, formerly the CFO of Saatchi and Saatchi and graduate of Cambridge and Harvard. In 1985 Sorrell bought a small company called Wire and Plastic Products (WPP) and used it as a vehicle to purchase some of the world’s largest advertising and marketing services companies throughout the 1990s.

These acquisitions included marketing communications behemoths J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, Wunderman and Young & Rubicam, legendary advertising businesses built by some of some of advertising’s greatest pioneers; David Ogilvy, Raymond Rubicam and Lester Wunderman, as well as many whose names were not on the front door, like Jeremy Bullmore at JWT.

WPP grew into the world’s largest advertising holding company and expanded through acquisition into market research through Taylor Nelson and PR via Burson-Marsteller.

Sorrell left WPP in 2018 and his replacement was Mark Reid, former CEO of Wunderman. Under Read’s tenure, the WPP share price fell from highs of around 1200p (GBX) when he joined to around 500p by the time he left in June 2025. The problem was not only simplifying a huge, complex, and often duplicated business, there were also powerful distractions, not least Covid which hit advertising hard between 2020 and 2022. Covid prompted a switch to more digital media which left the traditional parts of WPP looking increasingly outdated.

Where are we now, in 2026?

The most striking difference in WPP’s fortunes is the change in financial margins. WPP has moved from being a ~14% margin business to a ~3% margin business.  Last year saw the loss of huge global clients like Coca Cola and Mars. Not only this, but we have seen the “disintermediation of advertising” where advertisers are dealing directly with media owners like Google and META through platforms, thus negating the need for an intermediary “agency” function. Alongside this, creativity, the core product of advertising agencies, creative production, is being replaced by artificial intelligence. What took days, and cost thousands is now achieved in minutes. The media disintermediation and technological advances in creative production mean the very core of an advertising agency’s business model is under severe threat.

Can Cindy Rose do it?

Rose joined from Microsoft, but WPP is a lot different to working at Microsoft.

Microsoft has a very well-defined product suite much of which is essential to the way many companies operate and deliver. Microsoft is well positioned for the extended growth of cloud technology and AI. These capabilities give it a strong competitive advantage and a wide defensive moat. It’s Morningstar moat rating is “Wide” [1].   Reflecting these points, Microsoft’s share price has grown x10 since Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in 2014.

By comparison, WPP is a broad and unfocussed marketing services group selling a set of services that are not clearly defined, understood, or appreciated by many boards. It is under continuous threat from other agencies offering the same services and has limited genuine competitive advantage. The main advantage WPP had in the past was media trading scale, but disintermediation of media buying and the ever-expanding power of the big tech companies mean this is no longer relevant. Reflecting this, Morningstar’s moat rating for WPP is “none” [2] and whilst Microsoft’s share price has increased tenfold since 2024, WPP’s has fallen from 1274p in 2014 to 267p in the same period.

So, Cindy Rose faces an exceedingly challenging task. David Indo, of ID Comms said he couldn’t think of a harder job in advertising right now than running WPP. His colleague, Tom Denford described WPP as “vulnerable”[3].

Recovering WPP is going to be a difficult job for anyone, because many of the problems are structural, and WPP is at the mercy of a fast-moving landscape where it no longer wields power. These issues are going to stretch the capabilities of even a superhuman leader. So, it’s not a question of can Cindy Rose do it, but rather what does Cindy Rose have to work with, especially in a company that, compared to Microsoft, doesn’t have a tangible product?

So, what does WPP have that Cindy Rose can work with?

Below I have listed 10 core capabilities that agencies had until now – these are the capabilities offered either explicitly or implicitly by the major global agencies. I suggest what the status of those capabilities is now:

The four that stand out as having some moated durability are Peer Knowledge Sharing, Human Originality, Marketing Process Support and Platform Governance. Let’s look at each one in detail:

1. Peer Knowledge Sharing: This is often overlooked but agencies are in an interesting position – they know what’s happening in the marketplace in a way that any one client cannot. Their cross-market and cross-category view is a privilege and makes fertile ground for building advantage for clients through comparison, benchmarking and pattern recognition. WPP has lots of the  connectedness required to generate this insight, and it can capitalise upon it for the next few years.
2. Human Originality: Possibly the essence of what agencies call “creativity”. Whilst the production of ads may be hoovered up by Artificial Intelligence, it is not particularly good at originating from experience and cultural context. This is because AI can’t be connected directly in to the generators of original thought: lived experiences, emotions, intuition, and a genuine understanding of the physical and social world [4].  WPP can and should aim to win this territory back.
3. Marketing Process Support: Many clients have informally arranged marketing departments, but more than that, these departments are not always highly valued inside their businesses and in many they are viewed as a cost. Whilst this might not be the case for the Unilever and P&Gs of this world, it is true for many businesses in the next tiers of spend and global distribution. Opportunity lies in helping these marketing department to be better at what they do and to become more highly valued by the companies they belong to. An element of data and tech has a role to play in this in the field of process management and optimisation.
4. Platform Governance: Huge sums of money are going into a small number of very large platforms and tech stacks.  There are a number of areas where strong governance is required and these include:
   1. Brand reputation protection – ensuring that brands are displayed in safe environments
   2. Cross platform budget optimisation – it’s often the case that when summed the sales across platforms exceed the number of sales reported by the brand itself; this is a clear signal that  cross-platform media investment management is required.
   3. Brand and creative consistency – ensuring that brands are presented as they should be, and in the right context to their target markets and audiences across all platforms.

Conclusion

It’s pretty much inevitable that Rose will have to accept that WPP is going to be a smaller company in the future, it is out of the FTSE100 and in my view will not return. WPP should be able to stay in the FTSE250 so the question is how can FTSE250 companies deliver the right kind of profits to keep shareholders interested?

It would be an error to try to take WPP back to its previous heights. Historically, WPP has been a scale business, with high revenues and relatively low margins delivered through massive media billings. Now the scale has gone so WPP has to pivot to being a specialist business.  In this format it needs to concentrate on making higher margins from lower revenues.

The practical answer is to create a sharp focus on the defendable elements listed above:

1. Peer to peer knowledge sharing – this has always been underestimated by agencies, but cross-fertilisation of insight across categories to identify meaningful commonalities and differences has to be valuable to individual brands.
2. Human originality – this is what agencies were originally good at but they seem to have lost it in automation. Originating totally new ideas and solutions, thinking outside the box, going beyond the referencing capabilities of AI, this type of originality has great value in any organisation.
3. Marketing process support (amplification might be a better word) – marketing teams are the first target in cost-cutting, but agencies can play a crucial role in strengthening what they deliver and how they are perceived internally.
4. Platform governance – the needs for governance is illustrated in news items almost daily, brand are precious entities, they can be seriously damaged in seconds; protecting them must be an imperative for every company.

Cindy Rose understands tech businesses and is on the record as valuing ‘compassion, clarity, purpose [and] emotional intelligence. These might just be the skills and values required to build a foundation for evolution at WPP.

References

1. Microsoft MSFT Moat rating www.morningstar.com 18 May 2026
2. WPP Moat rating www.morningstar.com 18 May 2026
3. “Can Cindy Rose rescue WPP” MediaSnack (IDComms YouTube channel) 16 July 2025
4. “Is AI Dulling Our Minds”, Liz Mineo The Harvard Gazette, 13 Nov 2025