• Cindy Rose, a Microsoft executive, will become WPP's new chief executive in September.
• Insiders see Rose's tech background and board experience at WPP as assets for the role.
• WPP issued a profit warning this week, and the ad industry is beset with problems.

As advertising giants try to shed their analog roots, WPP has raided one of the world's biggest tech giants to find its next leader.

The UK-based ad giant on Thursday announced that Microsoft executive Cindy Rose, 59, will succeed Mark Read as chief executive on September 1.

Insiders and shareholders told Business Insider they were hopeful Rose would steady the ship after a rocky period.

The appointment was announced the day after WPP had issued a surprise profit warning on Wednesday, saying cautious clients were spending less and less keen on pitches.

Three company insiders expressed relief to BI that the CEO search was over just a month after Read announced in June he would exit the company after 30 years. WPP said it considered both internal and external candidates. Rose was a surprise appointment to most observers BI spoke to and wasn't on their lists of probable candidates.

One WPP insider said they were "very optimistic" about the hire, adding Rose was both a fresh face and knowledgeable about WPP, having sat on its board since 2019.

American-born Rose is a former lawyer who switched to corporate roles, worked a long stint at Disney before joining Microsoft, where she is chief operating officer for global enterprise. She is a dual UK-US citizen and will split her time between both countries, which the insider said was another plus for a company listed on both US and UK stock markets.

Her tech background would put her in good standing to lead WPP to capitalize on the newer and more profitable parts of its offering to clients, the insider added.

"She doesn't come from a 'media' or 'creative' background, so won't see the company through that lens either," the WPP insider said.

WPP chair Philip Jansen praised Rose's experience building "enduring client relationships," having led multi-billion-dollar operations. At Microsoft, she's helped large enterprises harness AI.

Jansen said in a statement her expertise would be "hugely valuable to WPP as the industry navigates fundamental changes and macroeconomic uncertainty."

A US to UK import

Rose studied at Columbia University and New York Law School before relocating to the UK.

She worked at the Allen & Overy law firm in London and later joined Disney as legal counsel for Europe.

Ian Twinn, former director of public affairs for UK advertising trade body ISBA, told BI that Rose's legal background would help her navigate the PR highs and lows of running a large public company.

"In terms of being a public affairs guy, you do rely on people with a good legal background — it makes a big difference," said Twinn, who briefly interacted with Rose while she was at Disney. "She was very receptive and very focused."

Just after the turn of the millennium, Rose became Disney's UK managing director, leading thousands of employees across film, TV, and retail, and launching huge movies like "Finding Nemo" in the market.

Andy Bird, former chairman of Walt Disney International, told BI that Rose's experience as a custodian of several different brands in her time at Disney positions her well for understanding the needs of WPP's marketer clients.

"How you stay relevant to consumers is going to be very important to WPP moving forward," Bird said.

Rose was senior vice president of Disney's Europe, Middle East, and Africa interactive media group when she left after nine years to take senior leadership roles at UK telecommunications companies Virgin Media and Vodafone.

In 2016, Rose became chief executive of Microsoft UK. Joshua Graff recalls first meeting Rose at this time, when he was UK country manager at LinkedIn, which Microsoft acquired in December of that year. They worked together at Microsoft for almost 10 years.

Graff described Rose as "direct, empathetic" and "super funny," with an ability to create energy in the teams around her.

"No doubt she will be a talent magnet for WPP," Graff told BI.

Read previously credited Rose with putting Microsoft on the map among UK business leaders and politicians. She also championed diversity, both within Microsoft and in encouraging people from different backgrounds to take up careers in tech. She will be the first woman to be chief executive of a global advertising holding company.

Bringing a touch of Microsoft to WPP

The American-accented Rose was made an Officer of the British Empire, an honor conferred by the UK government, and received it from Queen Elizabeth in 2019. Rose was promoted to become president of Microsoft in Western Europe during the pandemic and rose to her most recent position in 2023. In this role, she was responsible for helping huge blue-chip businesses understand and use technologies like AI to transform their businesses.

WPP, too, is attempting to retool its business as it looks to pick up more lucrative work than simply creating and placing ads. It's investing hundreds of millions annually in AI and other technologies as it hopes to win lucrative contracts in areas like customer-relationship management and digital transformation, areas where Rose has firsthand experience.

Matt Atkinson, former chief customer officer of The Co-Op, worked closely with Rose as the grocer transformed its tech stack, from data infrastructure to the in-store customer experience. It was a big, competitive process, and Microsoft won the pitch, beating out Snowflake, among others.

"She had created an environment where we were able to creatively and technologically collaborate for mutual benefit," Atkinson told BI.

He added she had the "technology chops, emotional intelligence, and a way of being," which made her a good choice to run WPP.

A peacemaker

Rose will join as the ad industry faces a reckoning. Economic and geopolitical uncertainty is making marketers cautious about taking on big projects and launching new brands. Meanwhile, Big Tech players are increasingly touting AI-powered tools that can create entire ad campaigns and lure eyeballs away from the sites that host the ads agencies make.

With WPP's share price hovering at lows not seen since 2009, investors will look for signs Rose is ready to make big swings to attract new business. Insiders are hoping she will boost morale after a series of restructures, layoffs, and the institution of a strict return-to-office policy that has rattled many in the internal ranks.

Claire Enders, founder of media and telecommunications research company Enders Analysis, said Rose "epitomizes the reasons women have increasingly succeeded to these roles."

"She's a peacemaker, she's very non-confrontational, very thoughtful, and she works very well in very large organizations," Enders added.

• Perplexity AI is cautiously growing its ad business.
• Its main ad product is 'sponsored follow-up questions,' and it recently introduced a perks program.
• Perplexity has a revenue share program with publishers, but its ads business is still nascent.

Perplexity AI is taking a softly, softly approach to building its ad business.

The AI company had a low-key presence at last month's Cannes Lions ad festival in France. Amid the huge multimillion-dollar beach structures erected by tech giants like Meta, Amazon, and Google, Perplexity sent just a handful of executives to meet with current and potential business partners.

Perplexity, a conversational AI-powered search engine, began testing ads last year. Brands such as Whole Foods and Indeed have bought "sponsored follow-up questions," which appear alongside an answer to a user's prompt, encouraging them to dig deeper into the topic. Advertisers themselves don't write or edit the sponsored questions, which are generated by Perplexity's AI.

It's a contrast to traditional search engine marketing, where ads typically appear before the organic results.

Speaking to Business Insider at Cannes Lions in June, Ryan Foutty, Perplexity's VP of business development, said the company is still figuring out which advertising model will work best.

He described sponsored follow-up questions as "a really incredible brand advertorial."

"It's additive because you're helping users figure out the next question they need to ask to make a better decision or figure out what they're trying to do versus just trying to put something in your face," Foutty said, adding that 40% of its users click on related questions.

Perplexity advertisers pay on a CPM, or cost to reach a thousand impressions, model. A Perplexity spokesperson said advertising currently comprises less than a tenth of a percent of the company's total revenue, and declined to comment on the company's current ad prices.

In recent weeks, Perplexity has also introduced a perks program, where it provides subscribers to its Perplexity Pro service with offers and discounts from brands including Turbotax, the smart ring company Oura, and hotel booking service Selfbook.

Both Perplexity ads and perks are only active in the US. Foutty said the company was also considering more ways to monetize Perplexity's shopping and travel booking features, which could theoretically include further ad formats.

"It's very manual today," Foutty said, "But when we find something that works for everyone, then it's very easy, naturally, for us to scale it."

Perplexity hasn't released its user numbers, but its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, said the company received 780 million queries in May, up 20% from April. But compare that to Google's AI Overviews, which the search giant said reached 1.5 billion monthly users in May. Google recently brought advertising to more areas of its AI Overviews product, and it's testing ads within its AI Mode, a newer feature where users can conduct deeper research.

With its relatively small scale and only one specific ad format available, Perplexity's advertising offering is only getting tepid interest from marketers for now, said Eric Hoover, director of search engine optimization at the digital marketing agency Jellyfish.

"I don't see strong adoption by users," Hoover told BI. "People rarely click out of 'regular' AI results; I don't see them being eager to click on sponsored ones."

Perplexity wants to build 'long-term incentive' deals with publishers

Perplexity shares a portion of its ad revenue with the publisher partners it uses to help source its answers, which include Time, Fortune, and Der Spiegel.

The company doesn't cut up-front licensing deals with these publishers because it isn't building foundational large language models that require content for training, Foutty said. It does offer these partners access to its enterprise product and APIs that can help publishers embed Perplexity's tech, like conversational search, into their own sites. (Disclosure: Business Insider's parent company, Axel Springer, has a multi-year content licensing deal with Perplexity rival OpenAI.)

"The model that we're creating on the revenue share side is a long-term incentive," Foutty said. "It's not a one-and-done."

When asked whether any publishers were making serious money from the program, Foutty said it was still early days. The publisher program launched in June of last year.

"We're focused on building the right product before we scale it to everyone," he added.

The relationship between AI companies and publishers can often be fraught, and many are locked in legal battles. Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones and the New York Post filed a lawsuit last year alleging that Perplexity engaged in copyright infringement by scraping and using their content. Perplexity said last year that the facts alleged in the complaint were "misleading at best" and that it planned to defend itself.

This week, the content delivery network and security provider Cloudflare announced it has begun automatically blocking AI crawlers from scraping the websites it powers unless site owners explicitly opt-in or the AI companies pay.

• AI and sports were hot topics du jour at the ad industry's annual confab, Cannes Lions, this week.
• The bustling streets suggested AI isn't decimating the ad industry yet.
• Brand safety was the elephant in the room.

The scorching hot sun is setting on advertising's annual shindig in the south of France, Cannes Lions, for another year.

At the sprawling event, there was a level of thematic whiplash. In the span of an hour on the main stage in the Palais you go from hearing about the creation of the iconic Snickers "You're not you when you're hungry" campaign to hearing a speech from human-rights activist Sonita Alizadeh on the humanitarian crisis of child brides in Iran and Afghanistan.

There was also a whole lot of partying. Spotify's beach concert stage hosted rapper Cardi B and indie rockers Royel Otis. Diplo was spinning the decks for Yahoo. Talent agency UTA's annual VIP "dinner" at the luxury Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc had no sit-down meal but instead a punchy set from comedian Sebastian Maniscalco.

Business Insider was on the ground — and occasionally the yachts — to get the inside look on the big topics that are top of mind in an industry undergoing seismic changes. Here were the key themes.

The AI of it all

If the advertising industry is losing people to artificial intelligence, it certainly didn't look like it at Cannes this week. The streets were bursting with lanyard-wearing, hungover Lions attendees trying to figure out which opulent branded beach setup their next meeting was located. Still, AI was the talk of the town.

With AI spinning up thousands of ads cheaply and in seconds, the business model of billing clients for time is under threat. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ruffled feathers ahead of Cannes when he said AI will essentially automate the ad business.

"You tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out," he said in a May interview with the tech newsletter Stratechery. (Is that the sound of Don Draper dropping his glass of rosé, we hear in the distance?!)

In an interview with BI, Meta's chief marketing officer, Alex Schultz, said his boss was talking about small businesses, not Fortune 500 brands.

"I don't see myself fully automating my ad campaigns and not using my agency at any point," Schultz said.

(Donny D! Come back, you're safe!)

For all the promises of AI, advertising still appears to be a people business. Cannes showed people in the ad industry believe that relationships matter. It's how attendees convince the finance department back home that the $5,000 festival pass, flights, Airbnb, meals, and a 2 a.m. expense receipt for a Jéroboam of Rosé at the Carlton Hotel was all worth it.

Marketers are racing to sports

If you haven't got an F1 sponsorship deal, are you even a CMO in 2025?

Sports was a pervasive theme at Cannes Lions this year, and athletes were out in force. Take a stroll down the famous — and exceptionally hot — Croisette promenade, and you had a good chance of bumping into tennis champ Serena Williams, McLaren Racing driver Oscar Piastri, or Kansas City Chiefs tight end — and Taylor Swift beau — Travis Kelce. Advertising company Stagwell's "Sport Beach" had some of the longest lines in town, some for the star-studded panels, others for the bragging rights of trouncing a colleague at pickleball. (Disclosure: BI hosted an event on Sport Beach, too.)

With traditional, or linear, TV viewing in decline, sports is one of the last destinations where marketers can guarantee getting their brands in front of large audiences.

"It's a way of being involved right in the moment, live," Michael Lacorazza, CMO US Bank, told BI. US Bank is involved in numerous teams and recently announced its partnership with the Premier Lacrosse League.

It's not just about placing 30-second spots or slapping logos on jerseys. Marketers talked up how they're enhancing the live experience in stadiums while people are in a joyful mood. Uber Advertising was pitching clients using a case study from beauty brand La Mer, which sponsored rides to and from the Miami F1 Grand Prix, stuffed with skincare goodies.

F1 is having a moment. According to the research firm Ampere Analysis, sponsorship spending on F1 and its teams is expected to reach $2.9 billion this year, up 10% on 2024. With viewership boosted in part by the popular Netflix series "Drive to Survive," brands and media partnerships are helping extend its reach beyond the race track.

"Seeing the new fans come into the sport, we needed to show up in their worlds and be meaningful in their worlds," Louise McEwan, chief marketing officer of the McLaren Racing F1 team, told BI. "Only one percent of fans ever go to the track in their lifetime."

Putting consumers in charge

The power of the consumer is stronger than ever.

At the Tubi cabana at Cannes, we spoke with its chief marketing officer, Nicole Parlapiano, who shared how the streaming platform is super-flexible in how it's marketing its titles. Streamers like Tubi can't easily test shows and movies before they acquire them, so they relentlessly monitor social chatter to determine how much and where to market a show, Parlapiano said.

Daniel Lawrence Taylor's hit show "Boarders" got a billboard in New York City's Times Square. And that's down to Parlapiano's team being flexible, pouring extra marketing dollars into "Boarders" after seeing the social media reaction, she said.

Laurie Lam, chief brand officer of E.l.f Beauty, said at a BI event that its product pipeline is often driven by what consumers are saying on social media.

"They're telling us exactly what they want and we're then putting it into the market for them," Lam said.

"And they're not polite about it, by the way," she added. "It used to be like, 'Hey, I would really love it if you can make this primer.' Now it's like, 'Make that primer now. Where is my primer?'"

Brand safety becomes a brand risk

Amid all the talk of AI supercharging creativity, and humanity being the ad industry's "super power," there was a big topic execs on the Croisette went super out of their way to avoid.

People noticeably squirmed as we asked questions about the current debate around brand safety — a catch-all industry term to describe how advertisers avoid platforms and media that don't align with their brand. A few years ago, you couldn't move for panels on the topic at Cannes, with speakers calling on big platforms to do more to protect brands. This year, with the US government questioning the propriety of those decisions? Crickets.

Barely anyone at Cannes wanted to discuss this enormous elephant in the room. Even the term "brand safety" has become a kind of Voldemort, "He who should not be named" word. One exec told us that the industry is more comfortable talking about "brand assurance" instead, whatever that really means in practice.

Perhaps nobody wants a target on their back. The turnabout shows how Cannes Lions holds a telling mirror into the industry, where sometimes what's not being talked about can also speak volumes.

• WPP CEO Mark Read plans to step down after seven years leading the advertising giant.
• The company faces challenges as the ad industry shifts to AI and tech-driven models.
• WPP's restructuring under Read saw brand retirements, office closures, and debt reduction.

Will the last ad exec leaving Madison Avenue please turn out the lights?

WPP CEO Mark Read said Monday that he plans to step down after seven years leading the advertising giant and more than 30 years at the company. He will continue as CEO until the end of the year to see through the transition to his successor, who hasn't been named.

The announcement comes at a fraught crossroads for WPP and the broader advertising industry. Read's exit follows that of famed ad veteran David Droga, who said last month he plans to leave Accenture Song, the consulting giant's marketing services division, at the end of this year. Several longtime WPP execs have also parted ways with the company in recent months.

Madison Avenue is grappling with upheaval as its profit centers shift from creating TV ads with catchy taglines and big branding ideas to trading media, integrating IT systems, and helping clients make sense of their customer data. The rise of artificial intelligence and its associated productivity gains also rips a hole through the traditional agency business model, where ad companies are generally compensated on the number of full-time equivalent employees devoted to an account. Add to that the threat from Big Tech giants like Meta, who want to cut out the advertising middlemen altogether using the power of their huge audiences and sophisticated ad targeting systems.

Under Read, WPP has attempted to respond to these forces. In recent weeks, WPP rebranded GroupM, the division responsible for managing around $60 billion in clients' media investments, to WPP Media. The company said the streamlined media offering is powered by WPP Open, an AI-powered platform that helps its employees do market research, spin up media plans, and create assets for campaigns using generative AI.

But WPP isn't fighting from a position of strength. The company's annual revenue declined last year, and WPP recently forecast another revenue drop for 2025, which it said reflected a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Once the biggest advertising holding company by most measures, WPP was displaced by Publicis as the largest ad company by revenue last year. Publicis currently trades at a market capitalization of around $27 billion to WPP's $8 billion. The industry is also awaiting the creation of an even bigger ad behemoth later this year once the proposed merger of Omnicom and IPG passes regulatory approval.

"The fundamental challenge is that an enormous amount of what the traditional holding companies do is commodity, and commodity can now be done using technology," said David Jones, the former CEO of the ad agency holding company Havas. Jones now leads the 10-year-old marketing and technology company The Brandtech Group, a WPP competitor.

"AI is going to give the traditional holding companies their Kodak moment," Jones said.

Read laid the groundwork for WPP's next era and its new CEO

While Read is a WPP veteran, the 58-year-old wasn't an ad man in the traditional sense.

He took a graduate job at WPP after getting an economics degree from Cambridge University in the UK. He left and became a cofounder of WebRewards, a digital coupons business he sold to the German publishing giant Bertelsmann in 2001, after the dot-com bubble burst. He rejoined WPP a year later, rising to become CEO of Wunderman, one of its digital agencies.

Read took over the reins of the entire company in 2018, after the acrimonious exit of its longtime CEO Martin Sorrell, who had built the company from a seller of "wire and plastic products" — WPP — into what was the world's largest advertising group.

While a fellow Brit, the similarities between Read and Sorrell largely ended there. Sorrell was famed for building WPP through a series of acquisitions, and still now at his new ad company, S4 Capital, is an archetypal "Davos Man," often seen on stage and TV offering commentary about macroeconomic issues. Read has kept a lower profile and has sought to simplify WPP's many agencies into a more uniform structure.

Sorrell did "empire building," while "Read has been an empire dismantler," the independent media analyst Alex DeGroote said.

Some industry analysts and insiders say this is to Read's credit. According to DeGroote's calculations, Read retired around 300 different agency brands, closed more than 800 offices, and realized around $5.1 billion for the company from disposals. WPP reduced its net debt to around $2.3 billion as of December 31 last year, down from about $3.4 billion in 2023.

But the Read era of restructuring and layoffs has hit morale within the rank and file — a mood that was further soured among some WPP employees when he instituted a four-day-a-week return to office policy this year. WPP has lost key accounts from clients like Pfizer and the Coca-Cola North America media account, though it has also won business from major advertisers including Amazon and Unilever. Toward the latter part of his tenure, some industry insiders said Read would need to take a bigger swing — anything from taking the company private to making a landmark acquisition — in order to return the company to growth.

Attention now turns to who might succeed Read.

Industry insiders told BI that internal candidates for the role would likely include newly appointed WPP Media CEO Brian Lesser; the CEO of WPP's specialist communications agency division, Johnny Hornby; WPP's chief operating officer, Andrew Scott; WPP's chief marketing and growth officer, Laurent Ezekiel; VML CEO Jon Cook; and Ogilvy CEO Devika Bulchandani. These execs either declined to comment or didn't respond to requests for comment from BI.

The search, led by the former British Telecommunications boss Philip Jansen, who became WPP's chairman in January of this year, is also considering external candidates.

"I don't think it will be internal, but I don't think it will be a radical hire either — WPP does not need more restructuring," media analyst Ian Whittaker said. "I would look for executives at one of the other agency groups who are well regarded."

One WPP insider told BI they expected and hoped the appointment would be made relatively quickly.

"At the end of the day, we've just got to get our mojo and momentum back," this person said.