• 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.

• 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.