Cindy Rose’s debut message to WPP staff: ‘Super-excited’ but won’t ‘sugar-coat’ challenges

Cindy Rose, the incoming chief executive of WPP, has used her first company message to tell staff in a video that she is “super-excited” to start in the job but she won’t “sugar-coat” the “hard work ahead”.

Her script included some significant messaging, including praise for “our beloved agency brands” — a notable point given WPP’s internal agency mergers in recent years, since before the pandemic.

Rose, who starts on September 1, has invited WPP’s 104,000 staff to join a “town hall”—live from New York—on September 4, when she will address them and take questions about her plans for the UK-based agency group. Staff who are unable to join due to the time difference can submit questions in advance.

Rose started her two-minute video by saying she was “proud and honoured” to take charge and pointed out how, during her prior roles at Vodafone, Virgin and Microsoft, she had worked variously with WPP creative agencies Grey, VML and Wunderman Thompson. The latter brand was dropped at the end of 2023 and merged into VML.

In her most recent role at Microsoft, where she was chief operating officer for global enterprise, she also had experience as a “strategic technology partner” to WPP on “cloud and AI”. “You could say I’ve been a mega-fan of WPP for 15 years now,” she said, noting she has also been a non-executive director of WPP since 2019.

“Our next chapter will be fantastic,” she said, before acknowledging the company’s recent challenges, which included a profit warning on July 9.

“Now I won’t sugar-coat this: We have a lot of hard work ahead and of course it won’t be easy. But when I think of the assets that we have as a company, the brilliant people we have, the multi-award-winning creative work that we produce, our beloved agency brands, our amazing clients, our global reach, our world-leading technology capabilities—wow, I cannot help but feel excited about our future.”

Rose, who has joint American and British citizenship, concluded by saying: “I cannot wait to get out there and spend time with you and your clients, to get to know you better, to learn from you, and to support your success. I am, as you can probably tell, super-excited to co-create the new WPP together.”

WPP said at its Q2 results that it expects revenues less pass-through costs to fall between 3% and 5% in 2025 — in contrast to rivals Publicis and Omnicom, which both expect to grow—and added Rose will carry out a review of WPP’s strategy. 

WPP’s share price has also more than halved since the start of the year to trade below 400p, giving it a stock market valuation of about $5.4 billion (£4 billion).