As she approaches her one-year anniversary as CEO of British agency group WPP, Cindy Rose today shared the most positive set of quarterly earnings under her stewardship so far, signs that the turnaround she was brought in to manage is starting to take hold.
Many of the key figures were still negative in a literal sense. Like-for-like revenues less pass-through costs, WPP’s metric for organic growth, fell by 2.8 percent year-on-year. Looking specifically at the company’s top 25 clients, this metric was down by 3.2 percent. And organic growth at WPP Media, its largest and most important unit, sat at -2.8 percent.
But WPP’s Elevate28 recovery plan always stated that 2026 would be a year of stabilisation, as the company doesn’t expect to return to growth until sometime next year. And while key growth metrics were down year-on-year, the fall was softer than in the first quarter, a sign that the bleeding is beginning to slow down. Markets have received the news enthusiastically, as WPP’s share price is up by over 20 percent since the results were released.
A significant strand of Rose’s strategy has been simplifying WPP’s internal structure. This was started under her predecessor Mark Read, but there’s been an acceleration since Rose took the helm, most visibly through the company’s reorganisation into four key units: WPP Media, WPP Creative, WPP Production, and WPP Enterprise Solutions.
It’s a move which has received plenty of criticism, since it’s involved merging and shuttering a number of storied agency brands. But the idea is to make the business simpler for clients to understand and navigate, while also making it easier to draw resources from across the holding group to serve clients’ needs. And Rose says this work is already starting to bear fruit.
All about the integration
In her introductory remarks on this morning’s earnings call, Rose shared some of her reflections on the state of the industry, now that she’s had almost a year leading one of its most significant players. She reiterated her previously stated belief that “we are living in a golden age of marketing”, given how ad spend has remained consistently high in recent years, and outperformed GDP growth. But “it is a really tough time to be a Chief Marketing Officer,” according to Rose, given the fragmentation of the media landscape and the relentless pace of change across the industry.
This, she says, is leading brands “to consolidate around fewer, more integrated partners who can simplify things for them and help them grow”.
WPP is meeting that demand, according to Rose, showing up to more pitches as one unified entity, rather than a collection of separate but related businesses. The group has trumpeted its big wins over the last year, but the gains most prized by the company are the integrated accounts across major brands. “What matters to me is how we’re winning,” said Rose. “These are integrated, multidisciplinary mandates awarded to WPP as one team. This is the direct result of the strategic changes we’ve made to our client proposition.” She listed a few of these accounts in her remarks: Wendy’s in the US, Natura and Avon in Latin America, and The Coca-Cola Company in EMEA.
Primarily, Rose frames this shift as a response to demand from clients themselves. “All the changes we made were in direct response to client feedback,” she said. “Now that we’ve made the changes, clients are responding positively. What’s behind that is that we’re showing up as one WPP instead of multiple different agencies. We can really put the right talent in front of the right clients at the right time, without all of the friction and constraints of our historical structure. That is really unlocking a sort of talent fluidity and cross-sell opportunities that we are seeing show up in a number of our wins.”
As well as contributing to new client wins, WPP’s CFO Joanne Wilson says this model is changing the nature of defensive pitches too, since these also become opportunities to expand relationships and upsell services.
“It is much more nuanced than what we’ve seen in the past,” said Wilson. “With many of the pitches that we are in, there are opportunities for winning more revenue and net sales.”
And Rose says that the ability to cross-sell clients into a wider range of services can help insulate against the deflationary pressure of AI, as clients expect to gain from AI-led cost savings.
“As we help clients optimise their marketing investments overall, we can also help them reinvest those savings into innovation and transformation,” said Rose. “That represents an expansive opportunity to grow our footprint and capture more addressable client spend through service integration and cross-sell. I think with our new structure and operating model, we are very well positioned to capture that.”
Follow VideoWeek on LinkedIn.
