Why WPP isn’t the biggest casualty in the PepsiCo-Coca-Cola-Publicis shuffle

Some might call that winning on a technicality. But that reading discounts how close the head-to-head between WPP and Publicis actually was before the latter walked away. One source, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity because they work with the team that was competing for the account, described it as close. 

Rose’s first year keeps landing in roughly that same spot.

Rightly or wrongly, everything she’s done over that period — the newly integrated internal structures and the heavy reliance on WPP Open — reads more like endurance than dominance. Never mind that the holdco topped JP Morgan’s net new business rankings, whether measured over Q2 alone, the first half of the year or the 10 months before that.

Forget too, that it wasn’t a couple of headline names doing the work but rather a mix of global, regional and market-specific ones, including  Airbnb, Heineken, Wendy’s, Just Eat, Asahi, Michael Hill and Estée Launder Companies to name a few. None of it turned into a recovery, though. Like for like net sales declined 4.7% in the first half of the year. Progress, it turns out, doesn’t pay the bill. Even Jaguar Land Rover, one of its bigger undeniable net-new wins, carries its own catch. The pitch was built on output-based remuneration — a premise its own market hasn’t fully bought into yet, something Rose has conceded herself. 

Coca-Cola is arguably one of the tougher ones. (For the record, a Coca-Cola representative declined to speak for this story.) The relationship it has with WPP isn’t exactly straightforward. It moved its North American media business to rival Publicis without a pitch in February of 2025. Now, Publicis has done the same to Coke, walking away from the account to land PepsiCo’s global media business instead. WPP, however, won’t go back for it. The math explains why. 

Coke’s global media spend runs somewhere between $2.5 to $2,6 billion, with North America accounting for roughly $800 million of it, according to COMvergence. By WPP’s own admission that account made up only 5% of what it actually handled for Coke — a fraction of the media planning, buying, data, creative production and increasingly the AI tooling that it had been doing for the advertiser for nearly five years. Add a complicated history there, given what happened a year ago, and it’s a fair example of Rose picking her battles rather than fighting all of them.

Because at this scale being a holdco isn’t about competing for the largest advertisers, it’s about winning the right ones. Rose’s counterpart at Publicis, CEO Arthur Sadoun, knows that all too well, operating at a level where he and his team can walk away from a pitch they don’t think fits – or where they couldn’t make enough profit, if the sniping from competitors is to be believed. Skipping Coca-Cola’s North American business was Rose’s first real attempt at the same move. 

Whether she can afford to make a habit of it is another question. Every time she says no it costs her something Sadoun doesn’t have to pay. He can turn down everyone and have it read as discipline because Publicis spent years proving it doesn’t need to say yes to everything. Rose is still in the part of the holdco’s recovery where a pass gets scrutinized rather than trusted, weighed by a board and a market watching for any sign the turnaround isn’t working. 

“Listen, I’ll be honest with you, I’m not bothered necessarily by who’s leading WPP so much as I care I’m getting a good service on a daily basis, which I get,” said the media director of a WPP client who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t permitted to speak to press. “With the setup I have with them at the moment we get that. We had the opportunity to leave over the last year but decided we were happy with what we had. I get it won’t be like that for everyone else.”

It’s too early, then, to count WPP among the main losers in all of this. If anything, it’s a chance to prove the naysayers wrong, and there are plenty of them. Granted, some of that skepticism is fair. There’s a $100 million whistleblower suit from a former GroupM exec alleging a hidden rebate scheme and a securities class action accusing Rose’s own predecessors of misleading shareholders about the state of the business she inherited. A verdict against WPP in either or both cases won’t stay confined to a courtroom. It will trickle through to the share price. On top of that, WPP is still playing catch-up on tech after years of promising more than it delivered, in a market moving faster than the company built to serve it. 

Take WPP Open, the holdco’s attempt at an AI—powered operating system. The platform was built to unify agency P&Ls around top clients with bespoke instances like Open X for Coke and Open Mind for Nestlé meant to give each account a single, connected team. But the operating model underneath never caught up. When it launched, agencies were still run on their own P&Ls with their own incentives so a client could log into a shared workspace and see almost nothing since one agency was working inside its own systems while the other was inside its own. Open Pro, the self-serve layer built on top of that, ran into a different problem. Self-serve tools need transformation work to actually land with a client, and WPP never built a central team to do it. 

That work sat inside the agencies, which had little incentive to cannibalize their own revenue by making self-serve succeed. The upshot was that ownership of the whole thing ended up split three or four ways internally across product tech, data and AI, with no single strategy tying them together. The result was a platform genuinely ambitious on paper that still hasn’t translated into the kind of client wins its scale would suggest.  

Rose has tried to fix that since she joined, most notably by restructuring the group around media, creation, production and enterprise solutions P&Ls. Now, she has to knit it together in a way clients can actually feel. That’s all they care about, in the end. They want a business that makes them look good, and moves the needle for their own benefit. 

There’s a difference between moving and arriving, and WPP is still very much moving.