WPP’s turbulent 2025: Inside the reorgs, financial woes, and new leadership under Cindy Rose

2025 was a nod to the good, the bad and the ugly for the agency hold co. There were financial challenges, leadership changes and major reorgs, but WPP keeps circling to the left. 

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Here’s a quick timeline: At the start of 2025, WPP reported a decline in revenue thanks to macroeconomic challenges (read: tariffs). Then, in May, GroupM rebranded to WPP Media and officially launched Open Intelligence, its AI-enabled marketing system. In June, it lost the Mars global media account. By July, CEO Mark Read announced his departure, handing the reins to former Microsoft COO, Cindy Rose. She officially took over in September, with more reorgs happening with creative agency Grey reporting under Ogilvy to streamline operations. By fall, finances had yet to turn around with Rose calling Q3 earnings “unacceptable.”

WPP isn’t the only hold co facing an uphill battle against client “in-house” trends, AI and economic headwinds. So where does that leave WPP? As 2026 shifts into focus, the hold co has a few chips on the table — painful, but necessary reorgs are out of the way, streamlining processes for clients. It also has a new CEO and AI platform to potentially take in more business.

To make sense of how WPP specifically is positioned for the challenge, Digiday senior marketing reporter Sam Bradley puts it like this: “Eulogies have been premature entries,” he said, on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast. He added, “I don’t think that story is done yet. That’s how I put it.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

Reorg shuffle and consolidation

Bradley: So this was WPP Media’s turn to go through that [restructuring] process, which has been a bit of a painful process over the years. Most folks would look at [it] and think [it] is necessary. WPP had an absolute empire of agency properties going into the pandemic when this process perhaps accelerated this process almost unmanageable. They wouldn’t have embarked on this [consolidation] without doing that. These were expensive and valuable agency brands that they decided it was better to sunset than to continue with. It’s not been unsuccessful.

VML is a very respectable agency business. Most of WPP’s agency businesses could be doing better commercially, but I don’t think anybody believes they’ve lost capabilities in that restructuring. So this latest one [with the organization of GroupM into WPP Media] marks the end of that process for WPP in theory. There’s nothing left to restructure. They’ve done their tectonics.

The role of the CEO

She’s been very upfront in the way she’s talked about the performance of the company. It’s rare that a CEO would say “unacceptable,”— especially a new one still hoping to enjoy a bit of a new manager bounce. It’s too early to tell whether or not she’ll play that significant role or not.

Cindy Rose coming in with that heritage, with that experience, making the pioneering and figure heading moves that she has so far, matches that theory [of hold cos becoming tech services businesses].

WPP’s big bet on AI

OpenPro [WPP’s self-service platform aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses] is a really, really interesting development, and it’s not something we’ve really seen other agency groups take a look at. But it’s too early to make a call. We haven’t really seen how they’re going to bring it to market. Cindy Rose said that during the last earnings call that they were still deciding on a pricing model, which I’m not really sure how alarmed to be at that — the fact that they’d brought it out and started talking about it, but before having decided on how they’re going to price the thing. It’s also worth noting that just because a software is self-service doesn’t mean it’s self-service behind the scenes. You need to staff it. You need people to sell the thing. You need somebody to troubleshoot it and maintain all this stuff. Salesforce employs a lot of people, for example. If you want to become the Salesforce of advertising, you’re still going to need a pretty large staff.