‘Unacceptable’: WPP’s Cindy Rose outlines changes after poor third quarter

October 31, 2025 4:16

WPP CEO Cindy Rose vows to change company's "very complicated" offer.

WPP’s freshly inaugurated CEO Cindy Rose has said it’s time the group acted “a little less like a holdco and a little more like a co,” as she promised change after an “unacceptable” third-quarter result.

The world’s largest advertising group recorded an organic decline of 5.9%, with quarterly revenue of A$4.8 billion (£2.4 billion) excluding client-billed costs.

The decline was largely driven by WPP’s global integrated agencies division, which accounts for 86% of the business and has recently suffered major client losses, including Bayer and Mars.

Despite the losses, Rose remained bullish before investors on the Q3 earnings call, saying: “We’ve made, over the years, great investments in AI and technology. We’ve simplified our structure.”

“We’ve nurtured fantastic talent. We’ve missed the opportunity… to go as far and as fast as we could have and should have, and that’s what we’re going to do immediately to improve our execution.”

Broken down, the results show WPP Media experienced 5.7% decline in revenue while its creative agencies’ revenue fell by 6.5%.

CFO and director Joanne Wilson said the headwinds from global client losses are expected to continue into next year, but highlighted opportunities to expand into new businesses.

On the creative side, WPP was affected by client losses and volatility in spending, with sustained pressure on both Ogilvy and AKQA, while VML’s decline has slowed, and Hogarth has returned to growth.

“Net new business has remained slow for us, and that’s partly the environment and also our win rate is not where we would expect it to be,” Wilson said.

“And that means that we have a limited cushion to mitigate those losses. And coupled with that, we’ve talked about the volatility that we’re seeing in client spend and delays to work.”

Reflecting on the account losses, Rose said former client feedback revealed that WPP’s “offer is very complicated.”

“They’d like us to be simpler to engage with. They’d like a more integrated proposition because when your proposition is integrated across creative, production and media, it’s easier to optimise your total investment spend, particularly when it’s powered by a common data model and AI across the entire workflow,” she said.

However, with investments including WPP Open and WPP Open Pro, Rose said she believes the company is “uniquely positioned to deliver on this vision.”

When asked on the investor call about Meta’s promise to marketers that they can simply provide campaign objectives and budgets and let AI manage everything, Rose responded: “The reality is you can’t just put — drop AI into your environment to modernise your marketing function and just expect magic to happen, right?

“And you can’t just apply AI to old processes either. You have to reimagine them. You have to train your people. You have to embed new behaviours in your organisation in order to realise the benefits of AI.”