WPP’s Taps Cindy Rose As CEO For AI Future

AGENCIES

WPP’s New CEO: Cindy Rose

When WPP announced its poor Q2 earnings results early this week, the agency holding company’s plan for a fresh start was undoubtedly already set. Outgoing CEO Mark Read dutifully “took the bullets” at Tuesday’s earnings announcement.

Then, yesterday morning – poof – WPP board member and Microsoft chief operating officer for global enterprise Cindy Rose took the helm.

Ms. Rose discussed why she took the CEO role, which begins September 1, on LinkedIn yesterday:

“WPP is a company I know and love – not only from my six years on the board but as a client and partner for many years before that. I couldn’t be happier or more excited to work with this brilliant, talented, creative team of people to write WPP’s next chapter together.”

The Wall Street Journal broke the news about the new CEO and said that WPP’s acquisition of InfoSum in April and investment in Stability AI in March were signs of the agency holding company’s “strengthening its AI capabilities.” Whether either is a significant catalyst going forward is too early to say.

In a WPP press release, Chair Philip Jansen added, “Cindy has supported the digital transformation of large enterprises around the world – including embracing AI to create new customer experiences, business models and revenue streams.”

Side note: WPP founder and former CEO Martin Sorrell, current CEO Read and Ms. Rose are British citizens with Rose (and possibly Sorrell) having a U.S. passport, too.

AGENCIES

So, Brian Lesser knew all along

Yesterday, I postulated that WPP Media CEO Brian Lesser seemed like the perfect choice for leading WPP, but he might be reluctant to “catch a falling knife” given WPP’s deteriorating performance.

…never was gonna happen.

In fact, it appears this CEO transition plan to Ms. Rose was likely in place since before Lesser arrived at WPP Media (formerly GroupM) last September.

Ms. Rose has been a board member at WPP since 2019 and likely had a hand in the plan to bring Mr. Lesser back – not to mention the April acquisition of InfoSum.

Lesser wrote on LinkedIn yesterday:

“Cindy Rose OBE is a brilliant choice to lead WPP into the future and I am thrilled to partner with her.”

”Since rejoining WPP Media last September, I’ve had the privilege of working closely with Cindy in her role on WPP’s Board. She’s an exceptional leader who deeply understands our company, our clients, and the power of media and technology to transform business and drive growth.”

”Cindy’s energy, expertise, and experience will be a gamechanger for our business. I’m excited to work with her as we continue building WPP Media into the world’s most advanced and integrated media company – delivering for clients and leading the industry into the AI era.”

”I also want to thank Mark Read for his leadership over the past seven years. His work to simplify and modernize WPP has laid the foundation for what’s next. Mark – I’m truly grateful for everything you have done for me, and for WPP.”

”As Cindy has said, we have so many opportunities ahead of us. I couldn’t be more excited about what we’re building together.”

”Let’s go!”

I was waiting for Mr. Lesser to close with “LFG,” but no such luck.

Thought bubble:

As I noted, all of the WPP CEOs are British citizens. Ms. Rose is an OBE – Officer of the Order of the British Empire – and born in the U.S. There’s a British “thing” going on here that’s going to make it hard for Yankees like me to understand – or for Mr. Lesser to ascend to the top role at WPP.

Furthermore, a centuries-old rivalry thrives with the French and is embodied today by Publicis.

Sir Martin’s WPP isn’t just a company, it’s a realm of the Commonwealth.

In addition to her technology and AI credentials, Cindy Rose OBE brings alignment with the Crown, which sees the company – and the industry it represents – as essential to the United Kingdom’s economic well-being.

But if Brian Lesser LFG starts throwing tea in New York Harbor, watch out. He didn’t hesitate at AT&T.

All of that said… is a WPP Media spinout next?

SELL-SIDE

Pay-per-query is where the $$$ are

Digiday broke down AI compensation models for publishers yesterday and spoke to IAB Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur, who is charged with sorting out what strategies to implement on behalf of his IAB publisher members and technology partners.

Mr. Katsur said that work related to AI chatbot crawlers thus far has involved creating “tiers of content, each of which has different licensing models, either for tiers of content set by the publisher or for all their content.”

Crawling, re-crawling, pay-per-crawl, pay-per-query, pay-per-inference are some of the different ways to slice the AI revenue “pie” for publishers. Charging LLM crawlers is not as easy as it sounds.

Toshit Panigrahi, co-founder and CEO of TollBit, a technology solution for the business of crawling, told Digiday that his firm “uses pay-per-crawl and gives AI scrapers the option to pay a ‘toll’ to access a publisher’s content. A web scraper or AI agent tries to go to a publisher’s webpage, gets redirected to Tollbit’s platform, and then is met with a transaction fee to access that page, set by the publisher.”

“Pay-per-query” – where a publisher gets paid every time a publisher’s dataset informs a question in a chatbot – appears to be where the money is for publishers and the likely battleground with AI companies.

SELL-SIDE

Cloudflare has lit a fire

“The AI Scraping Fight That Could Change the Future of the Web” (July 9) – The Wall Street Journal

From the WSJ: “The outcome of the copyright fights and technical efforts to curb free scraping could have a seismic impact on the future of the media industry—and the internet at large. Publishers are essentially trying to fence off swaths of the web while AI companies argue that the material they are scraping is fair game.”

TECH

AI meets “traditional” for the CTV channel

Virtual product placement company Rembrand announced a joint venture with Mirriad, a company that does something similar to Rembrand in the “traditional visual effects” world.

Adweek explained yesterday:

“Mirriad’s U.S. business allows Rembrand to tap into existing, large-scale media deals without needing to build out a massive salesforce. The deal allows Rembrand to insert AI products into TV shows and serve those clips as part of programmatic ad campaigns, a step up from its traditional use cases in influencer and CTV ads. In June, the company began working with The Trade Desk to expand its reach in programmatic channels.”

TECH

X is about AI not ads

Amidst all the media hand-wringing about X CEO Linda Yaccarino’s departure from the company, Media Dev Memo analyst Eric Seufert was zooming out – on X.

Seufert tweeted yesterday:

“I question whether advertising revenue matters to X following its merger with xAI. If the principal purpose of X is to generate training data, and the value proposition of the combined entity is the underlying AI infrastructure, what difference does ~$4BN / year (pre-X revenue benchmark) in advertising revenue make?”

Given the rocket ship which is AI (OpenAI is rumored to be worth $300 billion – 6x Twitter’s purchase price by Elon Musk), there’s a bigger picture to X.

Case in point:

“Grok 4 is live — here’s what makes it Elon Musk’s most advanced AI yet” (July 10) – Tom’s Guide

The gyst of Seufert’s tweet: it’s all about the enormous, proprietary, live, data stream of X – that’s what matters.

PRIVACY

Privacy platforms ❤️ AI

On Tuesday, AdExchanger’s Allison Schiff reported that there’s AI opportunity in the pipeline for consent management platform (CMP) Didomi after its acquisition of competitor Sourcepoint.

In an interview with Didomi CEO Romain Gauthier and Sourcepoint COO Brian Kane, Kane shared that he can see “a tool that automatically determines the level of risk associated with different AI models.” This meshes well with the companies’ existing privacy-compliance-cookie tech.

Gauthier and Kane also mentioned that – longer term – the product roadmap of the combined companies may include a tool “used to monitor how an AI agent handles data when it’s talking to another agent.”

Read more on AdExchanger.

More: Didomi and Sourcepoint Join Forces to Build the Future of Privacy Technology (July 8) – press release

PROMPT

Prompt: Please explain the competition between Publicis and WPP through the lens of French vs. English cultures.

Response from Mistral’s Le Chat:

The competition between Publicis and WPP can be viewed through the lens of French and English (or Anglo-Saxon) cultural differences, which influence their business practices, creative styles, and overall strategies. Here’s a detailed look at how these cultural nuances play out in their rivalry:

Business Practices

Organizational Structure:

Publicis (French Influence): Publicis tends to favor a more centralized and hierarchical organizational structure. This is reflective of French business culture, which often values clear lines of authority and a top-down approach to management. The “Power of One” strategy exemplifies this, aiming to integrate various agencies and disciplines under a unified leadership to provide cohesive services to clients.
WPP (Anglo-Saxon Influence): WPP, in contrast, has traditionally operated with a more decentralized structure. This aligns with Anglo-Saxon business culture, which often emphasizes autonomy, flexibility, and a bottom-up approach to innovation. WPP’s various agencies, such as Ogilvy and GroupM, often operate with a degree of independence, fostering internal competition and specialization…