Mediapsssst at MediaPost opined the search to replace WPP CEO Mark Read probably started long before Read announced he was “excited to explore the next chapter in my life.”
Technically, Read’s “retirement” message didn’t provide specificity on the search—but he also didn’t indicate when the process started. Perhaps the lack of clarity resulted from the equally fast and fuzzy resignation of WPP’s Communications and Public Affairs Chief.
Did Read already know Cindy Rose would replace him when sending his companywide memo?
Or maybe WPP used AI to speed up the succession.
MediaPost also pointed to politics and professional relationships between board members, indicating the CEO appointment might have involved levels of cronyism.
It all reflects the abject lack of transparency—and shady communications—prevalent at White holding companies and White advertising agencies.
Forget that the media was in the dark, spotlighting potential candidates to take the CEO role. Seems no trade journal pegged Rose as the heir apparent.
Consider the over 100,000 WPP drones who were likely blindsided by Read’s clumsy exit and Rose’s clumsy entrance.
Then again, this is not the first time the White holding company experienced a shitty CEO shift. Why, it’s a WPP tradition.
For WPP, Everything's Coming Up Roses
By Richard Whitman
WPP announced that Mark Read was stepping down on June 9.
One month and one day later the company announced his successor—Cindy Rose.
That’s got to be one of the shortest CEO searches in the history of CEO searches for a major company like WPP.
Or maybe not. When the Read stepping down announcement was made, it did say a search for his replacement was underway.
My guess is that it was well underway. Maybe so underway that the job was already Roses—except for maybe some contract details—by the time Read’s resignation was announced.
Current board chair Philip Jansen joined the board last September most likely with a mission to implement a CEO change. Read was in the CEO hot seat for seven years and started the job with a three-year turnaround plan—the company had lost its way during the last few years of Martin Sorrell’s reign.
Read did do a lot of streamlining, trying to make a complicated and unwieldy conglomerate into a lean mean marketing machine that clients could understand better.
He also invested billions in technology, particularly AI-related technology. But when a three-year turnaround plan stretches to seven and the financial numbers are getting worse, not better, it’s no surprise that the board might have decided Read’s time was up.
And Jansen had at least 10 months to get to know Rose, a WPP board member since 2019. And he almost certainly knew her or knew of her before then. She’s credited with orchestrating a major turnaround at telecom company Vodafone’s consumer business which she ran from 2013 to 2016. Vodafone is a competitor to BT Group which Jansen ran as CEO from 2019 to 2024. BT Group has also been a client of WPP agencies including EssenceMediacom and Wunderman Thompson.
So it’s not unreasonable to think that Jansen knew from the start of his WPP board tenure that Rose—a tech expert and turnaround specialist (in his own field of expertise) who knew WPP quite well from seven years of board service would make a great successor to Read.
She was likely the top candidate all along, even though the media didn’t see her that way. In fact, they hardly saw her at all.
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