Advertising Age reported how WPP CEO Cindy Rose is spending her time at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, prioritizing huddling with clients and investors over public events.
This semi-mirrors Rose’s global agenda; that is, she’s primarily focused on clients and shareholders versus employees—a worldwide community Wikipedia currently records as 100,000 humans. Losing clients and shareholders poses a big problem. Losing employees, not so much.
Besides, the single White operating company won’t threepeat as Holding Company of the Year/Creative Company of the Year—but only because the dubious award was nixed versus WPP is now recognized as a death-spiraling flaming dumpster.
Cindy Rose prioritizes clients and investors over public events during her first Cannes as WPP CEO
By Ewan Larkin and E.J. Schultz
Few executives have walked into Cannes Lions this year with quite as much baggage as Cindy Rose. Though the WPP CEO has helped orchestrate some momentum in the new business arena in her first nine months, she still helms a company working through a major restructuring, a string of client losses and a fall to fourth-ranked agency company.
Rose made her debut at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity as WPP’s CEO without much fanfare, opting for few public speaking appearances and spending more time tucked away meeting clients and investors while explaining her turnaround plan.
Perhaps her most important meeting was with Manuel Arroyo, the Coca-Cola Co. executive VP and global chief marketing officer, who also met with Arthur Sadoun, Publicis Groupe’s chairman and CEO, during the festival, according to a person familiar with the matter.
WPP is battling Publicis for the beverage giant’s media, data and technology business in most global markets outside of the U.S. The review, which is in its early stages, marks a high-stakes moment for Rose, as Coke incumbent WPP seeks to ward off further encroachment by Publicis, which took the North America media business from WPP in early 2025.
Arroyo did not tip his hand on which agency might have the advantage.
“We have a lot of confidence today in WPP,” he said in an interview at Cannes. “We also are seeing reasons why we should have a lot of confidence in Publicis based on the work in the U.S.” He credited Rose for bringing “a lot of new and great thinking” and “an increased focus on data, technology and AI.”
Coke’s marketing priorities moving forward include more emphasis on retail media and influencer marketing, he said.
Along with putting on an investor relations event atop the Hôtel Martinez, WPP’s home base for the week, Rose also hosted more than 30 consultants and intermediaries at a private terrace gathering. And she interviewed Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and Spotify co-CEO Gustav Söderström at WPP’s Stream event, Ad Age confirmed with WPP.
Her focus on clients—more than 50 of whom she met with privately—prompted her to opt out of a speech she had been scheduled to give at the Palais. Rose’s agenda also included a Thursday night client dinner.
A WPP spokesperson said Rose was not available for an interview during the festival.
On the heels of WPP announcing an agentic partnership with Amazon Web Services, Rose made a public appearance for a luncheon at Amazon Port, where she discussed a set of “trust principles” she released at the start of the festival. Asked about that timing on the panel, Rose said that “consumer trust in brands is at an all-time low, and trust in agencies isn’t much better,” so it felt like the right time to “put a stake in the ground” on how WPP operates.
One of WPP’s principles is about clients owning and controlling their data, a point Rose emphasized during her time in Cannes with AWS. “Your data and your insights as a brand is your biggest source of asymmetric competitive advantage, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand why CMOs would share that with anyone,” she said.
Rose later spoke about WPP’s marketing operating system, WPP Open, and said it is designed to give clients access to data insights and new technology without surrendering control. Her remarks come as research firms have warned that marketers risk becoming overly dependent on agency-owned AI platforms.
“It’s amazing to me how many of my CMO clients are willing to sign up to data solutions that lock them in,” Rose said. She added: “I want my clients to stay with me because we’re delivering superior growth, not because we’ve created some structural friction.”
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