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There’s no easing into this story. Cindy Rose didn’t politely “step into leadership” at WPP — she was shoved into the cockpit of a crashing plane and told to “figure it out.” No safety briefing. No peanuts. Just a battered fuselage, nosediving into the markets while rival Publicis zooms by in business class sipping champagne.

On her very first day, Rose faced what most CEOs would spend their entire tenure trying to avoid: a company with its dividend chopped in half, its market cap in tatters, staff mutiny brewing, and hedge funds circling like vultures at a desert carcass. That’s not a honeymoon period — that’s corporate triage with the patient already coding on the table.

And the real kicker? This wasn’t some shock that came out of nowhere. WPP’s implosion was years in the making. The industry just didn’t expect its obituary to be written so soon. But here we are: the former king of Madison Avenue turned into a discount stock, a French punchline, and a case study in how to squander dominance.

Let’s talk about Mark Read. Seven years in the CEO chair, three decades in the building, and yet he exits not with a bang but with a profit warning so brutal it looked like performance art. One of the biggest single-day share price collapses in recent FTSE history — a 16% nosedive that made investors wonder if their trading screens were broken.

As parting gifts go, Read didn’t stop there:

It’s almost as if he wanted Cindy’s first day to come with an “abandon hope, all ye who enter here” banner.

And if you want a sign of how the market really viewed Read’s finale, look no further than the hedge funds. They didn’t just notice WPP’s decline — they doubled down. Hedge fund holdings in WPP spiked by 44% in Q2, making it the single most popular European play for the quarter.

Now, this wasn’t optimism. No one suddenly believed in WPP’s creative renaissance. This was predation. Hedge funds don’t invest; they bet against gravity. They looked at WPP, saw a lumbering giant with a bloated structure and juicy assets, and thought: fire sale incoming. In other words, let’s buy the cow not because it’s healthy but because its parts will fetch more than the whole.

So let’s be clear: Read didn’t “step down gracefully.” He was shown the door, with Chairman Philip Jansen holding it open and the market already shorting his legacy.

Remember when WPP was the undisputed heavyweight champ of advertising? That was only a few years ago. Now? They’ve been dethroned and humiliated by Publicis, which didn’t just edge them out but embarrassed them in every measurable category.

Consider this: in the same period that WPP managed to lose $3.2 billion in billings, Publicis gained $5.2 billion. That’s not a bad quarter; that’s an execution. Mars walked. Coca-Cola bolted. PayPal bailed. These weren’t small losses — these were global flagships, the kinds of accounts that once anchored entire agencies.

Meanwhile, Publicis was busy cashing in on bets it placed years ago: acquiring Sapient in 2015, Epsilon in 2019, and doubling down on its AI-powered platform Marcel. They turned data and AI into fuel while WPP was still arguing about which agency got to sit in the driver’s seat.

And the market noticed. WPP’s value has gone from £24 billion in 2017 to £4.2 billion today. That’s not decline. That’s a cliff dive in slow motion. Imagine telling investors in 2017 that their £11.11 stock would be worth £3.91 in less than a decade. You’d have been laughed out of the room — but here we are.

Inside WPP, the rot was just as visible. Staff morale, always fragile in holding companies, cratered under Read’s leadership. His infamous return-to-office mandate lit the fuse. Four days a week, in the office, no excuses — delivered in the middle of layoffs and client losses. Cue a 20,000-strong petition from employees who felt blindsided and betrayed.

The backlash wasn’t just about convenience. It was about tone-deaf leadership in an industry that claims to understand cultural nuance but couldn’t even read its own staff. The optics were brutal: while Publicis was winning billion-dollar accounts, WPP was fighting its own employees over where they sat on a Tuesday.

The result? A company stripped of its crown, humiliated in the market, despised by its staff, and treated by investors as little more than a speculative carcass to pick apart.

Cindy Rose isn’t just taking over a holding company. She’s inheriting a vacuum. A hollowed-out shell of what once was, propped up by hedge funds and nostalgia. The kind of company where even the boardroom PowerPoints can’t hide the despair.

Mark Read’s legacy isn’t just one of decline — it’s a vacuum so vast it swallowed confidence, morale, and billions in market value. And now Rose, the “mystery candidate nobody saw coming,” has to fill it.

This isn’t succession. This isn’t transition. This is resuscitation. And the question hanging over all of adland is brutally simple: can Cindy Rose breathe life back into a patient that looks clinically dead?

Think this was bad? Wait until you see what’s hiding in the fine print. In the ADOTAT+ paid sections, we’ll unpack:

👉 Paid readers get the unvarnished breakdown, the names, the strategy, and the backroom whispers. Because the story of Cindy Rose isn’t about who she is — it’s about whether anyone can actually pull WPP back from the brink.