Kate Rowlinson: Rebuilding WPP Media For Growth

There are easier moments to inherit the responsibility of leading Britain’s largest media agency business.

Kate Rowlinson’s tenure at the top of WPP Media has coincided with fundamental restructuring inside WPP, the dismantling of long-established organisational boundaries, redundancies, relentless speculation around the group, and a media industry itself being reshaped by AI, platforms and changing client expectations.

It has required more than the familiar corporate skillset of managing a P&L, setting strategy, and chasing growth. Rowlinson has had to keep thousands of people focused while the organisation around them changed; reassure clients when the outside narrative threatened to overwhelm what was happening inside the business; and persuade a company built from powerful individual agencies that its future strength would come from behaving increasingly as one.

Little more than a year into that transformation, there is evidence the bet is beginning to pay off.

WPP Media has rebuilt its new-business momentum, winning the UK Government’s vast integrated media account alongside business including Reckitt, JLR, Honda, Estée Lauder, and Just Eat. The company remains the market leader in the UK. More significantly for Rowlinson, the organisational model she has spent the past year putting into place is starting to demonstrate what it was designed to do: bring more of WPP’s talent and capabilities to bear on clients and creating a more efficient and effective whole from the individual agencies.

“I feel really good and optimistic about this year,” she says. “If you think about how far we’ve come already, we’re not the company we were twelve months ago. Yes, we had some tough times over the last couple of years. But we are stronger than ever.”

Coming from a leader who is notably reluctant to pretend difficult things are anything other than difficult, it is a significant statement.

Leading Through Uncertainty

Ask Rowlinson what the hardest part of transformation has been and she does not begin with structure, technology, or strategy. She begins with people.

“One of the biggest challenges is that any kind of significant change and transformation creates a sense of uncertainty in your people,” she says. “People feel unsettled when there is any kind of transformation programme happening.”

The early communication around WPP’s media overhaul did little to ease that uncertainty. People were trying to understand not only what the changes meant for the agency brands they worked for, but what they meant for their own careers.

Rowlinson’s response was simple: communicate. Then communicate again.

So Rowlinson began giving regular updates to the organisation. Sometimes there was significant news. Sometimes there was not. But the consistency built trust and transparency.

“If there’s no major update, I just say there’s not much more I can tell you at the moment. But this is the direction of travel,” she explains. Silence, she believes, is rarely neutral during periods of uncertainty.

That became particularly important as the company went through its restructure. Rowlinson was conscious not only of those leaving, but of the effect on colleagues who remained. “I was really careful about acknowledging that it’s hard when you see colleagues departing,” she says. “And it also means that if you’ve had someone leave in your team, you might be picking up the work that that person was doing.”

For Rowlinson, empathy is part of how transformation works. “I think if you say nothing, people feel the silence.”

The same principle applied to clients. As WPP attracted an extraordinary volume of external commentary, Rowlinson found herself repeatedly explaining that what clients were reading did not reflect the reality inside the company.

The answer again was consistency: talk to clients, explain the strategy, acknowledge what was uncertain and keep returning to what was not. The new model is designed around clients and getting them the best of WPP.

It is perhaps the least glamorous lesson from one of adland’s largest restructures. There is no management acronym behind it. Just repetition, visibility and an understanding that people cope with change better when somebody is prepared to tell them what is happening.

Keep. Grow. Win.

Inside WPP Media, that repetition coalesced around an unusually straightforward strategy: Keep. Grow. Win.

Keep the clients the business already has. Grow those relationships. Win new ones.

But Rowlinson realised the same idea could be applied to the company’s internal approach. “We’ve got to keep great people in our organisation. We have to grow and develop their careers, and then we have to go and acquire new talent as and when we need it,” she explains.

It is intentionally simple, and Rowlinson calls it the company’s mantra.

The broader ambition aligns with WPP CEO Cindy Rose’s Elevate 28 strategy: become a trusted growth partner for clients and remove enough internal friction that WPP can bring the best of the group to bear on their problems.

Rowlinson is particularly animated by that last point. In the old model, senior agency leaders were simultaneously responsible for clients and for the machinery of running individual businesses: P&Ls, propositions, talent strategies, and the rest.

“When I was running Mediacom, I was running a P&L. We had our own talent strategy. We had similar programmes to the other WPP media agencies,” she says. The new structure is designed to remove some of that duplication and focus senior leaders on client growth and the work rather than running a company.

For Rowlinson, this is not an argument against agency brands. EssenceMediacom, Mindshare, and Wavemaker remain important client-facing identities, and some clients care deeply about those relationships. But others increasingly do not. “What really matters is the team that you have,” she says. “The team of people that work on your business is what matters, and how they can navigate WPP for you to grow your business."

It is a distinction easily lost in advertising’s fascination with agency architecture. Clients, Rowlinson argues, do not necessarily need people operating within the confines of a single agency proposition. They need access to the best people and the capabilities most relevant to solving their particular problem. That might come through EssenceMediacom. Or Mindshare. Or a bespoke construct such as OpenDoor for Amazon, or Open Mind for Nestle. The front door can vary, but the ambition behind it is now the same.

The Pitch That Proved The Model

If there is one moment Rowlinson points to as evidence that the new structure works, it is winning the UK Government account.

WPP Media entered the process convinced that pitching through one agency alone would limit its chances. For the first time, government media planning and buying were being brought together, and WPP already had significant expertise in government communications spread across Wavemaker, EssenceMediacom, and Mindshare. Rather than choose one of them, it built a WPP proposition.

The resulting team was called WPP 650, after the UK’s 650 parliamentary constituencies, with “Every Citizen Matters” as the pitch mantra. “We knew that the team approach meant we were offering the very best of WPP,” Rowlinson says.

WPP 650 won the business. More importantly to Rowlinson, it won decisively. “Our scores speak for themselves”. Government procurement processes award contracts on the quality of the work and the work only.

“This wasn’t just a, ‘Oh, it’s probably going to move anyway,’” she says. “This was a convincing, determined approach to winning a piece of business.”

And for an organisation still emerging from months of internal disruption, the timing mattered. The new WPP Media model had been introduced in May. A new leadership structure followed; within months the organisation had won one of the largest media accounts in the country.

Rowlinson used the victory internally to make a broader point. “When you strip away all the noise out there around WPP and you judge us exclusively on our work, we win.”

Other wins followed. Reckitt helped change the trajectory during the second half of the year, followed by the government and then JLR, Honda, Estée Lauder and Just Eat.

“I feel that it’s not taken us very long to really drive that momentum back into the business,” she asserts.

For Rowlinson, the government win was the proof of concept. The new model had not simply been designed; it had been tested in one of the market’s most important pitches and come through.

Turning Scale Into Access

WPP Media has never lacked scale. The challenge has been ensuring clients experience that scale as an advantage rather than an organisational burden. Rowlinson believes the new model is beginning to do that.

WPP Open, the group’s technology platform, is central to the proposition. Open Intelligence sits underneath it as the data layer.

But Rowlinson is equally interested in something much less technological: access to WPP talent and capability.

"A media client can now more readily draw on capabilities elsewhere inside WPP, including consulting, CRM and loyalty, customer experience, commerce, retail media, design or production. Cindy has set the strategy and we are all leaning into that like never before. It’s a step change in how we show up for clients."

She recalls recently sitting in a meeting with WPP Creative and being struck by work from businesses including Landor and Design Bridge. “It’s so impressive,” she says.

The challenge now is to make sure WPP Media’s client leaders understand enough of that wider company to know when it could solve a client problem.

The distinction matters. Rowlinson knows clients do not want agencies arriving with a shopping basket of capabilities simply because the holding company happens to own them. “I think clients get really frustrated when an agency just sells to them,” she says. Instead, she wants people to begin with the growth problem and then orchestrate the right expertise around it.

That is also why strategy has become so important to the model. Rather than pushing capabilities towards clients, WPP is developing what Rose calls “solutions architects” to identify a client’s growth challenge and work backwards towards the right combination of expertise.

WPP Media is adopting a similar approach within the strategy team led by Jem Lloyd-Williams. The ambition is to shift senior client leaders from being solely representatives of a particular media offering to people capable of navigating the breadth of WPP.

The Privilege Of Market Leadership

For all the structural change, Rowlinson repeatedly returns to culture.

Her ambition is straightforward. “I just want this company to be the best place to work in the UK ad industry,” she insists. “If you want to come and learn your craft, come and do it here.”

It could sound like standard employer-brand language were she not so specific about what market leadership should mean. WPP Media remains number one in the UK, she says, even following the merger of Omnicom and IPG. But being the largest player creates obligations beyond market share.

“I take the fact of market leadership really seriously,” she says. “Market leadership extends to way more than just a kind of market-share stat.” It should mean better training. Better career possibilities. Better thinking. Greater access to knowledge.

She points to WPP Media’s Profit Ability research into advertising effectiveness, its Shaping the Nation work and its This Year Next Year forecasts. She wants NextM, its annual event, to become effectively WPP’s upfront for the market.

And she sees the scale of the organisation as a career advantage for its people rather than simply a commercial one. Entry-level recruits now enter through Thrive, a WPP Media-wide programme rather than separate schemes belonging to individual agencies. They rotate around different parts of the organisation before deciding where to specialise. “You can build a meaningful career here,” Rowlinson explains. “We have more clients in this business than any other holding company in the UK. That is one of our great selling points. So you never really need to leave here.”

It also speaks to the larger cultural change she is trying to achieve. If WPP Media is to behave as one organisation for clients, its people need to experience it as one organisation too.

A Different Kind Of Confidence

Rowlinson is clearly frustrated by the degree to which WPP’s internal reality has, in her view, been overshadowed by the external narrative around the company. The criticism bothers her because it conflicts so sharply with what she sees: strong talent, award-winning work, and a business once again winning major pitches. “I see incredible people doing incredible work,” she says simply.

She points to WPP’s performance at Cannes, the CMAs and the Media Week Awards as further evidence of the quality still sitting inside the organisation.

That belief also informs how she has constructed her own leadership team.

When Rowlinson unveiled the new line-up last September, the appointments were intended to represent more than organisational boxes on a chart. She wanted leaders capable of signalling a different culture.

WPP’s media operation had historically been associated with its immense buying power; Rowlinson is frank about the reputation that came with that. “Historically GroupM [the former buying arm of the WPP media agencies] had been accused of beating up media owners,” she says. She wanted something different from WPP Media: partnership, strategy, and ideas, alongside the company’s continuing strength in trading.

Putting Kelly Parker into the role, Rowlinson says, was a signal that “we’re going to do things differently now”.

It is an important shift in how Rowlinson sees WPP Media. The scale remains, the buying power remains, but she wants the organisation to be known for much more than either of those strengths.

“There Is A Cindy Effect”

Rowlinson is equally enthusiastic about the change she sees taking place above her under WPP chief executive Cindy Rose. “There is a Cindy effect,” she acknowledges. She credits Rose with opening up WPP in a way it has not been before, while continuing to invest behind work already under way, notably WPP Open and Open Intelligence.

That leaves Rowlinson increasingly bullish about what comes next. She is not pretending the environment is benign. “Trading conditions are really tough. I’m not naive to that,” she insists. “Marketing budgets are under scrutiny and costs are rising.”

And there is volatility. Media owners are under pressure, an ever-greater proportion of advertising investment is flowing towards a relatively small number of global platforms.

But Rowlinson believes WPP Media – harnessed to a WPP under Rose that is itself more focused and re-energised - now has the people, skills, capabilities and momentum to turn those pressures into opportunity.

There is another challenge looming too: what Rowlinson calls a “crisis in differentiation”.

WPP’s long-running BrandAsset Valuator research points, she says, to a long-term decline in brand differentiation. Her approach to this challenge is revealing because, despite all the investment WPP is making in technology, it brings her back to people. “You need people, not just technology and AI. You need ideas. Clients want ideas.”

That feels central to Rowlinson’s leadership of the business. Technology matters, data matters, scale matters enormously, but she is adamant that none replaces the judgement, creativity and ambition of the people using them.

A year ago, much of Rowlinson’s job was about managing uncertainty: explaining what was changing, reassuring those inside and outside the company, and asking people to keep delivering while the architecture around them was being rebuilt.

Today, the conversation has shifted.

The structure is in place: the leadership team is established and major pitches have been won, with a much clearer client proposition. And WPP Media has something it conspicuously lacked during the more difficult moments of its transformation: momentum.

The task now is to sustain it. “We’ve got the momentum to prove that what we’re doing is working,” Rowlinson explains. “Now we’ve just got to keep doing it.”

For a leader who has spent the past year asking people to stay focused while almost everything around them changed, that may be the clearest marker yet of how far WPP Media has come.