London (Reuters) – WPP appointed Cindy Rose, a member of his board of directors on Thursday, to the post of director general, entrusting the reins of the British advertising group to a managerial executive of Microsoft, one day after having revised down his profit forecasts.
Member of the board of directors since 2019, Cindy Rose will succeed Mark Read on September 1, said the company.
WPP had previously announced that Mark Read would leave his duties by the end of the year.
Cindy Rose has held executive function at Microsoft in the past nine years, where she became operations director for the Global Enterprise division after directing the group’s British activities. She also worked at Vodafone and Virgin Media.
The president of WPP, Philip Jansen, stressed that Cindy Rose had contributed to the digital transformation of large companies worldwide.
“His expertise in this environment will be extremely precious for WPP, while the sector is going through deep mutations and macroeconomic uncertainty,” he said.
(Written by Sarah Young; Noémie Naudin, edited by Augustin Turpin)
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