Who is Cindy Rose, WPP’s insider-outsider pick for its next CEO?

WPP has been flirting with the idea of becoming an “AI-driven platform business” for some time – mostly in earnings calls and on strategy decks. Now, with a new CEO incoming, the holdco might finally be ready to turn the tagline into a throughline. 

That job now falls to Cindy Rose, a longtime Microsoft executive and current chief of operating officer of its global enterprise business. She’ll take over from Mark Read on September 1st (though Read will stick around until the year’s end). 

When she does, she won’t be walking in blind. Rose has been a non-executive director on WPP’s board since 2019, so she knows the scale of the ambition, and the sprawl she’s inheriting. 

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Condé Nast and Hearst strike Amazon AI licensing deals for Rufus

Condé Nast and Hearst have signed multi-year agreements with Amazon to license their content for use in its AI shopping assistant Rufus, according to sources with knowledge of the deals. 

The news comes just six weeks after The New York Times revealed its own AI licensing tie-up with Amazon, which allows Amazon to use articles from The Times and content from NYT Cooking and sports website The Athletic for its AI products.

A Hearst spokesperson confirmed that Amazon has an AI licensing deal for content to be used within Rufus, across its newspapers and magazines, which include Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar. Condé Nast didn’t respond in time for this article’s publication.

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