WPP is set to win Coca-Cola’s global media, data and tech business. For CEO Cindy Rose, the timing couldn’t be better. A year into trying to fix the holdco, a win of this size, from a brand with Coke’s stature, is the kind of thing a CEO points to as proof the turnaround is real.
But the win comes with an asterisk. Publicis was the only other agency group in the running and it dropped out before the process finished. Nobody found out whether WPP could have beaten it straight up. Instead, the field just narrowed to one name, and that name happened to be WPP’s.
Some might call that winning on a technicality. But that reading discounts how close the head-to-head between WPP and Publicis actually was before the latter walked away. One source, who spoke to Digiday on condition of anonymity because they work with the team that was competing for the account, described it as close.
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