The Two Juries

Last week, two juries judged the same company on the same week's evidence and reached opposite verdicts.

One named WPP the best in the world at making advertising.

The other took close to a tenth of its value away.

Both were right. That is the part worth sitting with, because the temptation is to treat it as a contradiction or proof that one set of judges is foolish. It isn't. The two juries were looking in opposite directions through time, and what separates their verdicts is the whole story of this industry in 2026.

On the final night in Cannes, WPP's networks did something close to a clean sweep of the prizes creative people most want to win. Ogilvy was named the number one Creative Network of the Year. VML came second. Burson London took PR Agency of the Year. WPP Media was the most-awarded media group for the second year running. Across the festival, WPP collected 140 Lions including a Titanium, seven Grands Prix, and a wall of gold beneath them.

And the work earned it. Oreo Cows, the Titanium winner, found a real cattle breed whose markings mirror the biscuit and used it to revive a milk-dunking ritual. The KitKat Heist turned twelve missing tonnes of chocolate into the most talked-about PR campaign of the year. Uva Uva Bombón unlocked one-dollar products the instant Bad Bunny sang a brand's name during the Super Bowl.

To win at that level takes a year of machinery. Entries identified and built, cases filmed, submission fees paid, the right people lobbying for the right jury seats, the calendar cleared for the right rooms on the right nights. An organisation does not top the Cannes table by accident. It points thousands of its most talented people at that table, deliberately, for twelve months.

A second jury of owners sat the same week and never saw a single Lion. It does not applaud.

That jury knocked over 9% off the value of WPP over exactly the same period that Cannes juries were sitting a deliberating.

WPP's 2025 revenue was down 8.1%. The company has issued two profit warnings inside a year. On the day of Cindy Rose's first results as chief executive last autumn, the shares fell 16% by the close. Billions in media work have walked out of the door. When WPP collected the last lion of the week, they were valued at about £2.74bn, down more than half over the year, trading within touching distance of its lowest point in a decade. When Goldman Sachs put a "sell" on the stock this month, its argument was not about the work; it was that free cash flow would stay weak and that the planned £500m of cost savings would largely be eaten by wage inflation and incentives.

Here is why both verdicts are true, and why neither jury was wrong.

A Lion is a verdict on the past. It rewards work already made, already run, already counted. Much of what won last week was briefed a year or more ago. Awards are the purest lagging indicator the industry owns: a certificate that something excellent happened.

A share price is the opposite. It is a price on the future or the present value of the cash the market believes you will generate. It is almost indifferent to last year, except as evidence about next year.

So the two juries were never in disagreement. They were answering different questions. Cannes asked: can WPP make the best work in the world? The answer was an emphatic yes. London asked: can WPP convert that into the cash it generates three years from now? The answer was a shrug.

For most of this industry's history, those two answers moved together: creative reputation converted into retention, pricing power and growth, so a Lion was also a leading indicator of commercial strength. The gap between the two juries last week is the widest I can remember. That gap is the company's situation, not a contradiction to enjoy, but a link coming apart in public.

It would be lazy to treat the market as the only adult in the room. Within days of that Goldman "sell," both Redburn and Berenberg initiated WPP at "buy" with targets well above where it trades. And they have more than sentiment on their side: WPP topped JPMorgan's net-new-business table in the final quarter of 2025, its first time at number one since 2020. A company circling the drain does not win those. The deepest version of the bull case is the case for creativity itself, if distinctiveness is the one asset that compounds, and gets scarcer as AI commoditises competence, then the backward jury may be the better futurist, and the market the one that is late.

Which brings me to the person caught in the exact centre of the gap.

WPP CEP Cindy Rose did not create this divergence. She inherited it. She took over last September with the share price already at a five-year low, walked straight into a profit warning and a quarter she called "unacceptable," and was handed a turnaround that three predecessors, two McKinsey reviews and a decade of restructuring had not delivered. She has, by any fair reading, an almost impossible mission and she is, to her considerable credit, looking in the right direction.

Read what she actually says to the forward jury. On her first results call, the future she described to investors was "simpler, more integrated, powered by data and AI, efficiently priced." When she launched her Elevate28 plan in February (the plan I called Evaporate28 at the time) she said the quiet part out loud: "What's made us successful in the past will not make us successful in the future." She has stopped calling WPP an advertising company and started calling it "a trusted growth partner in the era of AI." She has said she wants the group to be "a little less holdco and a little more 'co.'" Every one of those sentences is pointed at the second jury, not the first.

The trouble is timing, and the timing is not hers. The fundamental pivot, away from creativity-as-the-core-asset and toward owning the data and outcomes layer, needed to begin when the world changed, at the latest in the years just after the pandemic, when it was already unmistakable that value was migrating downstream. Instead those years went on consolidation: agency brands merged, org charts redrawn, the structure rearranged while the strategy waited. Elevate28 describes structure, not strategy, and it is being asked to deliver the real transformation now, late, on a balance sheet with no margin for error. Rose is doing the right thing. She may simply be doing it several years after the window for doing it comfortably closed.

Here is the divergence that does not show up in any share price, and the one I find most revealing. It is inside the building.

The CEO is facing forward. The organism is facing back. The same company whose chief executive spent her first Cannes in private rooms with clients and investors and who walked WPP away from the beach it had occupied for years, who reframed the whole enterprise around AI and growth, is the company whose agencies spent the preceding twelve months building entries, converting them, lobbying for jury seats and rehearsing the speeches for Friday night. Both things are WPP. They are pointed in opposite directions.

You can see the split in the language itself. To investors, in the autumn and again in February, the future was data, integration, AI, outcomes with creativity conspicuous by its absence from the core pitch. To the Croisette last week, Rose's line was "creativity is our superpower." (I must add that this was after, when presenting the Q3 2025 earnings on her first results call, she managed to not utter the word 'creativity' once). They are addressed to different juries, and they cannot both be the strategy.

This is not a failure of will, and it is certainly not a failure of the people who made the work. It is closer to a failure of physics. You cannot turn a hundred-thousand-person organisation whose prestige, promotion paths, pitch theatre and self-image have been built around a single backward-looking scoreboard, and have it face the other way, in eighteen months, by changing the slides. The incentives still reward the old jury. The status still flows from the old stage. WPP did not win 140 Lions because it disagrees with its CEO. It won them because winning Lions is what a machine built for the last era does superbly, right up to the moment the era ends and sometimes for a good while after.

In 2017, Publicis walked away from the awards economy entirely by pulling out of Cannes and the rest for a year and putting the money into building a platform instead. The reaction was ridicule. You do not abandon the scoreboard. The scoreboard is the point.

I sat on the Publicis Groupe Management Committee at that time. I have sat in the rooms where exactly this trade-off gets argued: the trophy versus the thing the trophy is supposed to predict. And I can tell you it is not a comfortable side of the table to sit on when the awards are still the currency everyone respects. You feel, in real time, that you might simply be wrong.

Look at what those private rooms contained this year. Publicis ran closed-door demonstrations of its AI platform to existing clients and investors rather than putting it on a stage (having recently spent about 2/3 the market value of WPP to buy LiveRamp this quarter). Omnicom spent the week talking integration and data. And WPP's own CEO chose clients and investors over the public programme. The whole top tier of the industry spent Cannes 2026 quietly making the case Publicis made nine years ago and took a beating for: that the festival's scoreboard is no longer the one that prices the company. The difference is that one of them is being asked to make that argument while its own agencies, on the same week, win the old scoreboard more comprehensively than anyone.

The two juries did not disagree last week. They judged the same company in opposite directions through time, and handed down a past tense and a future tense that no longer rhyme a certificate that WPP was the best, and a price that says the market is not yet convinced it will be.

Which of them turns out to be the better futurist is the genuinely open question, and it is a question for the whole industry, not a verdict on one company. If creativity is the asset that compounds, the backward jury will be proved right, the new business will keep coming, and a lot of people will have bought a great company cheap. If value has truly moved to the plumbing, the forward jury already knows something the stage has not caught up to. Cindy Rose, for what it is worth, appears to have placed her bet on the second, while her agencies spent the week winning the first.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 28 June 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.