Publicis accuses WPP’s Cindy Rose of insulting clients in letter on pitchless wins

Publicis Groupe has published an open letter to WPP chief executive Cindy Rose, rejecting her suggestion that it wins business through a “CEO handshake” and accusing her of insulting clients’ intelligence.

The letter, signed “Your friends at Publicis”, responds to remarks Rose made on WPP’s third-quarter results call, when she warned against “encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence”.

The pitchless wins

Over the past year alone, Publicis has picked up a string of major accounts without a pitch, including Microsoft, LVMH, Tiffany & Co and Paramount.

The latest was PepsiCo’s $1.9bn global media account, which Publicis was awarded while it was competing against WPP for Coca-Cola’s global media business. Chief executive Arthur Sadoun accepted the PepsiCo account and withdrew the group from the Coca-Cola review.

WPP went on to win Coca-Cola. Omnicom took North America, after WPP chose not to re-pitch for a market it had lost a year earlier, and Dentsu picked up some APAC markets.

The Coca-Cola and PepsiCo moves were settled on the eve of WPP’s Q3 trading update, and analysts questioned Rose, a former Microsoft executive, about the growing number of briefs changing hands without a pitch. She did not name Publicis, but urged clients to “do their proper due diligence.”

Answering Bank of America analyst Adrien de Saint Hilaire, she said: “The other question you had was this pitchless CEO handshake thing that I keep getting asked about. I think what is really important to me is that my clients fully understand the implications of the decisions they are making.

“These are really high-stakes decisions with material business consequences, and they deserve careful consideration. I do not think we do ourselves any favour as an industry of professionals by encouraging clients to bypass proper due diligence. I think I will leave it at that.”

The letter

Publicis wrote that it had been busy in recent days but had not missed the earnings call, and that it “couldn’t let your theory on how we win new business slide without a word”. It cast the exchange as “a bit of industry back and forth, à la Maurice and Martin”.

“Although it might make for a good headline, claiming we win on a ‘CEO handshake’ is an insult to clients’ intelligence,” the letter said.

It argued that global companies do not hand over “their data, media, and tech keys over a friendly espresso”, and that such decisions involve “months of hard testing by marketers, engineers, data architects, and procurement teams”.

“So let’s be really clear here: skipping an old-school pitch circus isn’t skipping due diligence. It’s clients knowing what they need and testing us to the limit,” it said.

Addressing Rose’s previous employment at one of the companies that appointed Publicis this year, the letter said her comments “sell them remarkably short”, adding that its leaders “would never have entrusted us with a task of this magnitude on a wink and a handshake”.

Publicis also targeted WPP’s decision not to re-pitch for Coca-Cola’s North American business, comparing Rose’s argument to saying her “troops were too tired to try and win back your biggest client’s biggest market”.

“You can’t be a passionate defender of pitch culture and plead exhaustion in the same breath. If an extra six-week run was enough to sideline your teams, it’s not an endurance problem; it’s a capability one,” it said. “Take it from us, investing in tech and talent really helps on that front.”

The letter said enterprise partners are not picked after “a cosy tête-à-tête or legacy slide decks”, but “on connected identity and media solutions, intelligent creativity, and AI engines that drive business”.

Publicis added that it had not expected “a basket of muffins or a thank-you note for clearing the path to your global renewal”, and that it understood the pressure of building a story for the financial markets. It said “a victory lap is fun even when you’re the only one who ran”, before adding: “But it shouldn’t require denigrating our clients, our people, and all of our efforts.”

It closed: “Our industry does extraordinary work. Let’s give it the credit it deserves.”

WPP is understood to have received the letter before Publicis posted it on its social channels. WPP had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.

The wider pitching question

Publicis framed the exchange as sparring in the tradition of Maurice Levy and Martin Sorrell, but the shift towards business moving without a pitch raises bigger questions.

The Omnicom-IPG takeover has left clients with global business fewer holding company options. Sadoun called this the “new market reality” last month, arguing that with less choice, clients prefer to scrutinise a preferred partner’s capabilities rather than run a long and costly competitive review.

“They consider it way more efficient to spend their time and their money digging deeper and kicking the tires of the partner they are interested in, rather than basically organizing a beauty contest for months that, by the way, disturbs the entire organization and distracts them from the focus they should have on business,” Sadoun said.

Jay Wilson, a VP analyst at Gartner’s Marketing Practice, partly agrees, but says awarding business without a pitch is less widespread than Sadoun suggests. “It’s something we see rarely, and when it happens, it’s often centered on very large, global media engagements, such as the Pepsico/Publicis deal,” he says.

He adds: “As CMOs, under financial pressure to demonstrate business results, move more budget from non-working fee to working media spend, efficiencies of scale on the media side become increasingly attractive. Couple this with AI-enabled operating models that tie strategy to execution and optimization, and a single large global platform, as offered by the holdcos, can make sense, and these solutions are being aggressively priced by agencies who are also feeling the squeeze on the non-working end of client budgets.”

Wilson cautions that big global awards without a formal review only suit the largest marketers, whose buying power lets them push agencies for the best terms. PepsiCo’s $1.9bn budget carries far more weight than that of a brand such as Olipop.

“Most CMOs shouldn’t operate this way,” he says. “They need to dedicate the time and effort to fully vet potential agency partners not just for cost, but for strategic and cultural alignment, understanding of their business, creative differentiation, and technical expertise.”

Ruben Schreurs, chief executive of Ebiquity, a media advisory that runs global pitches, agrees that the trend is being driven by pressure on CMOs to prove marketing’s value in the age of AI. Marketers want to judge agencies on their capabilities and the value and impact they can deliver, rather than on who can work fastest and cheapest, he says.

That means standard, price-led pitches run by the usual consultants are “not fit for purpose any more for many major brands,” according to Schreurs. “Yesterday’s priorities and baselines are not representative of the models they pursue.”

He says holdco leaders such as Sadoun understand this and are going straight to the C-suite, not only to CMOs. “The market is commercially aggressive at the moment, with agency leaders pursuing clients proactively without waiting for a pitch, often by approaching C-level stakeholders directly, and not just CMOs. This is a valid strategy and the resulting reimagination of what vertical integration across communications can look like, for example, is exciting.”

Ebiquity is changing the way it runs pitches as a result. In place of the months-long “beauty contest” Sadoun describes, Schreurs says it is steering clients through “more meaningful partnership creation processes”, from renegotiations with incumbent agencies to closed pitches and tough, direct negotiations with just one partner.

Forrester’s Jay Pattisall has been calling since 2023 for an overhaul of what he terms a “dysfunctional process”. At that point, pitches were costing agencies, and by extension their clients, $12.5bn a year, and the figure has since risen.