Japan – In its latest industry wink, Tokyo-based independent agency UltraSuperNew is offering an unexpected internship—this time to WPP CEO Cindy Rose.
In a press release, the agency announced a three-month internship at its Tokyo headquarters, describing the offer as made “in a spirit of genuine generosity”, following Cindy’s comment in a recent interview with Campaign that “we don’t want to be a holding company anymore”.
Cindy recently unveiled a major restructuring plan for WPP, dubbed Elevate28, which aims to shift the company from a traditional holding model into a single, unified organisation. The multi-year strategy targets £500 million in cost savings and growth through a fully integrated, AI-enabled operating structure, addressing declining revenue and margin pressures alongside recent leadership changes.
Cindy took on the CEO role on September 1, 2025, after Mark Read stepped down. She previously spent nine years in senior leadership at Microsoft as COO of global enterprise and held leadership positions at Vodafone, Virgin Media, and The Walt Disney Company.
Despite her extensive experience across tech, media, and telecommunications, UltraSuperNew noted that Cindy has never actually worked inside an advertising agency—a cornerstone of WPP’s business.
Marc Wesseling, co-founder of UltraSuperNew, said, “We read about Cindy’s new strategy for WPP with great interest and great sympathy… She is clearly a brilliant executive. But we noticed that she has never actually worked inside an advertising agency. Not a big one. Not a small one. Not any one. And we think that might be a problem when you’re running one of the biggest collections of advertising agencies in the world.”
“So we’d like to help,” Wesseling added.
UltraSuperNew’s internship programme is designed to give participants hands-on experience in a “proper creative hot shop”. Interns contribute from day one: making coffee, sitting in on client calls, debating ideas, celebrating wins, and absorbing the sting of ideas being rejected. The agency emphasises that these experiences are impossible to learn from quarterly earnings calls.
The internship is unpaid.
“This is, UltraSuperNew acknowledges, a meaningful financial sacrifice for someone on a FTSE 100 chief executive’s salary. But the agency believes the experience will be worth considerably more than any remuneration it could offer,” the release said.
For Wesseling, the offer is particularly relevant given Cindy’s ambition to reshape the advertising industry.
“We have enormous respect for her ambition,” he said, “but we simply think she might find it useful to understand what she is reshaping before the reshaping is complete.”
“A leading independent like UltraSuperNew can help show her what advertising actually looks like when it isn’t being managed, processed, restructured, and optimised into something that resembles a platform business,” he added.
“We can show her what an idea looks like. We can show her what a culture looks like. We can show her what it feels like to win a client because you have a brilliant vision for their business, not a better procurement relationship. We can show her what it feels like to answer to nobody except the work.”
The agency asks only that Cindy arrive with “an open mind, comfortable shoes and no restructuring plans”, concluding, “The internship begins whenever Cindy is ready.”
MARKETECH APAC has reached out to WPP for comment. A spokesperson confirmed they would not be commenting on the offer.
This is not UltraSuperNew’s first playful nudge at the advertising world.
In December 2025, the agency ran a creative job order amid industry-wide layoffs. With offices in Tokyo, Singapore, and Amsterdam, UltraSuperNew positioned itself as a response to large-scale layoffs that left thousands of creative professionals uncertain.
The ad was notably released after media reports indicated that, following Omnicom and IPG’s merger in November 2025, CEO John Wren projected around 4,000 acquisition-related layoffs as some agencies were consolidated or retired.
