WPP has handed Devika Bulchandani the newly consequential role of Chief Operating Officer, moving her out of the Ogilvy CEO seat after four years and installing Laurent Ezekiel — the executive who built the Coca-Cola megadeal — as Global CEO of Ogilvy Group. Floriane Tripolino, who ran the Nestlé relationship, becomes CEO of WPP Open X, the bespoke unit serving The Coca-Cola Company.

The moves land three months into Cindy Rose's tenure as WPP CEO and read, whatever the press release says about "intelligent growth," as her first real stamp on the org chart.

What Bulchandani is actually being asked to do

As COO, Bulchandani will be responsible for "commercialising services and solutions across WPP in a seamless, frictionless way" — corporate-speak for the cross-sell and integration problem that has haunted every WPP CEO since Martin Sorrell. The holding company claims her Ogilvy record justifies the bet: the network became the first agency to top both WARC's Creative 100 and Effective 100 rankings for three consecutive years (2023–2025), a first in those rankings' history.

Whether an integration mandate from the centre survives contact with fiefdom-building agencies is, as ever, the open question.

Ezekiel inherits a bigger Ogilvy

Ezekiel's Ogilvy Group remit spans advertising, PR, social and influence, customer engagement, consulting and health, plus creative boutiques DAVID, INGO, NCA, Thjnk and Village Marketing. Grey joined the network in May 2025 as part of a strategic realignment, adding scale — and integration friction — to the portfolio.

His credentials rest on the 2021 Coca-Cola win, which WPP describes as the industry's largest-ever global marketing agency partnership. Open X pulls creative, media, social, influencer, commerce, PR, data and technology into one ecosystem serving more than 200 Coca-Cola brands in 195 countries. Under Ezekiel, the unit built Studio X and, by WPP's telling, helped push Coca-Cola to Brand of the Year at the 2024 Cannes Lions.

Tripolino takes over a renewed contract

Tripolino steps into Open X on the back of Coca-Cola renewing the global partnership in May 2025 — the strongest signal the model is delivering, at least enough to keep the client signed. She spent four years on the Nestlé account, where she expanded WPP's media footprint and made the holding company Nestlé's largest marketing services partner. That track record of running a single giant, demanding multinational client maps neatly onto the Open X job.

Her brief: keep scaling Studio X and push harder on data and AI capabilities.

What Rose said

CEO Cindy Rose framed the appointments as accelerating WPP's next phase of growth: "Devika's deep obsession with helping our clients grow and win will help us accelerate our growth across the entire WPP landscape. Laurent's close, successful partnership with The Coca-Cola Company and creation of WPP Open X gives him valuable insight and experience to help navigate the needs of our largest clients, many of which are housed in Ogilvy."

Bulchandani, for her part, called her time at Ogilvy "the best job in the world" and promised WPP's capabilities would become "an invincible force" when brought together seamlessly — a taller order than the phrasing suggests.

Ezekiel invoked David Ogilvy's legacy and pledged to keep the network "the most creative and effective communications partner for brands worldwide." Tripolino called the move "an energising opportunity" and said she would work with Ezekiel on the next phase of the Coca-Cola marketing transformation.

For practitioners, the practical consequences are straightforward: a new COO with a mandate to break down silos across WPP agencies, a proven account operator now running its most storied creative network, and the Coca-Cola unit passing to a client-relationship specialist at exactly the moment AI-driven production models like Studio X are reshaping how the work gets made.