WPP has named Tyler Turnbull as chief executive of WPP Creative, moving the global head of McCann into the top job at the advertising group's consolidated creative business.
The appointment was announced on 8 October 2026. Turnbull joins WPP in early 2027 and succeeds Jon Cook, who has led the division since it was formed.
Turnbull arrives from McCann, where he is global chief executive. Before that he spent 12 years at FCB, leading businesses in Canada, across North America and globally. The move takes him from one holding company's creative network into a direct competitor's, and it hands him a division that WPP has assembled by drawing its creative agencies into a single structure rather than leaving each to operate as a separate business.
WPP describes the remit in terms of connection rather than consolidation for its own sake. The company says WPP Creative is intended to bring its creative agencies together with its capabilities in media, data, production, commerce and technology, so that a client is served by one set of resources rather than several, and so that artificial intelligence can be applied across the whole of that stack rather than agency by agency. That framing matters for how the role will be judged: the measure is whether the parts work together, not whether any one agency grows.
Cindy Rose, chief executive of WPP, described Turnbull as a world-class leader with the ambition, global perspective and creative conviction the division needs, and said she was delighted that he is joining the company.
Turnbull said that leading WPP Creative is a tremendous honour, and that he looks forward to working with Rose, with Cook and with the agency leadership teams.
The handover is set out as an orderly one. Cook is named in Turnbull's own remarks as someone he expects to work alongside, which places the two men in the same frame rather than presenting the change as a clean break. WPP has not said what Cook will do next, and the company has not published an exact start date for Turnbull beyond the early part of next year.
Several things the market will want to know are not addressed in the announcement. WPP does not name the agencies that sit inside WPP Creative, does not set out how the division will be reported, and does not disclose whether an external search firm was used. Nor does it give any financial detail attached to the appointment. Those omissions are worth stating plainly, because trade coverage of the move has filled some of them in from sources the company itself has not confirmed.
What the announcement does establish is the shape of the bet. WPP has put an operator who has run creative networks at two rival groups in charge of the structure through which it now intends to sell creative work, and has given him a brief that is explicitly about joining that work to the group's media, data and technology arms.
