Don’t talk to new WPP CEO Cindy Rose about the “glass cliff”—a term for a woman’s ascent to the top role only at a moment of corporate crisis, elevating her risk of failure.

She doesn’t buy it. “This idea that boards offload risk onto women is a really demotivating idea,” Rose told the Journal’s Suzanne Vranica in a recent interview. “Most transformations succeed or fail because of people.”

The assignment facing Rose, the first woman to lead a major ad holding company, is certainly formidable: Right-size the workforce and cut costs while winning new accounts and adapting the agency to an AI-driven future. Build up WPP’s tech offerings while keeping the creative class engaged. And do it while trailing Omnicom and Publicis, competitors that WPP once led.

But in her previous post at Microsoft, Rose brought in outside experts and organized workshops to destigmatize failure and end internal rivalries. Senior Microsoft executives had “failure parties,” confessing their biggest professional mistakes.

Coming up: One very visible sign of Rose’s new regime will be WPP’s revamped presence at the Cannes Lions ad festival in June. Last year, the company spent $23 million hosting meetings at “WPP Beach,” entertaining guests on a private yacht and ferrying clients and potential clients by speedboat to lunch on an island.

This year, WPP has cut the yacht, the beach and the island. There will still be fabulous locations, but this year’s agenda is highlighting AI capabilities at a space atop the Hôtel Martinez and a client lunch at Cannes hot spot La Petite Maison.

Rupert Murdoch warned President Trump at a White House dinner in February that more NFL games on streaming services could kill broadcast TV networks, Dana Mattioli, Josh Dawsey, Andrew Beaton and Joe Flint report in a deep dive on the battle over football’s media rights.

The league was angling to reopen existing media deals, potentially giving deep-pocketed streamers a chance to make even more inroads into America’s most popular sport. Murdoch’s Fox network would have to pay up or risk losing its whole franchise to the likes of Amazon and YouTube.

Trump listened to the concerns and asked questions about the business, a person familiar with the evening’s events said.

It was a bold play, even for a media titan known for making them. Murdoch was trying to stir up trouble for a partner it pays billions, fraying a decades-long relationship that once put a fledgling Fox on the map.

The Justice Department last month began examining whether sports leagues should still enjoy antitrust protections under the 1961 Sports Broadcasting Act, which lets them collectively negotiate TV rights on behalf of teams.

A person familiar with the matter called a DOJ lawsuit unlikely. But the scrutiny could embolden broadcasters when the NFL comes knocking.

It could also turn into a political issue in Congress.

Murdoch is chairman emeritus of both Fox and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp.

Consumer demand for value was a common theme again in many companies’ earnings reports this week. But the responses by C-suite leaders were a little more varied.

• “Consumers are literally running out of money toward the end of the month,” new Kraft Heinz CEO Steve Cahillane said this week. “Being there with the right offering at the right time has never been more important.”
  
  The company is cutting prices on items that had grown too expensive, boosting promotions and introducing smaller package sizes at lower prices, he said. It also increased its marketing investment 37% in the latest quarter.
   
• Papa John’s said budget-conscious customers traded down to smaller pizzas and passed on sides and desserts in the first quarter, weighing on sales and profit.
  
  The chain is trying to address the problem by improving its value perception and stepping up innovation to attract new customers, sell more premium pizzas and boost add-on purchases, CEO Todd Penegor told analysts on an earnings call.
  
  Papa John’s will spend $18 million more in supplemental marketing and franchisee subsidies to support its promotional strategy and that “reinvigorated innovation calendar,” CFO Ravi Thanawala added.
   
• Whirlpool blamed the Iran war for driving U.S. consumer confidence to 50-year lows as higher oil prices added to ongoing concerns about the cost of living.
  
  Though shoppers still replaced aging or broken appliances with modestly priced equivalents, they shied away from the company’s higher price, more profitable models. Organic net sales fell 6%. “We believe that’s absolutely driven by the fact that consumers are being a bit more cautious in terms of what they’re spending, and most likely reducing the amount of big-ticket purchases,” CFO Roxanne Warner said.
  
  And yet: Whirlpool has hiked prices this year across its range of washers, dryers, refrigerators and stoves—and plans to raise them again in the summer. CEO Marc Bitzer defended the strategy on an earnings call, saying the company has to make up for three years of cost inflation it hasn’t passed onto customers. It’s also cutting back on promotions, arguing that a replacement-driven sector like appliances is more likely to pull purchases forward than create new demand.

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Google’s new Fitbit Air and other wearable devices are ditching the screens and gaining consumer appeal. [WSJ] 

Applebee’s is telling managers to spend less time in back and more time with diners, part of its broader effort to improve customer service. [Restaurant Business] 

How to build a branded microdrama, as shown by Marc Jacobs and others. [Ad Age] 

Microdrama marketing is using AI to depict actors in sex scenes they say they didn’t and wouldn’t have performed. [BI]

Trade Desk executive Samantha Jacobson is leaving to become vice president of partnerships at ChatGPT maker OpenAI, where she will lead monetization partnerships. [Adweek]

Broadway has a new problem: Audiences won’t stop laughing, even during serious moments. [WSJ]