Six ads. One argument. And why I mean every word of it
We have just launched six advertising executions aimed at the people who run marketing and communications at major organisations. Each one names no holding company directly. None needs to. Here is what each means, and why I stand behind every word.
The first ad says: 'The big agency groups are firing. But not on all cylinders.' It’s tongue in cheek but it’s a precise description of what is happening today. Last week, WPP announced plans to cut £500m in costs under a sweeping restructure that will collapse the company into four units and eliminate further roles targeting what its new chief executive described as 'excessive organisational complexity'. This follows approximately 7,000 job losses at WPP since June 2024, with operating profit for 2025 down 71% on the previous year.
The company is simultaneously telling clients and investors that it is building the communications industry's most advanced AI platform. Firing people and firing on all cylinders are not the same thing.
The second ad says: 'When it comes to AI, big agency groups are more artificial than intelligent.' In February 2026, Omnicom CEO John Wren told analysts that since every agency now has access to the same AI tools, the differentiator is the quality and judgment of the people using them. He then confirmed $1bn in planned labour cost reductions, with offshoring accelerating through the year. The holding companies are making expansive claims about AI capability while removing the people whose judgment gives those tools any value. That is not intelligence. It is the performance of it.
You cannot declare your people your most irreplaceable asset and remove a billion dollars' worth of them.
The third ad says: 'At big agency groups, clients come first. After M&A, restructuring and profit.' This one requires the least elaboration. When Omnicom announced its acquisition of IPG in December 2024, it set a synergy target of $750m, which had doubled to $1.5bn by the time the deal closed. The merger has since eliminated approximately 10,000 positions across both companies and retired DDB, FCB and MullenLowe as independent creative networks. These are the priorities of a financial engineering exercise. The client outcomes follow, if they follow at all, some distance later.
The fourth ad is the one I find most revealing about the human cost of what is happening. It asks: 'When the big agency group sunsets your agency, where do you ride off to?' GroupM CEO Brian Lesser's internal memo described the forthcoming 'sunsetting' of agency-specific titles across various markets. Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom are to become client team structures within a single operating model, no longer distinct businesses with their own identities or cultures. For the clients who chose those agencies, and the people who built careers within them, sunsetting is a strange word for what is happening. It sounds peaceful. It is the systematic removal of the specific working relationships on which client trust depends.
The fifth ad says: 'Want to know why the big agency groups are struggling to survive? Here's a 150-slide deck.' It is perhaps the most poignant of the six. The holding company response to a decade of structural pressure has been an endless production of strategy documents, investor presentations and transformation narratives, each one promising integrated propositions and efficiencies of scale. Forrester forecasts that 85% of US B2C marketing executives plan to review their media agency relationships in 2026. The decks are not working.
The sixth ad asks: 'Maybe they're called agency holding companies because their clients have to wait so long?' Speed is one of the most consistent complaints clients make about large agency groups. Multiple approval layers, competing internal profit centres, account teams that rotate before they have properly learned the business: these are not inconveniences. They are the product of a model built for geographic scale and media arbitrage in an era when those things were scarce. That era has passed.
The holding companies are not failing because they are too big. They are failing because size became the strategy.
Taken together, these six ads make one argument: that the holding company model cannot deliver what it promises. Not because the people within it lack ability. Because the model's incentives, economics and governance structures have become incompatible with genuine client service.
Clients are watching the restructuring announcements, counting the departures, fielding calls from new account directors they have never met, and quietly asking whether the organisation they appointed still exists in any meaningful sense.
I built SPQR on a conviction that has not changed: that the most important thing a communications agency can offer is independent judgment, applied by senior people who stay close to the work and whose incentives are aligned with the client's outcomes rather than the agency's own growth targets. That is what every client we have spoken to says they want. It is rare because it is very hard to sustain inside a holding company structure built for volume and margin.
We are not running these ads because we dislike holding companies. We are running them because the gap between what those companies promise and what clients experience is now too wide to ignore. Closing it requires something that structural reorganisation cannot supply: consistency, accountability and the kind of proximity to clients that only comes when senior people are genuinely on the business.
The holding company model has shaped this industry for forty years. I am not suggesting it will disappear, or that everything it produces lacks value. I am suggesting that its central promise, that scale and integration produce better client outcomes, has not been borne out.
Six ads. One argument. It is time to say it plainly.
Mike Coppen-Gardner, the Founder and Chief Executive of SPQR
