SPQR targets WPP's front door in campaign challenging the holding company model
We are a strategic communications company specialising in media strategy, public mobilisation and stakeholder intelligence. Today we launched a campaign of six advertising executions, near WPP’s head office at Sea Containers House on the South Bank of the River Thames in Southwark, and on digital screens on adjacent roads, all making the case that the holding company model has run its course.
The ads target senior marketers and corporate affairs professionals at major organisations.
The timing of the campaign is deliberate. On 28 February 2026, WPP announced a sweeping restructure it has named Elevate28, targeting £500m in cost savings by 2028, collapsing the business into four units and announcing further job losses. The plan follows a year in which WPP’s top 25 clients reduced their spending by 4.1%, the company’s stock fell approximately 60%, and major accounts including Mars and Coca-Cola in North America departed.
WPP has also cut approximately 7,000 roles since June 2024 and collapsed GroupM into a single operating model. Meanwhile, Omnicom’s acquisition of IPG has eliminated approximately 10,000 positions across both companies and retired DDB, FCB and MullenLowe as independent creative networks. Both organisations have presented these decisions as transformations in AI capability and operational efficiency.
The contradiction at the centre of that narrative became public earlier this month, when Omnicom CEO John Wren told analysts that talent, not technology, is the differentiator between agencies in an AI-enabled market, before confirming $1bn in planned labour cost reductions. WPP’s chief executive Cindy Rose said the company intends to be “the trusted growth partner for the world’s leading brands”. SPQR’s campaign takes the gap between those statements and the evidence as its starting point.
Mike Coppen-Gardner, our Founder and CEO said: "The holding companies are not failing because they are too big. They are failing because size became the strategy. The clients watching senior teams disappear, agency brands absorbed and account relationships handed to whoever remains after the restructuring is complete are not confused about what is happening. They simply have not been given a clear public language for it. This campaign provides one."
The six ads name no holding company directly. They do not need to. Lines include: ‘When it comes to AI, big agency groups are more artificial than intelligent’; ‘At big agency groups, clients come first. After M&A, restructuring and profit’; and ‘When the big agency group sunsets your agency, where do you ride off to?’ Each is grounded in documented, publicly reported events. Each addresses an audience that already knows the experience being described.
The campaign is also addressed to senior practitioners within the holding company world.
Adam Aljewicz, SPQR’s Director of Strategic Communications, said:
"Many of the most talented people in this industry are working inside organisations that are structurally incapable of giving them the conditions to do their best work. We are building something with different priorities. This campaign is a direct invitation to those people."
At the intellectual centre of the campaign is what SPQR calls the Belief Gap: the distance between what holding company leadership believes its clients think of them, and what clients actually experience. SPQR argues that no restructuring programme, however logically constructed, closes that gap. Only consistent people, aligned incentives and genuine proximity to the client’s business can do that.
