The Agency Business Splits
19 June 2025
It always used to be said that you could sit through any number of agency presentations, take the company logo off the deck and struggle to tell one from the other. Not any longer.
It’s been a strange few weeks in what some of us still see fondly as ‘adland’.
Much of the strangeness involves WPP. I hesitate to suggest such a thing; there’s an ‘under-seige’ sense that seeps out from many LI posts from WPP-ers. Not every commentator is:
- Nothing but a disenchanted ex-employee
- A WPP-hater
- A holdco-hater
- Old and out-of-touch
Granted, in my case one of these is at least partly true.
Pushing on regardless, and in case you’ve been on Mars (sorry, poor choice of planet):
- WPP announced the end of GroupM and the launch of WPP Media. Unfortunately, this was leaked to a trade paper before those most directly affected were told, leading to considerable stress and worry.
- WPP has lost business
- WPP lost many senior media staff including the team that built what was MediaCom, the UK’s largest and over time most consistently successful agency.
- WPP lost its CEO who has announced he’s leaving with no successor named.
Let’s try hacking away at the weeds whilst aiming off for vested interests.
It’s almost as if WPP, and I would contend some of the other legacy holdcos too have left the ad business, in order to become suppliers of specialist services to the ad business.
One commentator, @Pesach Lattin, in his sermon suggesting Brian Lessor, of WPP Media should get the top job, even goes so far as to advise his champion to build an ‘adtech business pretending to be a holding company’.
I’m not sure why there’s any need to pretend, but he may have a point. The question is: is that wise? And, what is the ad business?
Here’s what Dave Morgan, of Simulmedia has to say about the current state of play:
“Unfortunately, too much of the ad industry fell in love with the means — automated, data-driven ad planning, buying and measurement — as tools for media trading, not as tools for great advertising.”
I agree with Dave.
There’s a gulf that’s developed between on the one hand those who write the briefs for those who then craft the ads; and on the other those who create the tools that lead in theory to better briefs and, down the road a measurement of success.
We mistake the tools as a means to an end in themselves, as opposed to a set of, well, tools to do a job. Meantime, we’re at risk of forgetting what the job is.
To return to WPP, to be fair I have never seen a presentation on WPP Media; although I have seen videos and read posts from some involved.
It’s hard not to be impressed. Combining datasets is terrifyingly difficult, and politically next-to impossible. But they’ve done it, or so it appears.
The front-end, AI-driven planning system has similarities in its base thinking to the Carat Sphere tool from the 1990’s combined with a technology several generations along. Sphere was similarly brilliant, but it didn’t last for many reasons, including internal politics, a lack of continuous training of those using as opposed to those building, and absorbing the new tools into day-to-day business. In short, reality got in the way.
And that brings us to the ‘C’ word – clients.
Agencies build services to win and keep clients. Granted I don’t spend as much time with clients as I used to, but I think it still likely that the one thing clients crave above all from their agencies is results, and that what delivers results according to those far clever than me is creativity.
Brilliant tech is of course in a sense creative, but brilliant or not, it’s not an end in itself. You still need ideas.
What I see and read about WPP is the brilliant tech without the creativity. Closing JWT and Y&R and coming close to doing the same at Ogilvy does not send a sign that this is a business that interested in great ads.
Look at the noise around WPP. It’s all about ‘media’, ‘AI’, ‘technology’. Look at who’s speaking up for the organisation, the technocrats.
I don’t see or hear much from WPP creatives. Unless it’s about them leaving to go elsewhere.
Others do it differently, combining media in every sense, including technology and research with creative output. VCCP is one beacon of this approach – they’re not alone.
Clients come in all shapes and sizes, and nobody doubts that huge complex advertisers need huge complex solutions. The old MediaCom had an uncanny ability to handle the huge and the tiny in one shop, and do great work for both often going above and beyond ‘media’ thinking. That’s a trick worth learning.
Great tech is just that. I get that having it in close to great strategies and great creative execution is in theory a good idea, but culturally I’m not convinced it works.
The stresses and strains inherent within any publicly quoted business often conflicts with serving client needs through great advertising.
Has WPP left the building? Quite possibly, but the new building may suit their cause as a publicly quoted business better.