The Slow Death of the Ad Holding Co.

As WPP shrinks and IPG disappears into Omnicom, can Madison Avenue preserve the legacy of the creative ad agencies?

Jun 30, 2025

Outgoing WPP CEO Mark Read must have been thrilled that his firm picked up “Creative Company of the Year” at this month’s Cannes Lions after taking home 168 awards in all. But just a week later, the ad holding company laid off around 700 people—about five percent of staff—from Ogilvy, a 75-year-old creative agency known for enduring ad campaigns like Maxwell House’s “Good to the Last Drop.”

WPP is shuttering its global DEI operations and restructuring its media-buying arm. There are rumors that WPP could be broken up, with private equity giant Blackstone reportedly circling. The company has recently lost major accounts, including Paramount Global, Coca-Cola, and Mars. The AI armageddon is bearing down hard.

The work of the creative agencies that helped launch Cannes Lions is now vastly overshadowed by Big Tech, making Cannes Lions feel less like a celebration of creative advertising and more like CES meets Coachella.

One of Hollywood’s most successful creators, Shonda Rhimes, appeared at Cannes for a Q&A with WPP’s Read. She began her career in advertising—as a receptionist at McCann Erickson in San Francisco. She was thrilled when an essay she wrote about Barbie keeping her shoes in Ken’s plastic head became a Mattel commercial, setting her on a path to becoming one of the most legendary TV makers of all time. That San Francisco agency was dissolved last year. Its parent, Interpublic Group, is being acquired by rival Omnicom in a $13 billion merger that will result in a huge number of lay-offs. There’s a lively discussion about that topic on Reddit at R/Advertising. IPG’s creative brands are likely to disappear into Omnicom.

Today’s holding companies still talk about “The Creative Idea,” but they’re now dwarfed by the data side of the house—giant consumer-data factories that scrape and merge online behavior with buying patterns to forge the kind of audience-targeting that Palantir is known for.

Creative ad executives are now competing with every SoundCloud artist and attention-seeking influencer while clients who once relied on agencies to create their campaigns can now generate content for social media using tools like Google Veo or by partnering with creators directly. Some go straight to the tech platforms to buy self-serve ad inventory. New TV campaigns haven’t disappeared, but as a strategy to reach younger audiences, they feel as dated as Peggy Olson’s miniskirts.

TV and streaming will account for just 15.1%—or $155 billion—of global ad spend this year. Retail media, led by companies like Uber, is predicted to surpass that with $163 billion by year-end.

Back at the Palais in Cannes, Read asked Rhimes if she regretted killing off any characters. It's a question the holding companies might ask themselves. Some of the greatest creative advertising brands of the 20th century, are being erased as swiftly as a stroke of David Ogilvy’s red pencil. Brand names like J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, and Wunderman have all but dissolved into faceless acronyms.

In the middle of his interview with Rhimes, Read—an economics graduate from Cambridge with an MBE from King Charles— shared an unusual aside: that he’d not been allowed to contribute ideas in his role. The suits must stick to the numbers, but sometimes the numbers don’t add up.

Holding companies have seen this train coming for years. The changes have felt incremental at Cannes—until now. Industry consultant Michael Kassan, founder of 3CV and a veteran of both Madison Avenue and the Cannes Croisette, told Adweek: “I don’t think they can continue without some consolidation. If your question is, Michael, ‘If we’re sitting here next year, do you think there’ll be another one [merger or collapse]?’... I think so.”

Whoever takes the baton from Read will signal the company’s future direction. One source told me that WPP Chairman Philip Jansen—a senior advisor at Bain—is the most likely successor. Another rumored candidate is Dave Droga, a creative ad legend who just stepped down as CEO of Accenture Song, a “tech-powered creative group.” Droga didn’t hold back in Cannes. Speaking at a Campaign event, he criticized the dominance of the media side of holding companies: “The pursuit of media has derailed the appreciation of craft, creativity, and strategy. That model is going to break. And if we can’t help—or be one of the architects of—a new model, then the platforms will do it without us.”

Josh Rosenberg, CEO and co-founder of the independent agency Day One, offered his perspective: “Creativity is still the heartbeat of the Palais (even if the work is tucked in the basement). It’s why the Cannes Lions exist. But the growing presence of tech giants and platforms along the Croisette has expanded the focus. Their massive investment has elevated conversations about distribution, data, and deal-making—often overshadowing the work and the creativity itself. Creativity isn’t less important; it’s just one part of a much broader equation now.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, in Cannes to accept the Media Person of the Year award, was interviewed by P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard, once one of the most powerful figures in advertising. P&G’s global marketing spend last year was $12.7 billion. Pritchard’s effusive praise for Jassy bordered on awkward, but it reinforced who’s now in charge. If there was any lingering doubt that AI could reshape the entire media ecosystem Jassy put it to rest: “AI is the most transformative technology since the cloud—and potentially, the internet itself,” he said. “Amazon is using AI to optimize fulfillment networks, enhance Prime Video sports broadcasts, develop new shopping interfaces, and even transform advertising creative, including motion-generating tools that animate still images into product demos.”

It’s hard to blame the holding companies for struggling to compete with that.

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