Category: In the News

Now that the three major agency holding companies have issued their 2025 earnings results and set their strategies in place for 2026 and beyond, it’s fair to ask a few questions. Which will end 2026 in the best shape? And which one is truly built to last, in a media world dominated by platforms and inexorably altered by generative AI? 

Clearly the holding company that adapted its model the most is WPP, which last week revealed the transformation it’s enacted under the guidance of global CEO Cindy Rose, who hits six months in charge on the job. The “Elevate28” plan, which aims to simplify the company’s structure into four units — media, creative, production and enterprise solutions — looks to stabilize a business that’s been losing more clients than gaining, and reduces the complexity of a massive assemblage of assets. 

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Agencies have a compute problem. As AI takes over more of their day-to-day work, from writing copy to generating performance reports, it’s introducing a new and deeply unpredictable cost center. Every prompt, every output, every round of agentic back-and-forth costs tokens, and those tokens are variable in ways that neither agencies nor their clients know how to forecast yet.

The question of who bears that cost (and how) is the basis for the latest Digiday Bold Call, the live show where Digiday journalists put a stake in the ground on where the industry is headed, backed by their own reporting. The bold call this time: AI compute costs are the next frontier for the next upfront and the next iteration of principal media. Buy tokens in bulk from AI companies, absorb variable costs, wrap it into a client subscription. It’s a model that rhymes with how agencies have long handled TV inventory, and it carries the same transparency tension that has followed principal media for years. 

Sam Bradley, senior marketing reporter, and Seb Joseph, executive editor of news, joined Digiday’s executive editor of video and audio Tim Peterson to unpack where agencies actually are on this, covering token allotments, subscription experiments and the contract clauses marketers are quietly starting to demand.

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