Author: Michael Bürgi

New strata lines are forming across the top layers of the agency world, as the Big Three (Publicis, Omnicom and WPP) cement their status as top dogs in size, scale and clout. That much is undeniable. 

But entirely new formations, alliances and brand revamps are taking place in that second tier of major agencies, which depending on which consultant you speak with, can include Dentsu, Havas, Horizon, Stagwell, and even Brandtech Group, Dept, MSQ, Tinuiti, WPromote or PMG. Oddly enough, few consultants even bring up S4 Capital, even though Martin Sorrell’s Monks operation is working hard to get back on track by essentially handing over more work to AI. 

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Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun said this week that he’s pitching directly to CEOs, and the industry hasn’t stopped chewing it on since.

Some of the messages landing in Digiday’s inbox have him down as a leader in the fullest sense. Plenty of others aren’t buying it. How many chief executives, the doubters ask, decide their business needs transforming and make the first call to an ad holding company? A few go further and read the whole thing as bravado papering over a trail of pitches that went nowhere. Strip out the cheerleading and the snark, and what’s left is an identity crisis holdcos have been struck in for the best part of two decades. 

It started around 2008. Clients cut ad budgets the moment the economy wobbled, and the holdcos, badly exposed, went looking for a way into the boardroom. Some managed it. Sir Martin Sorreil made his name at WPP partly on his access to chief executives, and Mark Read kept a smaller version of that going after him. Sorrell’s great rival, Maurice Levy, worked edge same circuit for Publicis long before handing the job to Sadoun. Over at Omnicom, John Wren pulled the same trick, which goes some way to explaining how the group has held on to the likes of Apple and McDonald’s for so long. Still, those relationships tended to grow out of the CMO-holdco tie rather than any standing the holdcos had earned with the rest of the C-suite. 

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