You may have noticed The Ad Stack went dark for a month. No worries. I wasn\u2019t acquired, I didn\u2019t pivot to a Substack about sourdough, and no, the algorithm didn\u2019t bury me. I simply did what every great brand does when engagement dips: I called it \u201cintentional silence\u201d and added it to the content calendar retroactively.<\/p>\n
The official story is that I was \u201cheads-down on strategy.\u201d The real story is that I opened a blank draft roughly forty times, wrote the word \u201cSo,\u201d stared at it like it owed me money, and closed the laptop. Turns out the hardest part of a publishing schedule is the publishing. And the schedule.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the thing about going quiet in a business built on never shutting up: absence is just scarcity marketing you didn\u2019t mean to do. So consider this my triumphant relaunch. Same newsletter, now with a full month of pent-up opinions and zero new excuses.<\/p>\n
I sat on this edition for a couple of weeks; repeatedly re-reading. Effectively killing it. Someone asked me, \u201cSo when the **** are you sending something out?!\u201d<\/p>\n
That said, following is a ****-load of information. Feel free to use your expletive of choice. Let\u2019s look at how the holding companies might be doing. I\u2019ve got no dog in this fight.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s get into it.<\/p>\n
The funny part about the Q1 2026 advertising holding-company earnings cycle isn\u2019t the numbers. It\u2019s that one of the four CEOs running these things skipped her own earnings call.<\/p>\n
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Cindy Rose, eight months into the WPP top job, opted out of presenting the company\u2019s 8.9% revenue decline to analysts. The official line was that the strategy update was scheduled separately. The unofficial line is that there is nothing reassuring to say when your top 25 clients have shrunk 9.4% year-over-year and your stock is down roughly 51% in twelve months.<\/p>\n
What follows is what the trade press has been too polite, or too dependent on holdco ad spend, to lay out plainly. The numbers are real. The conclusions are speculative. The satire is what\u2019s left when you put both side by side.<\/p>\n
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If you read individual earnings releases, every holdco is \u201cexecuting on transformation,\u201d \u201cinvesting in AI capabilities,\u201d and \u201cpleased with progress.\u201d If you line up Q1 2026 organic growth side by side, you get a different story.<\/p>\n
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Publicis grows. Havas grows. Omnicom\u2019s headline number is merger-inflated. WPP shrinks.<\/p>\n
The gap between Publicis and WPP in a single quarter is roughly <\/span>13 percentage points<\/strong>. In an industry whose long-run nominal growth is 3\u20135%, that is not a \u201ctransformation gap.\u201d That is one company growing and one company falling out of an airplane.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Sadoun is, of course, talking his book. He is also factually correct about all three things.<\/p>\n The story being told about WPP, that it is mid-turnaround under new leadership, buries the real story. WPP has lost the three biggest media accounts in the industry in roughly fifteen months, and there is no plausible read of the numbers in which that doesn\u2019t matter.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n WPP\u2019s response to losing the Mars account was, and this is real, to publicly question Publicis\u2019s \u201cad quality,\u201d as described below:<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n WPP Share Price \u2014 Trailing 12 Months<\/strong><\/p>\n Down roughly 51% over twelve months; sitting near a 52-week low last seen in 1998.<\/p>\n The shareholder return number is the one nobody at WPP wants on a slide: <\/span>three-year total return is approximately negative 60%<\/strong>. In the same period, the S&P 500 returned roughly +28% and Publicis Groupe roughly +35%. WPP is not underperforming the market; it is underperforming a savings account.<\/span><\/p>\n Share<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Rose\u2019s restructuring plan, \u201cElevate28,\u201d targets $675M in gross annual savings by 2028. The plan is rational. The plan is also, with respect, Omnicom\u2019s playbook from December 2024 with a one-year time-lag and a new color palette. Omnicom announced a comparable program coupled to a transformative acquisition. WPP is announcing a comparable program coupled to losing accounts.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Analyst consensus is that WPP needs to shrink headcount by 10\u201315% in 2026. WPP Media (the rebranded GroupM) reportedly started layoffs <\/span>days<\/em> after the rebrand was announced; which is the corporate-comms equivalent of finishing your toast at the rehearsal dinner and then immediately filing for divorce. VML separately cut North American staff, citing a \u201cshift in client needs.\u201d The shift in question is mostly that the clients are at Publicis now.<\/span><\/p>\n Publicis Media captured roughly <\/span>56% of all global new business billings in 2025<\/strong>, per COMvergence \u2014 about $10 billion in new client billings, or close to a third of all media spend that changed hands in the year. Starcom alone won $2.7B, including the Mars and Aldi accounts. Spark Foundry added another $2.1B. This is not a \u201cPublicis is doing well\u201d market share. This is a \u201cPublicis is the market\u201d share.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Almost everything visible in 2026 is a consequence of one decision Sadoun made in <\/span>April 2019<\/strong>: paying $4.4 billion for Epsilon, the loyalty\/identity\/first-party data platform that Wall Street analysts at the time openly called overpriced and strategically confused. The CNBC headline was literally \u201canalysts skeptical.\u201d Sadoun closed the deal anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n Seven years later, Epsilon is the backbone of CoreAI \u2014 Publicis\u2019s identity graph and AI activation layer \u2014 and it is the reason Coca-Cola, Mars, and Paramount left WPP. WPP, in 2019, was busy unwinding Sir Martin Sorrell\u2019s empire and could not have spent $4.4B on identity infrastructure if it wanted to. The fact that one CEO was willing to take a strategic bet that looked obviously wrong at the time, and the other was managing a succession crisis, explains seven years of relative trajectories better than any AI narrative ever will.<\/p>\n This is the boring truth that doesn\u2019t make Cannes panels: the AI race in adland was effectively won in 2019, by a French CEO buying a Texas data company nobody could justify on a DCF.<\/p>\n On the Q1 2026 call, Sadoun did something unusual for a public-company CEO: he framed his entire 2026 thesis around <\/span>not<\/em> doing what his competitors are doing.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/strong> No mega-acquisition. No principal media plays (he ruled out the Omnicom-style media arbitrage model in February<\/span>20<\/sup><\/strong>). No headcount squeezing. The pitch is essentially: \u201cWe did the painful work between 2017 and 2022. The rest of you are doing it now. We\u2019re not going to do it again on your schedule.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Whether the strategy holds depends on whether AI actually creates the productivity gains Sadoun is betting it does. If it doesn\u2019t, his cost base is the most exposed in the industry. If it does, and the early CoreAI utilization data suggests it does, then we\u2019re heading into a winner-take-most decade.<\/p>\n Share The Ad Stack<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The deal closed November 26, 2025. Three months later, Omnicom announced the most aggressive integration anyone has seen out of a holdco merger in decades: <\/span>DDB (founded 1949), FCB (rooted to 1873), and MullenLowe are being euthanized<\/strong> in the first half of 2026, folded into TBWA, McCann, and BBDO respectively. Total job cuts: 4,000+, mostly admin. Targeted savings: $750M annually, above original guidance.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Ruhanen\u2019s \u201crelevance, not legacy\u201d framing is the most quoted line in the trade press this quarter. It is also a confession dressed as a strategy. Translation: <\/span>we cannot afford the brand equity of three networks we no longer have a thesis for, so we\u2019re going to brand-equity-launder them into BBDO.<\/em> The clients of DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe are about to discover whether they were paying for the agency or the logo.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Omnicom\u2019s reported Q1 2026 revenue of $6.2B is up $2.6B \u2014 but the increase is mechanically the IPG bolt-on. Operating margin compressed from 12.3% to 10.4% on $59M of integration costs, $4M of severance, and $34M of disposition losses.<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/strong> The merger math depends on hitting the synergy number. The synergy number depends on not losing the people you need to keep.<\/span><\/p>\n Dentsu, the Japanese holdco that for the last decade tried to be a global player by acquiring Aegis and Merklel; quietly disclosed in August 2025 that it had hired Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley and Nomura to <\/span>explore strategic options including a sale of its international business<\/strong>. Forrester\u2019s reaction to the news was, in essence, \u201cwe told you so.\u201d Dentsu\u2019s international integration has been visibly underperforming for three years.<\/span><\/p>\n The crown jewel of any Dentsu international sale is <\/span>Merkle<\/strong>, the data consultancy acquired in 2018. Merkle is essentially Dentsu\u2019s answer to Epsilon. Which is to say, the asset that Publicis already won the war with. Whoever buys Merkle is buying a second-place data infrastructure in a game where the first-place player is six years ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n In November 2025, The Times reported that Havas, controlled by the Bollor\u00e9 family, was in \u201cvery serious\u201d early-stage talks about WPP, potentially involving a minority stake purchase. Within days, Havas CEO Yannick Bollor\u00e9 <\/span>denied<\/em> the talks in a staff memo, while carefully leaving the door open to \u201clarger acquisitions aligned with our strategy.<\/span>\u201d<\/sup><\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe are not in discussions with WPP\u201d is a sentence that means three different things depending on tense interpretation. It does not mean \u201cwe have never been in discussions with WPP\u201d and it does not mean \u201cwe will never be in discussions with WPP.\u201d The Havas CFO has separately confirmed interest in Dentsu\u2019s international business.<\/p>\n If Dentsu sells its international arm and Havas buys it (or buys WPP\u2019s media business, or some combination), the global advertising industry collapses from five holdcos to four \u2014 or, more interestingly, to <\/span>three plus a holdco for the remainders<\/em>. By 2027 there is a non-trivial probability the league table reads: Publicis, Omnicom-IPG, [whoever ends up owning the WPP\/Dentsu\/Havas residue], and the AI platforms.<\/span><\/p>\n The narrative in trade press is that \u201cAI is disrupting the holding companies.\u201d The numbers say something more specific and more interesting: AI gave Omnicom and Publicis a <\/span>permission structure<\/em> to do the consolidation they already wanted (admin, middle management, production). The job cuts would have happened anyway. AI is the macro story that makes them socially acceptable.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The actually disruptive AI story for the holdcos is on the other side of the ledger. It is on the <\/span>media buyer<\/em> side, not the agency side.<\/span><\/p>\n Of the 66 commercials that aired during Super Bowl LX, <\/span>15 \u2014 nearly a quarter \u2014 featured AI in some way<\/strong>.<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a><\/strong> OpenAI, Anthropic, Google (Gemini), Amazon (Alexa+), and Meta (Oakley Meta glasses) all bought ad time. Reported media buys ran $8\u201320M per company.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n The Anthropic ads, four satirical spots tagged \u201cAds are coming to AI,\u201d were a pointed shot at OpenAI\u2019s plans to monetize ChatGPT with ads. Sam Altman called them \u201cfunny but clearly dishonest.\u201d Anthropic\u2019s daily-active-user count jumped <\/span>11% post-game<\/strong>, the largest lift in the AI cohort per BNP Paribas data.<\/span><\/p>\n The Super Bowl is the closest thing the U.S. ad market has to a power ranking. Historically, the dominant Super Bowl advertisers have been CPG (Anheuser-Busch, P&G), automotive, telecom, and the occasional tech IPO splurge. Those brands were, almost without exception, holdco clients.<\/p>\n In 2026, roughly a quarter of Super Bowl ads were AI platforms. <\/span>The AI platforms are not holdco clients.<\/strong> They run their creative in-house, or with boutique production shops, or \u2014 increasingly \u2014 with AI-generated work made on their own models. They buy media programmatically, not through holdco media networks. <\/span>The holdcos do not sit in the middle of the largest emerging ad-spending category in television.<\/strong><\/p>\n The structural implication: if the next ten years of upper-funnel media growth is AI-platform brand-building (which it appears to be), the holdcos are not the gatekeepers to it. They are vendors at the periphery of it, hoping to win occasional production work that presently keeps smaller shops and prodco\u2019s busy. The platforms they used to mediate access to \u2014 Meta, Google, Amazon \u2014 are themselves now the buyers, building first-party creative pipelines.<\/p>\n This is the inversion that the trade press hasn\u2019t fully metabolized. Omnicom and Publicis can consolidate, cut costs, and ship AI-augmented creative all day. None of that changes the fact that the fastest-growing category of TV advertiser in 2026 doesn\u2019t need them.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n Here is the forward-looking call, stated with the appropriate disclaimers about forecasting in a market this turbulent<\/p>\n <\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n If you are a CMO at a top-50 global advertiser, your three-year planning horizon should assume your current holdco-of-record might not exist in its current form by 2028. Publicis is the safe play if you can stomach the price. Omnicom is the operational risk play (integration). Anyone else is, charitably, an option position on consolidation.<\/p>\n You are now in the media business; not as advertisers buying media, but as buyers competing with the holdcos for the relationships that <\/span>used to<\/em> sit between brand and consumer. The interesting question for 2027 is whether OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta start acquiring agencies, or whether they conclude that the agencies are the obsolete intermediary they\u2019re explicitly trying to sidestep.<\/span><\/p>\n They don\u2019t acquire the agencies. They hire <\/span>from<\/em> the agencies, build in-house, and let the holdcos shrink into the high-touch, high-craft, high-margin work that AI can\u2019t yet do. Which, by the way, is a real business. It\u2019s just a smaller one than the four current incumbents are built for.<\/span><\/p>\n The thesis here will hold for another 1\u20132 quarters; after that, Dentsu\u2019s strategic review concludes and the next domino falls. It is opinion and satire. I could be wrong. So could a lot of people.<\/p>\n Adweek \u2014 \u201cWPP Revenue Falls 8.9% as CEO Cindy Rose Opts Out of Q1 Earnings Call\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n StockInvest.us \/ WPP plc price data \u2014 TTM decline approximately 51%<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Campaign US \u2014 \u201cPublicis hits 4.5% Q1 growth as Sadoun rejects rivals\u2019 \u2018squeeze\u2019 tactics\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Adweek \u2014 \u201cOmnicom to Cut 4,000 Jobs, Retire FCB, DDB, and MullenLowe\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Indian Television \/ COMvergence \u2014 Publicis Media tops 2025 global new business rankings with $10B<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Adweek \u2014 \u201cArthur Sadoun Won\u2019t \u2018Squeeze to Please Wall Street\u2019 in the Age of AI\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n The Drum \u2014 Coca-Cola\u2019s $700m N.A. media account moves to Publicis (March 2025)<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Social Samosa \u2014 Publicis Groupe bags Mars\u2019 $1.7B global media account, ends WPP\u2019s run<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n eMarketer \u2014 \u201cWPP hits Publicis over ad quality after losing $1.7 billion Mars account\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n MM+M \u2014 \u201cWPP stock plunges 16% to lowest level since 1998 after fresh Q3 downgrade\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Yahoo Finance \u2014 \u201cWPP\u2019s earnings have declined over three years, contributing to shareholders 60% loss\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Marketing Dive \u2014 WPP turnaround \/ Elevate28 progress<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Storyboard18 \u2014 WPP shareholders approve Rose\u2019s $14.8M pay despite 25% opposition<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n BW Marketing World \u2014 WPP pushes global salary reviews under Rose\u2019s transformation plan<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Digiday \u2014 \u201cWPP\u2019s \u2018unacceptable\u2019 results show scale of turnaround challenge\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n Adweek \u2014 \u201cWPP Media Begins Layoffs After GroupM Rebrand\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n<\/picture><\/div>\n\n