Although it’s safe to predict that a good portion of the expected crush of mergers and acquisitions in the agency landscape will happen in the U.S., recent signals point toward consolidation and scale-seeking on a global level.

And not just by the major holding companies either — although last week brought news that Publicis bought a Brazilian influencer marketing firm (see Antoinette Siu’s story below in Speed Reading) while Havas bought an Argentinian creative shop.

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Much has been written in the last year about how principal media has grown in use among major holding company agencies — and how little clients seem to know about the practice. Even though it’s been going on for years, the topic has grabbed headlines as it has had a significant role in profit generation for some of the leading holding companies.

One overlooked aspect — but symbolically important — is the increasing avoidance of the word “agency” in contracts being struck between those agencies and clients, according to five people who spoke to Digiday for this story.

The pursuit of principal media has ended up affecting how holding company agencies draft contracts with sizable clients, said Steve Boehler, who runs agency consultancy Mercer Island Group. Agencies that buy inventory directly from media sellers, then sell that inventory to its clients, are in effect no longer working as agents for those clients, he and many others argue.

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Less than two full months into 2025 — and with something like four to six months before its acquisition by Omnicom is consummated (if it’s consummated) — Interpublic Group is experiencing challenges on an almost-unprecedented level. But the payoff in the end could be worth the trouble, since a merged company would easily be the biggest purveyor of principal media, which regardless of one’s opinions on the ethics of the practice, can make a holding company a lot of money.

Here’s a walk-through of those challenges and opportunities IPG has in store. 

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This is a story about how generative AI helped a media agency CEO do the job of several people over the course of a few days.

It’s the experience that Dave Gaines, the CEO of Media By Mother, had when he was asked to deliver an RFI, which led to an RFP, for a global multinational client — just as the December holiday break was starting. Gaines declined to name the client, but it was a sizable pitch that would ordinarily take a team of people at least a few days if not weeks to assemble.

“AI in particular is forcing some changes that are necessary for all of us,” Gaines told Digiday. “AI is going to fundamentally reshape what it costs us to ask a question. Because sometimes, a client asks a question and it triggers six or seven people having to sit down and work out what the answer is. And that’s not necessary.”

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We may have just finished football season with a blowout Super Bowl, but women’s sports is where the real competition is at — at least from an ad marketplace point of view.

Publicis Media just this morning announced it’s launching a dedicated women’s sports investment unit within Publicis Sports, called Women’s Sports Connect (WSC). Targeting what it sees as a $1.28 billion marketplace, WSC will be active in media, content, sponsorships, influencer, and events at collegiate (such as NIL opportunities) and professional levels.

In an announcement that went public earlier today, Publicis Sports and WSC said it’s already made several investments, including a partnership with Disney Advertising (ostensibly to access ESPN inventory), in Women’s Sports Now, a weekly talk series from Roku, and a student-athlete program developed by NBCUniversal Local’s Sports Partnership Development team and sports media brand The GIST.

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As generative AI wends its way deeper into the corners of the agency world, companies are making moves to own their own IP buildups and buildouts. Take CourtAvenue (CA), which Digiday has learned acquired a majority stake in Ukrainian AI bot firm Bots Crew, which sets up custom conversational AI solutions for enterprises, aka bot-driven chat functions, for a range of companies. 

Bots Crew has helped to service a handful of CourtAvenue’s clients — as well as the agency’s internal bot functions — over the last 18 months, said Kenny Tomlin, CourtAvenue’s co-founder and partner. Their working relationship organically led to the acquisition, terms of which neither Tomlin nor Nazar Hembara, Bots Crew’s co-founder, would disclose. It’s estimated that the acquisition runs in the tens of millions of dollars.

Working mostly with U.S.-based clients including City of Chicago, Rutgers University and genetic testing company Natera, Bots Crew will be housed in the CourtAvenue Collective, an umbrella for the various companies it owns. The eight-year-old tech firm will remain standalone and continue to be run out of the Ukraine by its three co-founders, Hembara as well as CTO Oleh Pylypchak and CMO Max Gladysh. 

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As 2024 financial results start to trickle in over the month of February, the two leading agency holding companies’ numbers are out, and their results tell a variety of stories. But the bottom line takeaway, which really has little to do with the actual results, is this: The big will continue to get bigger, no matter the price.

And any client that isn’t a multinational advertiser spending at least half a billion in media spend is unlikely to get the attention it will want from those holdcos — a truth that has independents and smaller holdcos licking their chops at what they hope will be a windfall of client defectors from the giants.

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Consolidation may be happening at the holding company level, between Omnicom’s planned purchase of IPG, and Publicis’ latest acquisition wave (just last week it moved to buy Australian/New Zealand agency Atomic 212). But it’s also happening at a level that plans to take advantage of the thousands of midsized marketers that will be overlooked by the new class of media agency behemoths.

Digiday has learned that PlusMedia, a direct response agency, and Cage Point, an omnichannel media agency, are merging to form Mile Marker, a media agency that specializes in middle-market brands that are looking to grow. 

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The world of audio hasn’t exactly been a hotbed of innovation and wild growth, despite the ubiquity of streaming audio and podcasting — two areas that have enjoyed a steady climb in ad revenue since the pandemic. Terrestrial radio represents the audio equivalent of linear TV in its slow backward roll in ad-revenue generation, despite surprisingly consistent audience numbers over the years.

Well, turn up the volume, because there are actually innovations happening in audio investment that are likely to help all manner of advertisers — but especially small local advertisers — bump up their spend in the sector. 

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Whether on a large scale or small — in this case, medium sized — consolidation continues apace in the media agency world, following tectonic changes at the end of last year.

GroupM continued to centralize its operations at a global corporate level, with global CEOs of the brands taking on company-wide roles — at least those who haven’t already left the company. 

Although one internal executive insists it’s not the beginning of the end of the individual brand names within GroupM — Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom — the moves indicate a simplification that more easily enables client-centric mini-shops to get crafted where needed, sometimes across agency brands. GroupM declined to comment on the record.

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They say the only constant is change, and that couldn’t be more true of the 2025 national advertising marketplace, as the U.S. experiences a new administration that seems both familiar and uncertain, and as major platforms’ and publishers’ futures adopt new stances or hang in the balance. 

Meantime, a mini-version of musical chairs has beset the national investment teams at a handful of holding companies — the latest change at GroupM, where Matt Sweeney is leaving his post as U.S. chief investment officer. GroupM didn’t respond to requests for information about Sweeney’s replacement. 

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Once the U.S. presidential election was decided on Nov. 5, 2024, with former president Donald Trump defeating vice president Kamala Harris — an election that was certified only a week ago without attempts to overthrow the government, thankfully — there was little doubt the country’s mindset would shift somewhat rightward. 

That shift took a decisive and intentional lurch rightward last week with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announcing he was dismantling the company’s fact-checking apparatus in favor of X’s approach to content moderation — community notes. The move, because it aligns with X owner Elon Musk, was largely interpreted as a means of currying favor with the incoming administration — which, it’s fair to say, Musk helped usher into power more than any single person or entity in the last year. Whether that’s true or not remains in the eye of the beholder.

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No one doubts that 2025 is going to be a fasten-your-seatbelt kind of year.

A new (but also not-so-new) president known to shake up norms, an expected deregulatory environment, but one that generally discourages pro-social initiatives and generative AI adapting and getting more powerful with each new iteration — the latest buzzword being “agentic” AI. 

So what’s in store for the media agency world? A lot, it would seem. For one, the mid-December news that Omnicom moved to acquire Interpublic Group has observers and analysts thinking it’s bound to set off a wave of acquisition and consolidation among the other agency holding companies — at least most of them. Scenarios usually involve WPP, which has been the largest global holdco, or Havas, which has just spun out from parent Vivendi, making it a much easier acquisition target now. 

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Wrapping up its search-related string of partner deals announced at CES this week, Digiday has learned that Omnicom Media Group has secured access to Roku’s viewer searches on the streaming platform in order to help guide clients better fine-tune their investments and messaging across the CTV space.  

As with all its other partnerships this week — with Google, with Amazon Ads and with TikTok — Omni, the parent company’s central operating platform, will play a major role in the first-to-market deal. Brand-specific audiences created within Omni get sent to Roku’s clean room to get layered with Roku’s anonymized and aggregated search data. It includes data on the most searched programs, content categories, genres and performers. 

Say a consumer searches for Hugh Jackman. Those results will likely yield as much song-and-dance films like The Greatest Showman or time-travel works like Kate & Leopold as it will Wolverine films. That immediately opens the door to insights that can inform spend and content decisioning from sponsorships, tailored creative messaging or even contextual optimization. 

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TikTok may be facing a potential existential crisis here in the U.S., as a Jan. 19 deadline approaches which could possibly see it shut down or sold to another company.

But that’s not stopping Omnicom Media Group from expanding its partnership with the popular social video platform, as the holding company focuses on a series of search-related moves during CES this week. 

Does Omnicom Media Group know something about TikTok’s future that the rest of the world seemingly doesn’t? If so, it’s not saying, as OMG executives declined to comment on TikTok’s impending status, except for chief product officer Megan Pagliuca acknowledging the agency network is “closely monitoring the situation. The way we’re working with them is business as usual. The consumers are still there.” 

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Omnicom continued to focus on advances and changes in search during CES this week, announcing a partnership with Amazon Ads and Omnicom’s Flywheel unit that enables access to five years of purchase data — a move Amazon is announcing today for its Amazon Marketing Cloud clean-room solution, and an expansion from the current 13 months of data.

The deal gives Omnicom Media Group and Flywheel first-to-market access in the U.S. to the expanded data, with the goal to extend it globally. Again, much of the flow of information will also run through Omnicom’s operating platform Omni, as it did with Omnicom’s announced search deal with Google yesterday.

Via a beta test, Flywheel customers are able to access five years of purchase history to see how consumers’ purchase habits and conversions have evolved or changed in that time, which allows brands to adjust their strategies accordingly.

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As it has done at most major media tentpole events the last few years, Omnicom and its media arm, Omnicom Media Group, will take advantage of the attention around the Consumer Electronics Show this week in Las Vegas to unveil a series of partnerships with major platforms.

This year’s focus for OMG going into CES revolves around search — given the research the company conducted in late 2024 that reveals just how much search is changing.

The first of four partnerships, Digiday has learned, is with Google — the granddaddy of search. OMG and Google have struck a two-pronged partnership that starts with a planning tool and ends with AI-driven agentic support for investment and creative decisions for search-driven efforts.

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Both a boon of opportunity but also the bane of most media folk that have to immediately snap out of holiday mode and head to Las Vegas, CES is again upon us. With each passing year, CES becomes a more important staging area for agencies and ad-tech firms to not only learn what’s just around the corner but also to showcase what they’ve assembled. 

Tech, in its various guises, is rapidly becoming a differentiator among both holding companies and independent media agencies alike. And tech is what’s helped power French agency holding company Publicis to the forefront of its holdco brethren — at least by the gauge of financial results and stock performance. 

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Have you ever planned a vacation using just TikTok to search your destination(s)? That’s more common these days than it used to be, thanks to the changing habits of consumers, who spend more time on social platforms or engaging with influencers.

According to new research coming out of Omnicom Media Group — aptly called The Future of Search — search has essentially evolved from a channel to a behavior, thanks to some of the above consumer adaptations as well as advances in AI and algorithmic application of content across the social sphere. 

Joanna O’Connell, Omnicom Media Group’s chief intelligence officer for North America, spearheaded the research but assembled a variety of team members from influencer shop Creo, cultural specialists Sparks & Honey, commerce shop Flywheel as well as design and research departments. S&H even did a Boolean query to see the latest cultural chatter on the topic. 

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Judging from the reaction to the news of Omnicom’s planned acquisition of Interpublic Group near the end of 2024, there’s a strong expectation that 2025 will see the biggest of the agency groups get bigger. Size and scale will be vital for them to compete with each other.

But getting so large means seeking out the largest multi-national marketers that need that global heft to execute their media — the P&Gs, Coca-Cola’s and General Motors of the marketing world. Together they make up a large swath of media spend. 

And that leaves a whole world of smaller and mid-sized marketers left on the sidelines of the holdco game — the “Forgotten Middle,” as one independent media agency CEO coined it — and looking for agencies that will bring them their A teams and innovative solutions.

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