‘The tide has turned’: Why the era of the Madison Avenue holding company is on its way out

Is it time to ring the death knell for the holding company model?

It’d be easy to think so. Last month, as WPP revealed restructuring plans, CEO Cindy Rose stated that WPP was “no longer a holding company.” Instead, WPP will be a single operating company with four divisions: WPP Media, WPP Production, WPP Enterprise Solutions, and WPP Creative.

WPP isn’t alone. Consolidating and retooling the holdco operating model is in line with a broader ongoing makeover of Madison Avenue. Rather than continue with the traditional financial structure, where a collection of agencies operate (mostly) independently under one roof, the major advertising firms have instead signaled an interest in combining sister agencies and retiring storied industry brands as they hunt for efficiencies and cost savings.

“The tide has turned on [the holding company] model decidedly, because of the performance that they’re putting up and the reaction that the financial markets are having to it,” Jay Pattisall, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, told Marketing Brew. “Most are pursuing some sort of advancement in their [profit and loss] and in their structures. Lots of consolidation. Lots of headcount reduction.”

But the pursuit of a new model is, well, complicated—and time-consuming.

Publicis led the charge

Many recent transformation efforts from industry giants like WPP, Dentsu, and the new Omnicom behemoth follow in the footsteps of Publicis Groupe, which carved a path to operate as “one” more than a decade ago. But it’s a task that’s often easier said than done.

“It is a very big job to turn a financial holding company into a single company like Publicis,” Michael Farmer, chairman and CEO of strategic consultancy Farmer & Company, told us. “They took 10 years to do it, and they were really strong-minded about the agencies. They moved them into the same headquarters. They downgraded the role of chief executive…Then they purely went to market as Publicis Groupe. They didn’t go to market as Publicis, a holding company relationship that gives you Saatchi & Saatchi or Leo Burnett…it’s a very top-down-driven company.”

Publicis is the farthest along in its transition from a financial holdco to a single operating company model, and in the fourth quarter of 2025, Publicis reported 5.9% organic growth. The other firms, meanwhile, are in the thick of their transformations, focused on reorganization that supports going to market today while attempting to please Wall Street. Omnicom and WPP used recent earnings calls to outline their plans for job cuts and restructures, while Dentsu, which reported a loss, unveiled an executive shake-up.

Amid the changes, few have been as clear about the makeover as Publicis once was.

“I think that WPP and Omnicom are simply guilty of envy at Publicis’s performance, and they think the more that they can look like a single holding company, the more they can emulate what they’re doing,” Farmer said. “But Publicis has gone all the way. They don’t run like, ‘We’re a media company,’ ‘We’re a creative company,’ or ‘We own those assets.’ They’re acting like we are a single, integrated data and communications company that serves clients.”

A rose by any other name…

Instead of the holding company model disappearing entirely, then, the advertising industry may be in the midst of something its executives should be pros at: A rebrand.

Whether those rebrands will be successful will vary by the advertising firm and the ways in which those firms rework structures and offerings to the market. Until that real transformational work is complete, though, “it’s pure rhetoric to say, ‘We’re not holding a company,’” Farmer said.

Ken Robinson, co-founder and co-owner of search consultancy Ark Advisors, agreed. “It’s taxonomy,” he told us, noting that there was once also a time when being an agency, as opposed to an “ideas incubator,” was similarly out of vogue. “I don’t think the idea of holding companies is dead. I think the wording is.”

Robinson is optimistic about a future where, even as legacy brands are shuttered, there will be a need for new agency brands to emerge at the behest of clients. “Even though legacy agency brands may go away, there will be the birth of bespoke named client teams,” he said. “And frankly, agency names are going to come back.”

…would smell as sweet?

Greg Paull, president of global growth at marketing advisory MediaSense, said he sees the move from major industry players as part of an effort to manage the coming changes due to AI. “It’s a little bit of semantics,” he said. “But I think it’s also preparation for the AI age, because they’re moving more and more to platform-based activities. They’re going to move much more to subscription-based work. They’re going to move more to selling tools and not just talent.”

The need to rework the model and consequently, rebrand makes more sense when considering that the details of what major advertising firms are pitching and selling to the market is also changing.

“Someone gave me a quote yesterday, ‘T and M is talent and machines,’” Paull said. “It used to be ‘time and materials.’ I think you are going to see this idea of migration to a more AI-centric approach.”

That being said, all the remaking and defining of what these companies aren’t could lead to a muddled definition of what they are, which could be problematic in the quest for clients.

“We are literally hurting ourselves by not being clear and not taking a swim lane,” Lisa Colantuono, founder and CEO of search consultancy Agency Search Kaizen, said, noting that any lack of clarity leaves room for independents to take a piece of the pie.

“When you start to be all things to all people,” she said, “you become nothing.”