Agencies are consolidating and restructuring their business models to navigate technological and economic shifts. When Omnicom acquired IPG, it created a massive global ad holding company, triggering huge job cuts and agency brand partnerships.
By Hadi Khatib
For older generations who still reminisce about timeworn catchy magazine, billboard or TV ads that boasted trusted and established brands, they are more and more realizing that this sentimental past is gone forever. The “Marlboro Man” cigarette ads, Sprite’s “Obey your thirst” or “Ya-Hoo! Mountain Dew!” somehow had a natural, unfiltered, unsophisticated intonation that naturally resonated with audiences.
Much later, the world became absorbed by SEO and paid search to optimize algorithm traction. We are beyond all that. Generations Z, Alpha and Beta bear no resemblance to traditional audiences of yesteryears. The media marketing landscape in 2025 gave us a strong preview of what’s to come and what is expected to reach these audiences.
Where was the money?
WPP’s 2025 mid-year forecast projects $1.08 trillion in global ad revenue with 6 percent growth into 2026, lower than expectations, induced by the Trump Admin’s announced trade tariffs that impacted the sale prices of consumer products, cars, and technology items, among others.
One constant in 2025 was digital advertising, a principal driver that was expected to account for over 73 percent of spend, according to WPP.
WPP forecasts a 5.4 percent annual rate between 2026 and 2030.
User-generated content from platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram Reels represented over 50 percent of content-driven advertising revenue estimated at $185 billion last year.
Traditional formats are shrinking, prompting brands and agencies to reallocate resources toward high-growth media categories. The key remains to prove ROI with measurable outcomes.
AI Reshaping Marketing
AI could arguably be the single most disruptive force shaping 2026 in nearly every economic and social sector. Generative AI and automation are transforming creative production, targeting, measurement, and even agency roles themselves, according to Onclusive, a world leader in media intelligence.
Brand visibility is now more dependent on AI-optimized content than on traditional SEO or paid search.
Forrester’s 2026 predictions for marketing agencies find that automation and AI are accelerating workforce reductions across agencies. After an average 8 percent headcount cut in 2025, Forrester now forecasts a 15 percent reduction in 2026 as agencies pivot from selling services to selling solutions.
According to a recent Cornell study, AI ads outperformed human ads in 2025, and nearly 30 percent of participants chose AI content despite knowing its origin. “These findings demonstrate LLMs’ evolution in persuasive storytelling, with significant implications for advertising practice given their near-zero marginal cost and time requirements compared to human experts,” said the December 2025 study conducted by the university’s tech arm arXiv.
Evolving agency roles and models
Agencies are consolidating and restructuring their business models to navigate technological and economic shifts. When Omnicom acquired IPG, it created a massive global ad holding company, triggering huge job cuts and agency brand partnerships.
John Wren, CEO Omnicom commented: “Executives frame the integration of IPG as a way to achieve cost efficiencies and strategic reinvestment in technology and scale.”
According to Investing.com, Publicis reported outdoing competitors in 2025 thanks to investment in data, AI and targeted marketing. Arthur Sadoun, CEO of Publicis Groupe said: “Publicis sees continued growth through data and AI investments.”
What this means is that the agency of tomorrow will be more focused on delivering solutions, using strategic data, and providing AI-augmented services, than legacy production workflows.
GroupM’s leadership said via a media plan update in 2025 that its strategy emphasizes “predictive performance via multi-source data, a shift away from proprietary siloed datasets and toward data-driven decision models.”
Creator Economy: From niche to mainstream
A recent Business Insider (BI) report on Unilever’s 2025 influencer strategy quoted its CEO, Fernando Fernández, announcing a strategy to work with 20× more influencers and allocate up to 50 percent of its marketing budget to social creators.
A 2025 survey of 200 marketers by the influencer marketing agency Linqia found that 62 percent of respondents intended to increase their annual influencer budgets in 2026. According to BI, US advertiser spending on creators was expected to reach $37 billion in 2025, a 26 percent year-over-year increase.
According to Shopify, quoting Tomoson, a reliable resource for digital enthusiasts and entrepreneurs, businesses earn an average of $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing, with the top 13 percent of brands hitting $20 or more. Around 70 percent of businesses double their money, it said.
Creators and micro-influencers are now becoming core components of mainstream marketing strategy, shifting marketers’ spend toward creator collaborations rather than traditional billboard and broadcast advertising.
ROI Pressures
Forrester’s 2025 B2C marketing forecast reveals 64 percent of marketing executives expect 2026 to be more volatile than 2025, with concerns about pricing, privacy, measurement reliability, and tighter budgets.
In this sense, creative innovation starts to take a back seat, or at best, is equal in importance to marketing performance, business outcomes, and ROI measurement.
According to Bain & Company, many companies invest heavily in marketing technology but struggle to see results because of poor measurement or improper data integration.
This is the crucial hump to get over in 2026 and beyond.
