Future of Marketing Briefing: Advertisers have more ways than ever to choose a holdco, and free holdcos to choose from

Read together, the comments describe a pitch that’s changing at the top of the market. Whether it’s on notice, though, is a question for a few more quarters if not years if not years. For now, what’s clear is that some of the biggest advertisers have stopped treating the year-long, seven-figure slog of diary wrangling and internal politics as the default route to choosing a holdco.

Coca-Cola had two holdcos competing to spend its media dollars in North America. PepsiCo moved its global media account in September without a pitch. Dyson ran the rule over all the three holdco heavyweights at the start of the year before settling on Omnicom. Jaguar Land Rover went looking for a single holdco that could build it a bespoke, end-to-end unit to run creative, media and production under one roof. 

“Clients are being proactive at thinking about what they want to own,” said David Muldoon as global managing director of marketing transformation at media management firm Ebiquity. “We’re working with clients three, four, sometimes even five, months in advance of a pitch process to ensure that they have that clarity before going to an agency.”

That homework matters more now in a market that’s been rearranged this thoroughly. Omnicom swallowed IPG. Publicis has the momentum and makes sure everyone knows it. WPP is mid-rebuild. Dentsu and Havas have gone more regional, and the independents finally get taken seriously. All of which makes the year-long beauty contest an increasingly expensive way to confirm a hunch. 

Coca-Cola’s North American media review is a case in point. The account came loose in Septemer after Publicis took PepsiCo’s global media, barely 18 months after winning Coca-Cola’s North American business from WPP. WPP sat the review out, which left Omnicom and Dentsu to fight over it. Omnicom came out on top. A field this small means clients often know where they’re leaning before the first meeting. 

Sadoun got at this on his company’s earnings call earlier this month: “We see an increasing number of clients who know exactly what they want for their business, and actually truly understand the difference between the three of us.” 

One media director knows the cost first-hand. They ran a pitch earlier this year with every holdco in contention and it ate the best part of 12 months. Logistics swallowed much of that. Briefs had to be stage-gated, contracts sent over and a law firm brought in. And somebody had to build a scorecard and then referee the arguments over it. Just getting 10 people into one holdco meeting meant working around holidays and the school half term. “Like just life,” the exec said.

After all that effort, the holdcos didn’t look all that different. 

“For me, they’re really similar,” said the exec, “It came down to fine margins.”

That left the decision to a short checklist. A holdco had to be commercially viable, for starters. Its service had to stand apart from the rest and the people on the account had to be good. Then came the integration last, which is whether media, creative and everything else work as one operation or just a shared logo.

Fine margins like these make for an awkward basis on which to uproot a media account. In the past, plenty of advertisers did it anyway, switching holdcos on the hope that a new name on the door would bring something the old couldn’t. That bet looks shakier when the names on the door are this alike. So the biggest clients have turned the exercise around and now start with their own horse, deciding what they want to run themselves and what they need an agency for. 

“Now what’s changed is that clients are actually looking inside their own organizations and looking at two things: what do they want to own and how can they be more integrated and more set up for success themselves,” said Muldoon. 

A long look in the mirror doesn’t always end with an agency review, though. 

Clients often come into the process, undecided, sources said, and work through the options with their pitch consultants before picking one. A closed pitch is one route. Staying put is another and so is going to the open market or splitting the business between a couple of agencies by capability or geography. Having that many routes on the table is the new part and clients seem happy to keep them open. For some, the decision gets made for them. A brand whose rival already sits at one of the big three has only two global groups left to consider and if it’s already at one of those there’s nowhere much left to go. So it doesn’t review at all. 

Those that do take the closed route save less time than they might expect. The capability assessment is shorter, said Muldoon, but the “negotiation is just as long”.

Anyone writing the pitch’s obituary might want to hold off. Pitch management firms are busier than ever running reviews and 2027 is shaping up to keep them that way with a wave of launches expected as soon as the first quarter.

Because, ultimately, a full review does something a closed process can’t. It puts a price on the market. For a big advertiser that has to prove it got the best terms going, that proof is worth a lot, and plenty of businesses aren’t organized well enough to skip the exercise and still sleep at night, The process also works as a stick. Advertisers with no plans to leave their incumbent will still call a review to wring better terms and a sharper operating model out of the agency they already have. 

What we’ve heard

“We are, in fact, most focused on scaling Muse, both in terms of growth and adoption and also features. And there’s a long list on the roadmap ahead of us to really get the flywheel going with Muse. So that’s our first and foremost focus. And I think Mark outlined [on a podcast] the primary ways that we are thinking about Muse monetization today. I wouldn’t rule out advertising. But, again, we are really focused on driving consumer adoption and getting the data flywheel going as our first priority.”

— Meta’s CFO Susan Li during Meta’s earnings call this week, when asked about how Meta is planning to monetize Muse.

Numbers to know

51%: Percentage of U.S. digital shoppers haven’t bought products through an AI platform like ChatGPT or Google Gemini and aren’t interested in doing so

$2.7 billion: Netflix’s revised full-year 2026 ad revenue forecast (down from its previous target of $3 billion)

$200: The average purchase price of of people using Meta’s Muse for shopping

306 million: Total premium subscribers to Spotify in Q3 2026

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