Future of Marketing Briefing: The holdcos long, awkward courtship of the C-suite

It started around 2008. Clients cut ad budgets the moment the economy wobbled, and the holdcos, badly exposed, went looking for a way into the boardroom. Some managed it. Sir Martin Sorreil made his name at WPP partly on his access to chief executives, and Mark Read kept a smaller version of that going after him. Sorrell’s great rival, Maurice Levy, worked edge same circuit for Publicis long before handing the job to Sadoun. Over at Omnicom, John Wren pulled the same trick, which goes some way to explaining how the group has held on to the likes of Apple and McDonald’s for so long. Still, those relationships tended to grow out of the CMO-holdco tie rather than any standing the holdcos had earned with the rest of the C-suite. 

Publicis, according to Sadoun, has found its way in. CEOs, he said, are “increasingly” involved in what the business does, mostly because they’re passionate about AI and need to understand it well enough to make the right calls. It doesn’t take much to work out who he has in mind for the tutoring. 

And why not? Few CMOs carry much weight with the rest of the C-suite, and most don’t last in the job long enough for an agency relationship to outlive the retainer. So the holdcos hedged. They spent years buying data companies and consulting shops to prove marketing could move the numbers a finance chief watches, and occasionally to catch the CEOs eye along the way. It only ever half worked. When a chief executive goes looking for outside counsel, the shortlist still tends to start with Accenture and Deloitte, whose boardroom relationships go back decades. 

That’s a completely different way of working for agencies. Consultancies are built to play the long game and their staff learn early that helping a client’s people get ahead, even with no fee attached, is how the bigger work eventually lands. Agencies grew up selling to a single buyer in the CMO, one brief at a time. For most of them, the reward for winning a pitch has been the chance to defend it at the next one. Unpicking the kind of loyalty a consultancy has spent decades building with a CEO will take holdcos a lot longer than a good AI pitch. 

“Agencies don’t typically have meaningful access to that level of the clients they work with. In packaged goods, they do, luxury is the same – because they are a pretty material part of the business,” said Brian Wieser, media analyst and author of the Madison and Wall newsletter. “What has struck me when I’ve seen it in the wild, is that it’s like a big deal for a an agency CEO to get to meet the CEO of a financial services company or an auto company where advertising and marketing is like a low single digit percentage of total activities.”

Get that meeting, though, and it can pay off handsomely. Sadoun said this week that Publicis Sapient helped land two of the year’s biggest accounts without a pitch. If CEOs can make reviews disappear, they’re the closest thing to a cheat code the agency business has seen in years. The theory is that a holdco gets through the technology door and the media and creative work follows. Getting that to compound is another matter. Sapient is the part of Publicis that’s shrinking — outside of the U.S. at least — down mid-single digits in the second quarter and still slipping slightly in the third. Transformation work is lumpy and can stall the moment clients get nervous, as delayed programs in the Gulf showed this year. The holdcos have also bled the senior people needed to hold the boardroom relationships together, sometimes by design and sometimes by accident. 

Then there’s the risk of getting exactly what they asked for. CEOs ask awkward questions for a living, and the holdco model has plenty worth asking about: data charges, tech fees folded into bundled deals and principal media, where the holdco buys inventory itself and sells it on at a margin clients don’t always see.

“All of that stuff doesn’t hold enough water for the rest of the C-suite,” said Steve Boehler, who runs consultancy Mercer Island Group. Pull those executives into the relationship and the holdocs will have “really smart people trying to look under the hood,” he said, who may be unable to see what they’re really buying.”

None of this means holdco bosses are wrong to covet CEOs. Boehler sees the push as part of a wider shift in what marketing covers, closer to the old four Ps of product, price, pace and promotion than to the advertising the agencies were built around. The holdco now has “at least on paper,” the capability to address the needs that “touch multiple people in that C-suite,” he said. That spreads the buying decision across more desks. The silos inside most big companies “have considerable power and influence,” said Boehler, so the CEO and CFO end up with a say in the pitches that used to sit with CMO, whether they show up in the room or not. He expects considerably more to happen before any of it sticks. The ambition itself, he said, is “a real intention” of the holdcos.

When it does stick, the marketers who used to own the relationship can find themselves on the outside of it. A senior marketer at one advertiser described a holdco deal that has run for several years with an agency the team likes. The trouble is that the holdco’s chief client officer has grown closer to the company’s C-suite. When the internal media buying team raises a complaint now, it struggles to get a hearing, because it’s no longer the agency’s main sponsor inside the business. 

Two decades spent trying to get past the CMO and the holdcos may find the CMO was the one relationship they couldn’t afford to lose. 

Billion Dollar Boy goes shopping

Billion Dollar Boy has bought something. The social marketing agency spent a decade building its business organically, so its acquisition of Creator Authority, a B2B creator marketing specialist with LinkedIn accreditation, marks a charge in habit. The deal also gives BDB more presence in LA and Austin. Thomas Walters, the agency’s chief innovation officer, said the firm spotted B2B marketing heating up 18 months ago and hinted that more deals are coming. The conversation that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Why B2B, and why now? 

Walters: We identified about 18 months ago that B2B marketing was heating up. Its shown promise for a ling time but hasn;t had the same rigor or professionalization, apart from specialists like Creator Authority. Spend is increasing and marketers are seeing very high ROI for B2B brands, even more markedly than B2C because it’s newer. Creator Authority was growing very quickly and dealing with some of the growing pains we went through as a younger business. We can support them through that. We’re very confident that with the combination of our global platform and Creator Authority’s special relationships, and LinkedIn accreditation,-that we can make a really serious mark in professionalizing and advancing the B2B creator marketing industry as a whole. 

How much do the two client bases overlap?

Walters: The client mix is different but there’s crossover. Microsoft, for example, is a client we share. Some businesses sell to other businesses, some sell directly to consumers and some do both. CMOs already work with a proliferation of agencies. Where a client has a B2B and B2C audience we can now offer a combined solution, which saves them managing different partners. 

Is this the start of more acquisitions?

Walters: Historically we’ve built things organically, whether that’s investing in creative tech or building direct access to creators. This is our first acquisition. Our long-term plan has strategic moves on it that we’re planning to make and the two approaches compound. As scopes get bigger and capability needs get wider we want to have solutions in market. 

Are the briefs changing as a result?

Walters: We’re seeing a creator way of thinking applied to more channels and more parts of the funnel than ever before. Creator content is supporting SEO and now AEO. Creators are being integrated intro branded entertainment and brand films. CMOs want partners that can work across that mix and we’ve been building against those changes for some time, from evolving Billion Dollar Boy into a social agency to creating our production arm about five years ago. 

Does calling a BDB a creator agency pigeonhole it?

Walters: Our mission is to transform how brands grow in a creator world. Billion Dollar Boy is a social agency with a creator instinct. We’ve delivered broad social copes for many years and creator fluency has always been in our DNA. In 2026 we;re in what we call social 3.0 where creators are the lifeblood of social media. If brands don;t understand that their advertising won;t engage audiences or drive impact. Many others in the social space are still operating with a social 2.0 mindset. 

Numbers to know

50.1%: Percentage of U.S. generative AI users that will use Google AI Mode over every other AI tool in 2030.

34%: Percentage of ad impressions on Instagram that came from Reels in Q3 2026.

$250 million: The estimated cost for Spotify’s latest multiyear licensing agreement with Joe Rogan.

$3.7 billion: eMarketer’s forecast for Netflix’s U.S. ad revenues in 2027

What we’re reading

A YouTube test brought creator analytics directly into brands’ YouTube Studio dashboards

YouTube briefly tested a “Channel Search” tab that let a handful of brand channels see opted-in creators’ audience analytics right inside YouTube Studio, to help with sponsorship scouting. YouTube says it’s strictly for brands, not a way for creators to snoop on rivals, per Tube Filter.

Meta Bans TikTok From Advertising on Its Apps in Escalating Feud

Meta has banned ads from ByteDance and any campaigns linking to TikTok across the U.S. and six other markets, calling it normal practice to refuse a competitor’s promotion, according to Bloomberg. It’s the latest escalation in a feud sharpened by Meta’s $18 billion child-safety settlement, which it’s been pressuring TikTok to match.

Trump Vowed to Wall Off TikTok From China. Did He?

Nine months after TikTok’s U.S. spin-off closed, employees say little has changed. Staff still collaborate closely with the global company on ByteDance-built tools raising doubts about how real the separation is. With Washington now focused more on child safety than China, those questions have been postponed rather than answered, per Politico.

TikTok’s CEO and a Microsoft executive warned that AI hype is outpacing the technology’s reality

TikTok CEO Shou Chew and Microsoft’s Judson Althoff both said in Singapore that AI hype has run ahead of what the technology can actually do, noting humans still beat it in key areas and that cybersecurity is the more pressing risk, according to Quartz.

What we’ve covered

‘An important capability for us’: PepsiCo CEO on Publicis switch

PepsiCo CEO Ramon Laguarta used an investor call to champion moving its roughly $1.9 billion global media account from Omnicom to Publicis without a review. He framed it as a data capability rather than an agency relationship, and signalled more marketing investment to revive flagging North American values.

Inside Dentsu’s plan to make entertainment a part of every brand’s budget

Dentsu wants branded entertainment to be a core budget line rather than an innovation side project, and its backing that by investing in productions like Angry Birds 3 so clients get first dibs on integrations. Cheaper creator-led formats like microdramas have made the pitch much easier to land.

Ikea’s CMO sees LLMs as the newest place a brand has to hold its line

Ikea’s CMO Vincenzo Riili argues that because LLMs draw on everything written about a company, from ads to annual reports, a consistent brand matters more than ever. AI should distribute a brand, not create it, and brands with muddled propositions will suffer when models can’t tell what they stand for.

Welcome to Creator University: Inside the colleges building creator economy programs

Universities such as Arizona State, Stanford and Syracuse are launching creator economy degrees, courses and research centres as the industry matures. The focus isn’t only on training on-camera talent, but also the strategists, marketers and operators behind them.