Platform aspirations, legacy limitations: the agency holdco dilemma 

But the idea that they’re about to shed their old-school holding company identity? Wishful thinking. Still, it’s a myth that just won’t die, enthusiastically recycled by holding company CEOs for years.

Earlier this month (December 9), it made another comeback with the announcement of Omnicom’s plan to acquire IPG. To win over the market, both CEOs leaned heavily on the “agency as a platform” narrative, pitching their proposed mega-group as a platform. They talked up the need to embrace software-as-a- service-like features and stressed the importance of building tools, framing the merger as a game-changing comprehensive marketing platform.

The vision: better client outcomes through tech and data integration, accelerated innovation and top tier services. The reality: a shiny rebrand of business as usual

This might sound harsh — after all, neither CEO has had a chance to prove the plan. But the skepticism is rooted in a long history of broken promises and hollow visions from the holdco c-suite.  

Investors seem to agree. 

Omnicom’ stock dropped 10.47% in the week since the deal was first reported. True, IPG’s stock has fared better (up 10%), but that rise feels more like a nod to its standalone prospects than a vote of confidence in the merger’s transformative value. 

“Agencies as a platform business is a buzzy thing to say, but there isn’t a standard definition of that phrase,” said Joe Maglio, CEO of digital creative agency Barbarian and president of Cheil North America.

And there’s the rub.

“Agencies as a platform” feels more like a myth — vague, overhyped and rarely tethered to reality. Yet the myth endures, fuelled by the tension between aspiration and obligation of holding company CEOs. They dream of being innovators, but they’re shackled by the demands of running publicly traded companies: chasing scale, appeasing shareholders and hitting quarterly targets. In trying to be everything — innovative yet predictable — they end up stuck in the middle, selling stories that don’t quite hold up.

Tough business to be in when you’re fighting for ad dollars.

Take GroupM, for instance. Its platform play leans heavily on media buying clout, but it’s still more pipe than platform. Havas talks integration between data and content but hasn’t meaningfully differentiated itself from traditional agency models. And Dentsu? The company leans hard into its consulting and tech credentials, but still struggles to escape its agency roots. 

There are outliers, of course. 

Publicis Groupe stands out as the most credible contender. While still far from perfect, the group has pushed its platform narrative further than most, investing heavily in technology and data through moves like its acquisition of Epsilon and its “Power of One” model. Even its critics admit it’s closer than others to making the myth a reality. 

“Publicis has done a fine job of making Epsilon and its tech business a focal point of the narrative around its success,” said Charles Ping, managing director at Winterberry Group. “How integrated it actually is with the wider agency proposition remains to be seen, but it’s clear they’re able to show that they have a media and data collection view of the world that some of their counterparts are trying to do with varying degrees of success.”

Yet, Publicis remains rooted to the foundational elements of the ad industry: media billions and creative services. Data and technology, encapsulating its more platform-like offerings such as Epsilon and Publicis Sapient, accounted for a third of the group’s revenue last year. Impressive? Sure. But not transformative. Publicis, like its peers, is still navigating the gap between platform potential and legacy reality. And the gap remains vast. 

To grasp how wide that delta is, compare Publicis’ performance to Accenture Song’s. The consulting firm’s advertising arm generated $19 billion in revenue for its fiscal year 2024, a 7% increase from the previous year. Publicis, on the other hand, reported €10.1 billion in revenue ($10.5 billion) for the first nine months of 2024. The contrast is stark and underscores just how far traditional holding companies still have to go. 

The gap looks even starker when looking at Accenture Song’s ability to leverage technology as a growth driver. Generative AI, for instance, accounted for $3 billion in booking during Accenture’s last fiscal year, signalling its future revenue potential. These bookings represent not just interest but commitments to large-scale projects — a testament to Accenture’s ability to secure transformative opportunities. 

For holding companies still entrenched in legacy structures, the takeaway is clear: transformation requires more than ambition or rebranding. It demands a complete overhaul of the business mode. Accenture’s success with generative AI shows what’s possible — and underscores just how far traditional agencies still have to go. 

Here’s the fundamental difference, according to Jared Belsky, CEO of independent agency Acadia. Platforms work because they’re scalable, repeatable, and uniform. Everything they do is collated, quantified and underpinned by self-service software, he continued. That’s what scales efficiently. 

Agencies, on the other hand, don’t operate this yet — not in any meaningful sense. Their work is anything but repetitive. If anything, it depends on individual briefs, account directors and ad hoc teams, resulting in a billion different ways to answer the same brief. Scalability relies on adding headcount, Uniformity? Rarely. And self-service? It doesn’t exist. 

To achieve all of this — scalability, repeatability, uniformity and self-service — agencies would need to break away from the very practices they were built on. The question is can they? Or are they too entrenched in legacy habits to evolve into something new? So far, the answer leans toward the latter. 

Belsky outlines three fundamental shits agencies need to make to even a approach a platform model:

Hire consultant-like executives: Agencies can’t change if their leaders don’t think in a more process-oriented way.

Reduce headcount: Being more process-driven means relying on systems and technology rather than sprawling teams, which will require a mindset shift across the industry. 

Redefine the industry’s DNA: Agencies must move beyond their brief-centric, improvised nature to embrace scalable, tech-enabled solutions that deliver consistent results.

Bottom line: For agencies, breaking the platform myth isn’t just about ambition, it’s about redefining everything they do. 

“If agencies want to be a platform then they have to make themselves unavoidable, and the only way they can realistically do that now is arguably through principle-based media,” said Chris Novak Chief Operating Officer at media consulting firm Eden Collective.