The Grand Irony: Agencies That Built Brands, Forgot to Build For Themselves
Despite being the original architects of global brands, advertising holding companies are collapsing in market value because they still sell human hours while the world now rewards scalable, self-learning systems.
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In an irony that’s almost poetic, the S&P 500 is up more than 13 percent this year , yet every major advertising holding company is in the red.
WPP has lost more than half its value. Dentsu has slid and its non Japan businesses are up for sale. Omnicom and Interpublic remain mired in decline. Even Publicis, the strongest performer, is not being rewarded by the market.
The world’s great brand-builders, it seems, cannot build their own value narrative.
This divergence tells a larger story than quarterly earnings. It reveals an industry that once defined smart business engineering but now struggles to define itself.
For decades, advertising was capitalism’s conscience and its chorus.
This was the culture creation headquarters. The place where commerce met culture, where human desire was translated into narrative form.
To sell a product was to script the dream. Today, the dreamers themselves are out of favour.
The Age of Aggregation
Marion Harper Jr. (1916–1989) was a transformative figure in the advertising industry, best known for founding the Interpublic Group of Companies (IPG), the world’s first advertising holding company.
But , in the current sense, the holding companies were born in an age of consolidation. In the late 20th century, as global brands expanded and media splintered, agencies merged to offer “integration” in the form of one-stop shops that promised strategic consistency across continents.
WPP under Martin Sorrell led the charge, buying up storied creative houses and media networks. Omnicom and Interpublic followed. Dentsu and Publicis sought to blend East and West, art and analytics.
For a time, it worked. The holding model brought economies of scale, negotiated media discounts, and allowed for global client management. Creativity, though financialized, still retained its mystique. The agency was both artisan and oracle. If tech companies coded the future, agencies narrated it.
But immanent in every structure lies its own limits. The holding companies built empires on a service model and they sold hours, not IP.
Their value lay in relationships and reputations, not in products that compounded. When the world shifted from manufacturing to platforms, from linear growth to network effects, their architecture froze in an earlier age. Visionaries build grand structures, bureaucracies make knowledge of the maze their specialty.
The Great Plateau
Then came the shock of technology.
Google and Facebook rewired the economics of marketing. Amazon turned customer intent into data. The algorithm replaced the art director as the engine of efficiency. In the process, the very physics of value creation changed. Tech firms built systems that scaled without human friction; agencies expanded only by adding more humans.
At the same time, the moral contract between client and agency weakened globally, the corporate world also saw a power shift. The CMO’s influence waned, the CFO’s shadow lengthened, and procurement replaced partnership.
Advertising became a cost centre, not a value creator.
The promise of long-term brand building gave way to the tyranny of quarterly metrics be it clicks, conversions or cost per acquisition.
When storytelling lost its time horizon, creativity lost its sanctuary.
Meanwhile, clients built in-house teams, consulting firms entered the arena, and the best creative minds defected to technology or start-ups. Agencies, once the temples of imagination, became service corridors in a procurement spreadsheet.
The Market’s Verdict
The numbers are devastating in their symmetry. The combined market capitalisation of the major holding companies viz WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Interpublic, and Dentsu — scarcely equals that of a mid-tier tech firm such as Adobe or Salesforce.
Put TOGETHER, they are worth less than a single data infrastructure company like Snowflake.
The market, in its cold rationality, is delivering a clear verdict - “value belongs to what compounds.”
Tech companies create things that learn, scale, and improve even while their creators sleep. Agencies create things that fade with the campaign cycle. Code compounds; decks decay. Platforms accrue data; PowerPoints age.
That is why the market rewards software and punishes services. The difference is not sentiment ,it’s physics.
The Poverty of Imagination
The tragedy is not that advertising is dying; it is that it has stopped imagining itself.
In a world drunk on metrics, agencies remain sober but joyless. Their presentations are filled with dashboards but devoid of daring.
They speak of “integration,” yet operate in silos. They celebrate “creativity,” yet outsource invention to others.
For all their talk of transformation, few have built proprietary creative systems, data products, or automation tools that can scale across clients.
Most still sell time, not technology. They value presence, not performance. Their business model has become their blind spot.
The industry that once taught the world to differentiate has itself become ,largely, undifferentiated.
A Deeper Lesson On How Value Now Works
Every era has its logic of value creation.
The industrial age prized efficiency The information age prizes scalability. The algorithmic age prizes self-learning systems
Cloud capital is about entities that grow by being used.
The great holding companies were built on the first principle but never evolved into the latter. They built empires of manpower, not memory.
They invested in networks of offices, not networks of data.
In contrast, the tech companies built architectures of learning and disintermediation followed. Each ad impression feeds the next algorithm. Each user click makes the system smarter.
Their growth was recursive, not linear. That is the difference between a service and a system.
That's what I call the physics of economics.
From Service to System
The irony is painful yet instructive.
Advertising once told the story of capitalism. Cut to now, capitalism tells the story of advertising. The path forward is not nostalgia but reinvention. It demands and deserves a rediscovery of creative purpose through product thinking.
Agencies must stop renting their genius and start owning their systems. They must build reusable creative IP, modular storytelling engines, proprietary data frameworks, and collaborative AI tools that allow creativity to compound.
In other words, they must start thinking like the companies they once advised.
The future of the industry will not be written in billable hours.
The future of the industry will be written in scalable ideas.
It lies in frameworks that learn, design systems that endure, and platforms that turn creativity into capital. Epilogue
The advertising holding company was once a metaphor for the modern world one that is rational, global and integrated.
Today it stands as a relic of linear thinking in an exponential age.
To endure, it must remember what it once taught others namely that relevance is earned not by what you sell, but by what you make of what you sell.
The market does not hate creativity.
It merely rewards those who build things that grow.
Until the storytellers learn to build systems that sustain their own story, their charts will keep telling the same tale.
Agencies that built the world’s greatest brands, forgot to build themselves.
Shubhranshu Singh is a business leader, cultural strategist, and columnist. He was honoured as one of the 50 most influential global CMOs for 2025 by Forbes and serves on the board of the Effie LIONS Foundation.
