With the merger or Omnicom-IPG and WPP’s media arm seeing massive restructuring, the industry is undergoing significant change. 

Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) is the industry’s largest consolidation yet, creating the world’s biggest advertising holding company by market share and revenue. The rebranding of GroupM as WPP Media is part of a significant AI-driven strategic overhaul in May 2025, and was followed by top leadership changes as Mark Read stepped down as CEO in September, to be succeeded by Cindy Rose.

All this has spurred speculation about further consolidation in the industry. We asked industry leaders: 
Will this be the overall trend going into 2026, driven by the need for greater scale, data integration, and AI capabilities to compete with big tech players and consulting firms?

Sir Martin Sorrell, founder and executive chairperson, S4 Capital

Three of the big six are in trouble - IPG, Dentsu and WPP. One is flat to down, Omnicom, and is merging to gain cost benefits with troubled IPG. Two drunks being propped up by a lamppost comes to mind, although one of the agency relationship heads of one of the major platforms told me he thinks Omnicom is the best run and governed of the holding companies. Kudos to Palm Beach resident CEO John Wren.

Two, both French, are prospering and is it something in the Parisian water? Or maybe it’s just better leadership, strategy around data and digital and better country-driven structures. 

My own view is that the recent and prospective results of the S&P 500 have the answer. Quarter three EPS was up 12%, 9% excluding the hyperscalers. True, a weak dollar helps, but margins are at an all time high and Goldman forecasts a 12% increase in EPS for 2026, despite tariffs and improved margins aswell to a new record level. 

Clients must be squeezing their supply chains, including us. Maybe as we clear the US mid-terms economic conditions will weaken and efficiency-driven AI implementation will rule as we have already seen in the Chinese EV/AV threatened auto vertical and the fintech threatened traditional financial services businesses. 

The holding companies will have to switch to an output-driven model, not rely on a time-driven, labour one. Scale will diminish in importance - brainpower, data and distribution will be the order of the day along with agility, taking back control and first party data.

Vishnu Mohan, partner and chief growth officer, Dept

The advent of generative AI has only accelerated the inevitable but the writing was always on the wall. Automation was already fast seeping into the creative and media workflows and there was no real place for large human capital or huge billed head hours for stuff that machines could do faster, better, and cheaper. Gen AI shattered our wishful thinking that AI was only here to take over the mundane but not smart enough to imagine and invent, and forced us all to reimagine our future quicker than ever.

We are at that moment in history where capacity consolidation and capability acceleration are the concurrent need of the hour. This dual imperative is paradoxical but essentially scale down and skill up must happen simultaneously. The truth however is that with AI still being more an efficiency driver than a growth catalyst, redundancies and consolidation are taking precedence which is exactly what we are witnessing today with legacy organisations taking the biggest hit.  However, we must not lose sight of the future as an era of AI-driven growth is imminent and the winners will be those who get their investment strategy right and are already thinking of an internal reorganisation with more AI-fluent talent on one hand and a focussed acquisition strategy of AI-first specialised boutiques on the other. 

Consolidation at the surface is great for the industry as its fundamental to bringing in efficiencies but it would only work if its augmented quickly with native AI capability for a true competitiveness with consulting firms or tech-led services organisations. Large scale consolidations come with it own challenges of integrating disparate cultures, process, systems all of which consumes leadership energy which runs against the sharp focus it needs to be truly AI ready and I worry time may not be on their side. 

And we have only just started and still too slow.