How Super-Consolidation is Redrawing the Map of Global Advertising

The advertising industry is witnessing its most dramatic competitive reshaping in decades. What began as gradual consolidation has accelerated into super-consolidation, fundamentally altering the economics of scale.

The completion of the Omnicom-Interpublic merger will soon create a $25bn revenue giant, overtaking Publicis Groupe. Dentsu is reassessing its international strategy. WPP has rebranded GroupM as an integrated ‘AI-powered media org’, signalling that holding companies see their future as platform-like, AI-first and globally consistent.

This compresses the global advertising oligopoly from dozens of large agencies through 5-6 major holding companies to a Big Three! Simply put: scale now compounds. Data assets, cloud partnerships, AI tooling, retail media integrations and global operating models reinforce each other.

This mirrors the broader economy. Platform effects produced extreme Big Tech concentration, big-four dynamics dominate consulting, AI economics—with their capital intensity, training costs and proprietary data access—reward those already large. Agencies aren’t exempt.

Today’s holding companies compete not only with each other but also with Accenture and Deloitte on transformation briefs and with Big Tech platforms on end-to-end advertising solutions. The gravitational pull is towards fewer, bigger, more integrated competitors.

Why the Big Three Became Inevitable

Once the Omnicom-IPG merger completes, one market pole becomes markedly larger. Publicis’s sustained outperformance creates a second. WPP’s media re-platforming anchors the third. Dentsu’s strategic review of its international business underscores how difficult it is to compete everywhere, on everything, simultaneously.

The competitive landscape has expanded. Consulting firms embed marketing into enterprise transformation. Platforms offer turnkey, AI-infused routes to market with closed-loop measurement that CFOs value. Only very large, deeply capitalised, highly integrated players can intermediate at global scale. Super-consolidation is about reordering what competitive advantage looks like.

The global advertising market generates roughly a trillion dollars annually, with power concentrated among major holding companies and an increasingly fragmented distribution landscape. The five giant holding companies (WPP and its GroupM arm, Publicis, Omnicom, IPG and Dentsu) collectively manage about a quarter of total ad spend, while mid-sized and smaller independent agencies handle about a fifth. The remaining half flows through rapidly expanding alternative channels: direct purchases from Google, Meta and Amazon, in-house agency teams, programmatic exchanges, retail media networks, over-the-top and connected TV, social and influencer platforms.

Does this foreshadow the end of small and mid-sized agencies? No. But it marks the end of being ‘safely in the middle’. In a super-consolidated market, mid-sized agencies must redraw the map, choosing where to lead and where not to play.

Three strategic shifts will separate those who thrive from those who fade.

Command Cultural Authority

If the Big Three race to scale technology, mid-sized agencies must master context. The most defensible edge is cultural intelligence: fluency in local nuances, subcultures, languages and lived realities that make creative work resonate beyond spreadsheets.

This is not an argument against data or AI, it is rather an argument for what those tools cannot easily learn: the texture of culture, signals hidden in communities, meanings embedded in moments.

Culturally anchored independents repeatedly punch above their weight when they are closest to their audience. The lesson is not necessarily that small is better, it is that specificity is.

As platforms industrialise targeting, the risk for brands is ‘sameness’. Smaller agencies that earn the right to be cultural interpreters, grounding broader narratives in local nuance, will command premiums that algorithms cannot set in foreseeable future. This is where giants, by virtue of their breadth and process, are most likely to be undifferentiated.

This is also where trust builds. In an age of polarised attention and fragmented identity, clients need partners who understand not just ‘what works on average’, but what speaks to this community and why.

Reclaim the Human in Creativity

Automation and AI will colonise production and optimisation. The largest networks signal ‘AI-forward’ postures in media and operations. For mid-sized agencies, this is an opening, not the threat.

When the market optimises for efficiency, the counterweight is originality, the type that feels authored, human, at times even a bit risky. We are certainly not undermining technology here, but we mean aiming it with humans not just in the loop but in complete control. Use AI to liberate time and budget from commoditised workflows, then reinvest those gains in creative craft: better briefs, braver ideas, tighter production, richer storytelling.

Brands aren’t immune to ‘optimised sameness’ fatigue. Work that endures reads as singular. Mid-sized agencies have organisational advantages: fewer layers between decision and delivery, leadership proximity to the work, cultures that prize distinctiveness over governance.

As the largest groups scale technology partnerships, many marketers will seek creative counterbalance: partners who challenge templated thinking with insight and intuition-driven leaps.

Look Inward for Resilience

No strategy survives weak economics. Margin pressure will persist as procurement hardens, talent costs rise and scope diffuses across channels. Resilience begins with operational clarity: value prioritisation, streamlined structures, disciplined build-buy-partner choices.

Recent sector history is instructive. Companies that hedged early with data and tech integrations funded reinvestment through cycles, those who waited found themselves fixing the core while chasing the future.

Resilience isn’t merely about costs. It’s about talent architecture, governance that enables quality at pace and crystal-clear criteria for declining opportunities so you win where you compete.

In a super-consolidated market, there is room for giants of scale and masters of cultural nuance. Mid-sized agencies that choose the latter path with intent can thrive alongside the Big Three, not beneath them.

The authors are co-founders of The Media GCC, a global capability centre for mid-sized media companies in the US and Europe.