2025 is not one for the faint-hearted

Opinon

A focus on transparency, indies versus holdcos, predators circling legacy brands… 2025 will see some big wins for those who make the right bets and fight the good fight.

‘Tis the season to be jolly…

Well, truth be told, we face a challenging year ahead, if probably an exciting one.

Recently, it was reported that almost half of marketers are planning agency reviews in 2025. Pitching already creates huge stresses for stretched agencies, so more pitches are great but it’s also more stress and burnout.

It will likely be exacerbated by the Omnicom-Interpublic merger.

This will compound significant agency leadership change. I recently threw in my two pen’orth as agency leaders were invited to give some advice to the new flush.

Central to it was an exhortation not to give your best stuff away for free at pitch. Indeed, never to release any intellectual property until you’ve been fairly paid for it. Imagine where we might be if we did that?

The transparency question

Closely related, there are more intermediaries influencing pitching agencies’ fates. Hardly a month passes without another new name advising some serious account move. There’s corporate and private equity participation and changes of leadership, too, but little visible corresponding tightening of advertiser discipline.

Nick Manning and Brian Jacobs’ Advertising: Who Cares? movement continues to gather momentum. They now report over 500 supporters from around the world, including a number of anonymous holding company folk.  Another gathering event is in prospect as the movement’s flightpath crystallises.

One key focus is of course transparency, as the holdcos are all now widely marking up media buys opaquely in order to deliver return to shareholders. The Omnicom-Interpublic mega-merger is doubtless about yet more of this.

Rise of the indies

The media agency sector is cleaving into two camps — the holdcos and the indies, which protest more senior resource dedicated and tailored to clients’ needs and transparent business practices.

Despite the resulting upward pressure on their fees, indies’ market share is growing (mainly from non-multinational advertisers). Notably, the successful Mother creative agency group has recently entered the media fray.

It’s down to advertisers to decide what delivers for them, although I’ve long wondered how so much will continue to be spent so blindly and wastefully.

The World Federation of Advertisers reports a majority of its members looking to change their remuneration arrangements. As ever, this is couched as the pursuit of “value”, but with practices like egregiously extended payment terms widespread, this could be early warning of yet another rout on fees, with AI as a negotiating feint.

Move into production

It’s not just in media where every pip is being squeezed to extract margin. Many agencies have established in-house commercial production resources to repatriate associated fees, a proportion of which they might return to clients as inducement.

Meanwhile, the Advertising Producers Association, which represents most of the leading independents, recently issued a critical report on the way agencies engage external production resource.

Citing non-adherence to best practices like ensuring three competitive tenders and transparent decision-making, it drew a swift rebuttal from the IPA.

Quite how you level the playing field between directors with very individual artistic styles beats me.

Predators are circling

There’s churn in the media, too, especially among national “legacy” media forms, particularly in audiovisual, where tension between national (regulated, quality) broadcasters and global streamers is peaking.

For the BBC, a major charter review looms. There’s little sympathy among politicians of any stripe for an organisation that has both experienced an unhealthy number of scandals and yet is conspicuously self-protecting.

But who is watching for the baby while radical proposals for changing the bathwater are mooted? It’s only my view, but a move from a bundled licence fee to a pay-as-you-go model would be dangerous — perhaps fatal.

Commercial broadcasters are also hurting from budgets’ landslide into online. Predators are circling, though held at bay by strong regulation that doesn’t burden global competitors. Yet stronger foreign ownership controls might be needed — too much national infrastructure is already in financially interested but socially disinterested hands.

Making the right bets

And, finally, the workplace — wherever and whatever that now means.

Sadly, the displacement of experience (expensive) with junior (cheap) talent continues.

Managements’ enforced return to the workplace makes sense in a business where face to face, often accidental, has such a profound positive effect.

How will the B Corp status our industry has seized upon fare, now that emissions from server farms powering the new demands of processing-hungry AI have overtaken those from the global aviation industry? It won’t just be Havas and Ogilvy getting it from the activists henceforth…

Finally, the micropolitics remain uncertain — wars, religion, tribalism, totalitarianism and extremism, widespread political churn, climate events. And with it the money markets that power industry.

Now, where was I?  Oh yes, being jolly.

It’s going to be quite a year and not one for the faint-hearted. But there will be some big wins for those who make the right bets. And, I hope, for those that fight the good fight.

Whatever your Christmas, I hope it’s relaxed and peaceful as you recharge for a busy new year. Cheers!

Bob Wootton spent 40 years working in advertising, first as a media buyer at some of the UK’s leading agencies before joining the trade body Isba in 1996, where he was advertising and media director for 20 years. He is also the founder of Deconstruction, a media and tech consulting business, and presents The Guitar Show on YouTube.