A year in review for media agencies… without the rankings and self-deception

Opinion

Omar Oakes assesses what 2025 actually revealed about media agencies and why the usual scorecards are lying to us.

I don’t know which media agencies had a good year.

Every December, the industry demands a league table: who won, who lost, who’s up, who’s doomed. And every December, trade journalism obliges with a familiar bundle of proxies—account wins, awards hauls, senior hires, office openings—stitched together into something that looks like evaluation. It isn’t.

To genuinely assess agency performance would require months of access: commercial terms, client churn, margin pressure, internal morale, delivery quality, and whether any of the strategy decks actually changed a client’s trajectory. That’s the work of a consultancy, not a newsroom.

Having worn both hats this year, I’ve seen this up close: what you see in press releases and interviews can differ starkly from what really goes on in an agency. Pretending otherwise doesn’t elevate journalism; it creates unrealistic expectations and, eventually, resentment when the truth fails to match the headlines.

So instead of crowning winners, this is a different kind of year-in-review. Not who “did well”, but what 2025 actually revealed about media agencies and why the usual scorecards are lying to us.

The WPP conundrum

If you wanted a case study in why surface-level judgments no longer work, 2025 generously provided one.

Imagine how proud you’d be at an agency holding company with this list of 2025 achievements:

* First major advertising holding company to appoint a woman as CEO, and a genuine outsider from the world of big tech.

* Won the UK government’s lucrative and prestigious media account.

* Completed a state-of-the-art UK campus in central London.

* Positioned itself more credibly than most peers on AI, while simultaneously talking (finally!) about diversifying away from an overdependence on multinational advertisers and toward SMEs.

* Simplified leadership, streamlined agency brands, and tried to make senior executives less like mascots and more like client partners.

* And its flagship media agency, Mindshare, won the Cannes Lions Media Grand Prix.

And yet, WPP also dropped out of the FTSE 100; the insult to the long-running injury of its depressing financial performance. Of course, Mark Read exited as CEO after a bruising period of earnings pressure and strategic doubt.

So did WPP’s media agencies have a bad year? The only honest answer is yes and no.

Or, more accurately: the question itself is flawed. When demonstrable strategic progress and apparent market failure can coexist so neatly, it tells us less about WPP and more about how inadequate our definitions of “success” have become.

Why 2025 was a bad year for everyone

Zoom out and the picture gets bleaker, fast.

All media agencies had a difficult 2025 because Donald Trump became the US president again. That isn’t some lefty gripe; it’s a material economic reality. You can’t be pro-media and pro-Trump because Trumpism is a form of institutionalised volatility: erratic tariffs, open corruption, the erosion of regulatory norms, and a collapse in the basic standards of conduct that businesses quietly rely on.

Uncertainty kills investment, and agencies live downstream of corporate confidence.

At the same time, the media ecosystem agencies operating within it became even more brutally concentrated. Google, Meta and Amazon tightened their grip on supply, data and distribution. Fewer media choices mean less need for agency guidance. So it again sucked to be a big-brand planner in 2025.

Not much better for trading, either, when a handful of platforms dominate attention, strategy flattens into allocation. Trading leverage weakens because monopolies don’t need to negotiate. Hence why 2025 saw more debate about the role of principal-based media, which should face even more scrutiny than it has.

This creates an environment that hits holding companies hardest and explains why WPP has struggled to convince markets of its future relevance, and why Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group ended up looking like a defensive manoeuvre rather than a victory lap. 

The deal first touted at around $13bn in 2024 closed closer to $9bn—a pretty clear signal of how little faith the market currently has in old models, no matter how large.

In that context, the question isn’t why some agencies “underperformed”. It’s why anyone expected clean wins at all.

Why 2025 was a good year for everyone

If you were willing to look beyond share prices and award shows, there was also evidence of something more valuable: clever and committed people giving agencies the tools to win.

Manning and Brian Jacobs’ Advertising Who Cares? event offered a rare concentration of serious thinking about how agencies might escape their addiction to time-based billing and better align themselves with client growth. 

VoxComm, the IPA’s global umbrella group, broke cover in February by explicitly challenging pay-to-play pitch consultants and urging agencies to stop participating in practices that quietly corrode value. 

ISBA followed in August with a Pitch Consultant Guide that asked advertisers to rethink the cost-benefit logic of those same processes. And in July, the IPA pushed agencies (again) to get serious about outcome-based pricing rather than treating it as an annual talking point.

No one will ever reference these initiatives in 2030 when they celebrate record revenues or when a thirsty comedian hands them their ‘agency of the year’ award. But it is the kind of infrastructural work that actually changes industries to enable success—slowly, awkwardly, and mostly out of sight.

Most people reading this belong to a trade body, either personally or through their company. Make sure you’re nagging these bodies to follow up on their guides and announcements with progress reports and pledges for further action.

This stuff only matters if they become tools for difficult internal conversations, not as PR moments filed away after a press release.

Independents: momentum without closure

There were, undeniably, pockets of optimism, particularly among independent agencies.

The launch of the Alliance of Media Independents felt like a more grown-up evolution of the pandemic-era Land of Independents: less protest movement, more trade body. And throughout the year, the senior figures at larger independent agencies reported a noticeable increase in pitch invitations and shortlists from advertisers who would historically have defaulted to global networks.

That shift matters. It suggests marketers are at least willing to question inherited buying structures.

But optimism needs qualifying. More shortlists did not consistently translate into more wins. In some cases, incumbents protected accounts by dropping fees — a familiar short-term tactic that favours scale over sustainability. In others, marketers appeared interested in change without fully committing to the risk it entails. Increased attention is not the same as redistributed power.

So independents didn’t “win” 2025. But what they did do was expose cracks in the old logic, and that may prove more critical in the long run.

Stop asking the wrong question

2025 didn’t sort media agencies into winners and losers. Nor did 2024 or 2023. As long as we confuse visibility with value, year-end reviews will continue to disappoint.

Perhaps you’re disappointed now that I’ve not mentioned a single Publicis Groupe agency in a supposed review of media agencies. That doesn’t mean Publicis had a good or bad year; in my eyes, it’s just that I really don’t have anything to say about them. Sorry.

Advertising and media are business sectors, not sports leagues where everyone gets a mention, and someone has to ‘win’. We shouldn’t be in the habit of producing phoney league tables and passing judgment on each other with superficial benchmarks.

Life, like the wonderful creative industries that we’re so fortunate to work in, is more complicated than that. And the agencies that embrace complexity will win every time.