Mark Penn: ‘We’re it in terms of a fourth alternative’
The Media Leader Interview
Stagwell’s Mark Penn discusses why he’s bullish about AI, the ad market, and the challenger holding group’s positioning against the Big Three.
Big brands require full-service, small brands prefer self-service, and Stagwell CEO Mark Penn is comfortable sitting right in between.
“That is the whole strategy,” he explains to The Media Leader at Stagwell’s London office in the Blue Fin building. “We’re ultimately going to be indifferent between services and platforms. We want to be in both businesses.”
Stagwell, Penn says, is developing products that clients are installing on their own tech stacks, “that they can use without us.” The goal is not just to sell tech-infused media and creative services, but to “become the leader in digital marketing transformation in the agentic world”.
Penn is speaking to The Media Leader just minutes after Stagwell announced it had appointed former iProspect North American CEO Liz Rutgersson as its global and North American CEO of Stagwell agency Assembly. Remarking on the hire, Penn says “we want to put our media at the forefront of digital transformation”.
The media division, he continues, has always centred on performance media, whereas he sees his competitors as “making a transformation from big brand and principal media” but still ultimately reliant on selling media at scale to earn their keep.
In contrast, Penn wants Stagwell to be known as the agency a brand comes to for creativity and technology. “Principal media is not why you’re showing up for Stagwell,” he says. “And when you come to us for media, you’re going to come to us because we have the most advanced proposition for the changing world.”
One can hardly go five minutes talking to an agency executive without mentioning AI these days, and Penn is no different. But he is particularly bullish on the technology and the changes it is driving for businesses.
“When you look at what AI is transforming, it is not transforming pure creativity much; it is not transforming research all that much because research was already quite advanced technologically; it is transforming production because it is just dramatically easier now, and it’s also enhancing media placement and targeting,” he says. “I think any company today has to be at the forefront of those particular areas as you adopt AI.”
‘We’re it in terms of a fourth alternative’
Penn exudes confidence with Stagwell’s positioning as an ascendant challenger that has reached a “tipping point”. The company reported organic revenue growth of 10% year-on-year to $786m in Q2, including a record $171m worth of net new business. Recent wins include Mondelez, Heineken and IBM, with Stagwell winning about 30% of its pitches, according to Penn.
“While WPP is shrinking and Omnicom is merging and Publicis is media-ing, we’re it in terms of a fourth alternative,” he says. “You can go to Havas primarily for healthcare or European; you can go to Dentsu primarily for Asian and some media, but we then provide really a fourth alternative. And even though we’re like 1.5% of the marketplace, we’re winning a lot more than that in pitches.”
Stagwell’s focus on “complete marketing transformation” is driven by its slate of recently launched AI products, dubbed The Machine, The Targeting Machine, The Knowledge Machine and The Media Machine.
The company, Penn argues, benefits from an “innovator’s advantage” because it is not weighed down by “all these legacy assets that we have to transform”.
Still, for all the bluster, Stagwell’s media business has grown in line with many of its competitors this year. According to the company’s Q2 2026 earnings report, the Media and Commerce division, which comprises 24% of Stagwell’s total revenue, posted a minor 0.2% year-on-year net organic revenue growth in H1. Instead, growth came from its smaller Digital Transformation (+12.0% year-on-year organic net revenue growth) and Communications (+8.8%) businesses.
“Our design always was that Digital Transformation would have the fastest growth,” Penn says. “AI means that virtually every company will have to re-do how it touches consumers.”
That is true of marketers, too. Brands, now armed with AI tools that make creative and media planning more efficient and cheaper, may well be more likely to in-house more of the servicing historically done by advertising agencies. That’s fine with Penn, who is positioning Stagwell to “pull up into global full-service and push down into platform self-service” while also giving brands the tools to manage their own AI transformation efforts.
Is Stagwell’s enterprise business thus competing with AI companies like Anthropic? Penn says no, pointing to the partnerships Stagwell has inked with tech giants.
“We’re a tech company’s tech company,” he continues. “We’re already doing work for Anthropic. Just like everyone else, suddenly Anthropic needs marketing; it needs positioning; it needs to make sure people understand the brand.”
‘The best economy we’ve seen in many years, in terms of marketing spend’
Penn isn’t concerned about the wider macroeconomy, even if he acknowledges war in the Middle East has affected Stagwell’s international business.
The group opened a “substantial practice” in the Middle East in recent years, with offices for Assembly and creative agency Forsman & Bodenfors dotting the region on top of the acquisition of government advisory Consulum.
“I can’t say that the war is helping that at the moment, because we had a lot of tourism work,” Penn says, referring to the US-Israel war with Iran, which has expanded to include the wider region. “Nobody expected that Iran would set missiles at Dubai, hurting Dubai tourism.”
Nearly four-fifths (79%) of Stagwell’s revenue still comes from the US despite the company’s global expansion, which includes investments in Asia, planned investments in Latin America, and “a couple of interesting European acquisitions in the pipeline,” Penn says. The UK, for its part, notched 10.7% net organic revenue growth in H1 2026, which Penn attributes to linking up what was once “disparate operations”, with more business wins leading to local recognition.
Stagwell CEO: There is a ‘perverse distortion’ in the news media ad market
Despite the war and widespread concerns around price inflation and shaky bond markets, Penn describes the current market as “the best economy we’ve seen in many years in terms of marketing spend”. He notes that, unlike during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent tech industry cuts in 2022 and 2023, brands are broadly holding their nerve by maintaining marketing budgets.
“On the pure element of ‘this is a bad economy, I’m not doing marketing,’ we’ve had almost none of that right now,” Penn says. New ad markets are also being created. In the US, AI companies and betting companies, for example, are funnelling investment into marketing, keeping business moving.
Penn, an outspoken proponent of AI, believes the AI boom is and will continue to be beneficial to economies, noting tech firms’ high capital investment is being spent creating jobs rather than being “held in corporate coffers”, awaiting the next acquisition, dividend increase or stock buyback.
“My general view on AI is that this is being looked at in an upside-down way,” he says. The US economy has a labour force of 150m workers; Penn believes AI will be the equivalent of adding another 50m, rather than subtracting 50m and replacing that labour with automation.
“There are jobs being lost and jobs being created, because that’s what happens in digital transformation, but economies tend to re-skin themselves and find something for the people to do,” he says. “But each person will have greatly enhanced productivity in what they’re doing, which means the output of the economy can skyrocket.”
Still, consumer backlash to AI is real. Penn’s own summer polling, via Stagwell’s market research agency Harris Poll, shows severe distrust of AI and widespread concern about job loss, power usage, and safety threats. Penn himself acknowledges there are “perils that have to be prevented” that will require some form of regulation — though he admits this is unlikely to come from the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, he agrees the job market in the marketing industry itself has been affected by a combination of agency consolidation and AI efficiencies.
“I still think marketing is a great field to go into,” he says, adding: “Obviously, I think the big companies got too big.”
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One company’s job cuts are another company’s “opportunity to hire great talent,” as Penn puts it. “While they’re trying to figure out the next 1,000 people they’re firing, we’re still figuring out the next 1,000 people we’re hiring. We’re in a different position. We’re a teenager growing up.”
Stagwell’s workforce now counts 13,000 people. For comparison, WPP alone has cut 11,000 jobs since the start of 2025.
The disparity has left Stagwell — and the wider advertising industry — suddenly awash with talent. According to Penn, Stagwell’s database of job applicants now counts 200,000 people globally.
“There’s no question that it’s a tough [job market],” Penn says, advising people to “come with modern skills.”
That requires embracing AI as a tool. As afraid of AI as many are, Penn notes that most people (56%) now use the technology daily, whether for work or personal use.
“If you think fire is dangerous, do you use it every day?” he asks rhetorically. “Obviously, you think it is useful.”