Mediahub EMEA CEO: ‘Media has become a thing of convenience’
The Media Leader Interview
Ross Jenkins discusses what sets Mediahub apart, why brands continue to over-invest in social media and the future shape of AI-driven agencies.
What does success look like for media agencies in 2025?
For Ross Jenkins, EMEA and APAC CEO of IPG Mediabrands agency Mediahub, it comes down to fulfilling five core business goals.
“My definition of success is running a business that grows, makes a profit, delivers on our purpose for clients (which is to deliver sound, unbiased, impartial advice about the best way to invest our clients’ money for the greatest return), to have happy people who are developing, and to have fun while we do it,” he explains.
Jenkins speaks warmly to The Media Leader in Mediahub’s London Old Bailey office. Although Mediahub’s UK business is relatively small, it has been growing at pace, he says. The agency grew revenue by 28% last year and 450% over the last six years — very little of which came through pitching.
“We drive growth because we solve clients’ problems,” says Jenkins. “And often the answer isn’t ‘spend more money on media’; the answer is spend your money in smarter ways on media.”
Distinct positioning
Mediahub’s new brand positioning is “More pilot, less auto” — part of what Jenkins describes as “a railing against technology driving people instead of people driving technology; a railing against the narrowing of the media canvas despite the explosion of media”.
He argues that Mediahub is structurally distinct from other agency brands because of its “birthplace” within the Mullen US ad network (which later merged with sibling network Lowe to create MullenLowe) in 2005.
“A low-margin, low-growth creative agency is a really good crucible for a fast-growth, higher-margin media business,” says Jenkins, noting that Mediahub has historically held a high degree of autonomy, “free of the encumbrances of the legacy of agencies that were born much earlier”.
That has manifest in an agency that has a “creativity unit”, Radical + Disruptive Lab, which is focused on “creating media you can’t buy”, as well as “disproportionately heavy” investment in predictive analytics for clients.
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“We’re smaller, and when you’re smaller you need to be different in order to win and to grow,” Jenkins says, pointing to the agency’s meld of creative thinking and data-led insights generation.
That could mean anything from optimising a campaign for “joy” as measured by facial-tracking technology, as the agency did for Topgolf, to building synthetic human bodies and placing them around Los Angeles bus shelters to drive interest in Netflix’s Altered Carbon.
“Maybe it’s a bit cynical to say that 80% of what you get from any media agency is the same,” he continues. “But I think we have the ingredients to help clients make better rear-view-mirror decisions, but also better-informed bets about the future.”
Jenkins adds that Mediahub likes to play in the space of creating “stop and stare” activations that drive earned media value for clients.
“I don’t think consumers go ‘oh that’s a great piece of advertising creative’ or ‘oh that’s a great media placement’,” he argues. “They go: ‘Well, that’s a great fucking idea.'”
Power of momentum
Standing out as an agency brand has arguably become more of an imperative in an era marked by holding group consolidation.
Mediahub parent Interpublic is currently in the midst of a proposed merger with Omnicom — a deal that would substantially change the shape of the media industry and potentially impact the agency brands within both groups.
While Jenkins admits the merger could bring some uncertainty over the future of agency brands within the new entity’s broadened portfolio, he expresses confidence in Mediahub’s positioning.
“We back ourselves,” he says. “I’m a big believer in the power of momentum. We have a lot of momentum. We’re a high-growth business.”
He agrees that, in a constantly developing industry, agency brands “come and go” and the past few years have been turbulent, leading to his team becoming “quite adept at managing change”.
Jenkins himself joined Mediahub through Interpublic’s acquisition of Profero and has been at the agency ever since.
In 2023, Mediahub became part of IPG Mediabrands after being spun out of MullenLowe in 2019, and Jenkins acknowledges that Mediabrands has itself “been through some of its own structural transitions”.
But he reaffirms the value of Mediahub to the wider business, particularly should the merger go through.
“This is a scale business. We like to talk about being a little bit oxymoronic — a bit smaller, more agile, more entrepreneurial, inventive, but with all the scale of a world-class marketing services organisation,” he says. “And I think Omnicom just amplifies that. We’re all excited about the potential of what we could create together that we couldn’t apart.”
Media as ‘a thing of convenience’
That said, Jenkins is highly critical of what he views as media agencies’ partial responsibility in creating a worse, less effective media environment than when he began his career around the turn of the century.
“The level of attention and care and thought and handling that went into a client brief about the idea, the execution of the idea, was next level,” he remembers. “Everything is sped up now. Somewhere along the line, convenience became too great a factor.”
Jenkins laments that, at some point, “someone decided that Meta or Google needed to be on every media plan”.
“Why? Why?” he asks, admitting that most clients are over-invested in digital media relative to its effectiveness.
While there is “no such thing as a wrong media channel” because all media effectiveness can be measured “on a curve”, he worries that agencies have “allowed themselves to become commoditised” in a world in which media investment is dominated by tech platforms.
“Media has become a thing of convenience,” he notes. “And plug-and-play systems — homogenous, ubiquitous platforms like Meta and Google and Amazon and TikTok and Snapchat — are convenient.
“They become their own industries, with their own received wisdoms, self-marking technology — the data relationship is so asymmetrical. But, as humans, we gravitate towards trying to minimise risk.”
The embrace of platforms concerns Jenkins not only because it siphons media spend away from the fourth estate, but because it’s based on a measurement house of cards that has led to inefficient media investment.
“A big segment of the digital marketing industry [was] built on this post-impression metric of post-view conversions,” he explains. “We cookied you, which means you saw the ad, and that cookie passed through a tag on the client’s website, which equals causality or causation.
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“It’s nuts. And yet agencies are filling out the post-view column on the report and clients are looking at the [cost per action] and going: ‘We’ll have some more of that please.’
“We haven’t really learned, it seems. You can draw a direct line between investment and outcome and it’s a convenient story for the board.”
Also “nuts”, according to Jenkins: Meta is in “every customer journey and yet we allow them to mark their homework”.
He is hopeful that the “second coming” of mixed modelling and econometrics will “shed a lot of light on the short-termism and convenient media allocation that goes on”.
“I think you’ll see a redress of media allocation and probably the fourth estate will benefit, because it’s effective,” he adds.
Prime for disruption
The agency landscape more generally is prime for disruption amid an AI revolution that promises to vastly reshape working practices in media buying and planning.
What is the future of agencies in a world shaped by AI? Jenkins jokes: “Surely, the inevitable destination of the journey we’re on is cyborgs.”
More sombrely, he admits there are “existential questions that we are blithely not asking” about the role of AI in human experience. Still, he argues that the media industry should embrace AI.
“It is really magical technology,” he says, noting its potential to free up critical and creative thinking.
However, Jenkins notes, structuring agencies to think differently will mean the composition of them will likely be very different in the near future.
“Inevitably, the shape of the people that we hire into the business will change,” he predicts. “I think the industry will be less pyramid-shaped. It’ll be more up-and-down, maybe a bit more like the consultancies, because there will be much more automation.”
Jenkins is hopeful that a less hierarchical structure will not only attract new candidates, but so will changes to pay structures caused by improvements in proving agencies’ business value to clients.
“Today, I don’t think we do a good job of demonstrating [value],” he says. “Tomorrow, I think we can be better.”