Why your media plan might look the same as everyone else’s
Opinion
Consultant and former PHD global lead Matt Sanders argues that the holding group business model is ‘responsible for, or complicit in, much of what has gone wrong in advertising over the past two decades.’
Over 30 years in media, across three separate network agencies, taught me plenty about advertising, but the coldest lesson was in what makes the HoldCos tick.
I didn’t join a HoldCo, but I left one. Nearly 30 years ago I joined a media agency successful enough to be bought by an ad agency but still small enough to feel independent, its founders still hands-on.
It had a culture that I heard a creative partner describe as “oozing from the brickwork”, and a conviction that the thinking, the ideas, the effectiveness of the work was the product, the identity, the everything. What happened to it is what happened to almost every great agency: it was absorbed into a global network.
It retained its own PowerPoint font, but soon had the same proposition, the same operating rules, the same systems and the same reporting cadence as every other agency on the roster. By the time I left, the uniquely identifiable culture that made agencies like it so attractive to join had become just a memory.
So, to be clear: I am no fan of the business model known as the “HoldCos”. I believe this model is responsible for, or complicit in, much of what has gone wrong in advertising over the past two decades.
And to be clear, my argument is with that model, common to them all, rather than with any one company. Here’s why.
A vehicle built by capital, for capital
How did the HoldCos predominance come about? Not by solving an advertising problem. Advertising, in its pomp, was an extraordinary if unpredictable business lever. It built magnificent brands, those bizarre manipulations of human emotion that drive consumer preference and price premium, conjuring business value out of thin air. But it was an art form that offered no guarantees, demanding patience and the occasional leap of faith. Many CFOs regarded it as an extravagant expense and treated it with suspicion bordering on contempt.
Then globalisation gifted big capital a golden opportunity. As successful brands went multinational, economies of scale emerged.
Consolidating a corporation’s multi-market adspend into a single, centralised relationship would deliver enormous savings. Step up the HoldCo, an oven-ready vehicle designed perfectly to take advantage of it, a shift that determined everything they have since come to stand for.
From this point on, the priority became less about better ideas, more effective campaigns, or even their supposed clients, the advertisers. Their true priority clients became the fund managers who dictated the metric everything worked towards, their one true god, the share price.
So the HoldCo is best understood not as an advertising business that developed financial discipline, but as a financial construct built around acquiring advertising businesses to extract extraordinary value from them. And then the tech platforms arrived.
The convenient story, and the real one
The story goes that consumers migrated their attention into Google and Meta at an unprecedented pace, and the adspend simply followed the audience. It might sound credible, but does it hold up?
Google, Meta and Amazon now account for over half of all digital adspend worldwide. If effectiveness were driving that phenomenal share, the empirical data would show it, but it doesn’t.
Lumen Research’s eye-tracking work puts average dwell time on an online ad at between one to two seconds. Professor Karen Nelson-Field’s attention research suggests around two-and-a-half seconds is the minimum required to form a memory and found that 85% of digital ads fall short of it.
So, if the average online ad is not seen for long enough even to be remembered, how is it remotely plausible that it builds the brand preference required to command a price premium? I have looked hard for independent evidence that concentrating half a brand’s budget across two platforms is optimal, but I can’t find any.
The platforms employ some of the finest marketing scientists in the world, so if that evidence exists, I’d genuinely welcome seeing it. In the meantime, it’s difficult not to question whether much of what is sold as “micro-targeted efficiency” is about as effective as a crack sniper firing blanks.
Yet the money keeps flowing, and an extraordinary amount of it from the HoldCos. Ivan Fernandes, a former WPP global digital director, reviewed the filings WPP disclosed in a recent US court case:
Across many of the top 20 global advertisers, one pattern kept appearing: more than 50% of the media plan was going to Google and Meta. Not television. Not publishers. Not the open web. Two platforms.”
Astonishing. It’s little wonder that clients no longer want to pay for strategy.
So, if the money is not following effectiveness, what is it following?
The Holy Grail
If the HoldCo’s one true god is the share price, then the Holy Grail is the global new-business win. It’s a veritable six-pointer, won at the expense of a competitor. The resource committed to it is extraordinary.
If someone you know at a HoldCo is working over a bank holiday, it probably won’t be devotion to an existing client; they’ll be on another “must-win” pitch. These wins reassure the priority audience of investors, and when they come off, there is obscene internal energy to ensure they make headlines.
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However, the press release never says they are typically won on commercials, at eye-wateringly low margins that would make a local client seethe. The process will be familiar to anybody who has worked around a global pitch.
After an exhaustive pitch, client procurement narrows the field to two HoldCos and then sits by while they undercut each other. Fees are squeezed, premium services are thrown in for free, ludicrous media discounts are guaranteed, until eventually one folds.
This is how most pitches are now decided. Not on capability, or ideas, or even the much-publicised proprietary tech. Purely on price whilst devaluing the agency’s own services in the process. Ask anybody with experience of HoldCo global business whether this is how it plays out and, if they can still look you in the eye, they will nod.
The money followed the margin, not the audience
Having won the account thinly, HoldCo must now service it, and the only way to do that profitably is to strip the servicing.
Step One: extract the profitable scopes from the local teams and relocate them to the centre.
Step Two: move all activation to low-cost offshore hubs. And here is the hinge on which the entire model turns. Those hubs are only viable if the media they activate can be planned and bought remotely, at scale, across multiple markets, by low-cost junior people through standardised, automated systems. And a model like that is entirely contingent on funnelling most of the budget through only one type of media. Yes, you guessed it. Platform media, and predominantly Google and Meta.
Meanwhile, what about local TV, physical OOH, and award-winning, culturally nuanced partnerships informed by brand affinity and consumer insight?
Alas, they all require expensive local expertise, which does not fit a model that prizes cost efficiency over craft. Much better to align with platforms that can be activated from anywhere, by anyone. This offshore model and the concentration of spend into the platforms were never two separate developments serendipitously coming together. They are a contrived, integrated phenomenon.
Once you start to unravel this dynamic whilst reminding yourself of the HoldCos’ organising principle — cost efficiency — then it starts to become apparent that, far from surrendering to the tech giants’ dominance of advertising, the HoldCos helped bankroll it.
Look the other way
The relationship is symbiotic. The platforms could bypass agencies tomorrow and step up their direct client relationships; their AI is already doing the groundwork by chipping away at the agency contribution.
For now, the HoldCos are safe, because they offer something valuable in return: a credible façade of independent media judgement, effectively laundering the concentration of spend against any suggestion of monopoly and the anti-trust complications that come with it.
Does the backscratching go deeper? In 2025, a US federal court found that Google had illegally monopolised parts of the adtech market. Meta has just agreed to pay a huge settlement, up to $17bn, rather than defend claims from 47 states that its products were deliberately engineered to be addictive to children. These are the two companies through which the HoldCos funnel most of their clients’ money.
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So, what has been the response from the platforms’ biggest customers, the HoldCos, the stewards of their clients’ brands and budgets? Absolute silence. Not a dickybird.
Perhaps because when an operating model becomes so reliant on cheap platform activation, it cannot afford public opinion of the platforms? Contrast that with the energy once poured into brand-safety and DEI commitments, quietly shelved once defending them became commercially awkward.
The HoldCos had a choice
Clearly, this machine was built with clients’ complicity. Their CMOs conceded the battle for effectiveness to procurement teams who prioritised cost efficiency, opening the door to consolidation and reducing agency services to commodity status.
The HoldCos will say they had no choice but to respond to the market dynamics. However, the ease of their folding greased the wheels in motion.
Capital at HoldCo scale could have shown more confidence in its product, invested in effectiveness, brand building, and talent rather than executives, and defended its pricing with evidence of value. Instead, it made the deliberate choice of platform dependency with a lucrative sideline in the sustained “milking” of successful agencies to finance buybacks to prop up the share price, the combination of which has weakened them strategically beyond the point of any alternative route.
The HoldCos can’t raise fees without losing clients, so the only levers left are the ones they’ve been pulling for years, now given fresh impetus by AI and inventory media. Cut deeper, offshore further, chase more volume at even thinner rates.
A race to the bottom that they entered voluntarily.
Winners and losers
So, apart from agency homogeneity, campus offices and quarterly dividends, what have the HoldCos ever done for us? After two decades of this model, who has actually benefited?
Not the work. Adspend has never been higher and effectiveness never lower, something I will return to in a follow-up article.
Not the multinational clients. They saved money on fees and media, but it is a false economy. Advertising should be an investment in brand equity, and equity erodes quietly under years of misdirected spend.
Not domestic advertisers. A UK-only advertiser in a HoldCo agency plays second fiddle to the network accounts. They are serviced at premium rates, effectively subsidising the commercials that won network business.
Not the employees. Salaries run on a strict income-to-payroll ratio, so when income is slashed by ludicrous global rates set several time zones away, pay is suppressed with it. Meanwhile, every wave of “transformation” leaves fewer people doing more for less.
Not domestic media, or the fourth estate, or even the broader economy. Every pound funnelled through an offshore hub into a global platform is food off the table of domestic media that pay taxes and employ people in the UK. For a century, advertising helped fund the journalism that holds power to account. The HoldCo model defunds it, diverting the proceeds to platforms that produce none.
And the winners are….
Shareholders, and the select few senior executives whose remuneration packages are tied to the share price. It’s called Darwinian economics.
Finding a better way
It doesn’t have to be this way. Especially not for UK advertisers with a choice. An industry sector remains whose media judgement isn’t mortgaged to the platforms, whose commercials don’t require your budget to offset a multinational’s discount, and whose incentives point, transparently, toward delivering good work. It’s called the independent agency sector, and it is more buoyant and awash with talent than ever before.
Objectivity in media selection and effectiveness as the actual product. Not because independents are morally superior, but because their model has not been financially engineered otherwise.
It boils down to a simple question UK advertisers should be asking themselves: Once you know what the HoldCo model is optimised for, then why wouldn’t you consider the alternative?
The Media Leader’s Future of Media, Planning Strategy and Innovation week runs 21-26 September for more on media planning, strategy and innovation from across the sector.
Matt Sanders spent three decades in UK media agencies and now works as an independent strategy consultant.