2025: The Year Media Had to Choose
The holding companies consolidated, WPP collapsed, and publishers lost traffic to ChatGPT. Meanwhile, nobody's figured out what comes next.
This year-in-review reflects my reporting from Cannes Lions 2025, the IPA Effectiveness Conference, INMA Media and Subscription Week, the PPA Publisher Conference, NewsRewired, and dozens of other events and conversations with industry leaders throughout the year. For detailed coverage of specific sessions and announcements, visit themediastack.co.uk/archive.
Looking back at 2025, it’s clear this wasn’t just another year of industry change. Cannes Lions, the PPA conference, NewsRewired—everywhere I went, the same reality kept surfacing: the old business models are broken, and nobody’s quite sure what replaces them.
The Holding Company Earthquake
November delivered the year’s most significant industry shock: Omnicom completed its almost $10 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group, creating the world’s largest marketing services company. The deal, initially valued at $13.5 billion when announced in December 2024, closed at a lower price following declines in Omnicom’s share price—a harbinger of the turbulence ahead.
The merger fundamentally reordered the industry hierarchy. Publicis Groupe, which had positioned itself as a leader through organic growth and technology acquisitions, dropped to second place. WPP, once the undisputed giant, fell to third. The new pecking order has immediate implications for competitive positioning, particularly when pitching multinational accounts where scale and global reach matter.
Within weeks, the consolidation’s human cost became clear. Omnicom announced it would retire the DDB, FCB and MullenLowe brands by mid-2026, cutting 4,000 jobs. Combined with 3,200 roles IPG shed ahead of the acquisition and 3,000 Omnicom roles cut after announcing the deal, total redundancies reached around 10,000 positions—roughly 8% of the combined 2024 headcount.
DDB, named Network of the Year at Cannes Lions 2025, created defining work for Volkswagen, John Lewis and McDonald’s. FCB played a crucial role in IPG’s global expansion. MullenLowe ran significant APAC operations. All gone by mid-2026, consolidated into three global networks. The decision, as CEO John Wren explained, came down to “positioning, client relationships and international footprint.”
The merger arrives as holding companies face mounting pressure from consulting firms, in-house agencies and the creator economy. Whether an enlarged scale solves these challenges or simply creates a bigger target remains to be seen.
WPP: The Fall of a Giant
If the Omnicom-IPG merger represented consolidation from strength, WPP’s 2025 represented collapse from weakness. The once-dominant agency giant suffered a year of humiliating setbacks that culminated in December’s ultimate indignity: ejection from the FTSE 100 after 27 years.
The numbers tell a brutal story. WPP’s market capitalisation collapsed from £24 billion in 2017 to £3.1 billion by year-end 2025. The share price plunged 62% during 2025 alone, hitting levels not seen since the late 1990s. Two profit warnings. A string of major client losses, including Coca-Cola’s US and Canada media business to Publicis. Revenue declining 5-6% year-on-year.
In June, Mark Read announced his departure as CEO after seven years and 30 years with the company. The timing—amid falling revenues and a share price at four-year lows—suggested the decision wasn’t entirely his. Read’s public statements emphasised WPP’s AI investments and Creative Company of the Year award at Cannes Lions 2025, but couldn’t disguise the underlying crisis.
Cindy Rose replaced Read in September, inheriting a company in severe distress. Her assessment was blunt: WPP had “not gone far enough or fast enough in adapting to the evolving needs of our clients.” The company launched WPP Open Pro, a self-service AI platform that allows WPP clients to create variations of their creative assets for different formats and markets—an acknowledgement that traditional full-service models no longer work for many clients and some might want to self-serve.
But these efforts came too late. On December 3, FTSE Russell confirmed WPP’s removal from the FTSE 100, effective December 19. British Land replaced it. The relegation triggered forced selling by index-tracking funds, adding further downward pressure on the share price.
What went wrong? WPP couldn’t match competitors’ AI and data capabilities despite heavy investment. Publicis and Omnicom built sophisticated platforms through strategic acquisitions (Epsilon, Sapient). WPP’s response—merging historic agency brands like J. Walter Thompson, Young & Rubicam, Wunderman and VML with tech specialists—undermined brand recognition without delivering comparable capabilities. These mergers began before the pandemic, early in Mark Read’s tenure as CEO, but failed to deliver the anticipated transformation.
The GroupM restructuring—laying off employees while downplaying individual operations such as Mindshare and Wavemaker—arose from weakness, not strength. Major accounts had already fled. The market interpreted these moves as managed decline rather than strategic repositioning.
Analysts now view WPP as a takeover target or break-up candidate. Speculation swirled in November about interest from Havas, Apollo and KKR, though nothing materialised. WPP’s fall from the FTSE 100 serves as a stark reminder: in a market being reshaped by technology, AI capabilities and data assets, legacy operations and famous agency names no longer provide protection.
Cannes Lions: Where AI Met Reality
June’s pilgrimage to the Croisette brought 25,000 people together to debate the future of creativity. At an invitation-only Campaign event, Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun delivered what may have been the festival’s most important message. Against economic uncertainty and industry upheaval, Sadoun called for advertising to embrace creativity, ethics and transformation simultaneously.
His argument: AI and talent, combined with ethical frameworks, will define the next era. The subtext was unmistakable—Publicis, about to drop to second place behind the enlarged Omnicom, needed to prove that transformation matters more than raw size. The French holding company bet heavily on data and technology through acquisitions like Epsilon and Sapient. It now faces a rival with comparable tech ambitions backed by superior scale.
The broader Cannes Lions festival had less fire than in previous years. Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, and Marc Pritchard, CMO at P&G, both delivered reality checks about data and discipline. But the real story was quieter: everyone knows traditional advertising is being displaced, nobody quite knows by what.
P&G’s Pritchard emphasised the importance of insight-led creativity and long-term brand building over short-term performance metrics. Amazon’s Jassy outlined how data and AI are reshaping commerce at a scale that makes traditional advertising look quaint. The message was clear: creativity still matters, but only when it’s powered by data and measurable business outcomes.
The most significant announcement came later in the year: the launch of the Creative Brand Lion for 2026. Rather than celebrating individual campaigns, Cannes Lions will recognise organisations that have built the internal systems, cultures, and capabilities to produce world-class marketing consistently. It’s a fundamental shift—rewarding organisational excellence over creative one-offs.
AI also got its own craft subcategories, acknowledging what we all know but few want to say aloud: AI isn’t supplementing human creativity anymore; it’s becoming fundamental to how work gets made. The focus is on human-AI collaboration, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
The Sports Marketing Bet
December brought another Cannes Lions initiative: LIONS Sport, a two-day forum scheduled to launch in June 2026. With brand investment in sports hitting $250 billion in 2024, up 150% from a decade ago and projected to reach $602 billion by 2030, the timing makes sense.
Among 18-24-year-olds, 93% engage with sports on social media weekly. Rights fragmentation and athletes operating as independent publishers have fundamentally changed the landscape. Creativity, as Simon Cook noted, becomes “the ultimate competitive advantage” when brands must navigate this complexity.
Dublin: Where Publishing Strategy Got Practical
September’s INMA Innovation Week in Dublin provided a crucial counterweight to Cannes’ creative celebration. While Cannes debates the art of marketing, INMA focused on the mechanics of survival—particularly for publishers facing budget constraints and existential threats.
Tom McCave, former marketing leader at The Economist, delivered the session that crystallised the challenge. His presentation on brand building with limited budgets addressed the elephant in every publisher’s room: how do you maintain brand equity when finance demands immediate ROI from every pound spent?
McCave’s answer: rigorous measurement, ruthless prioritisation, and defending budgets by proving impact. The Economist managed this balancing act through sophisticated attribution modelling and a clear-eyed focus on activities that moved business metrics. But the subtext was darker—many publishers lack the resources, data infrastructure or expertise to follow this playbook.
The Dublin conference revealed a stark divide. Elite publishers like The Economist, Financial Times, and The Guardian have the resources to invest in measurement, experimentation, and brand building. Regional publishers and digital-first operations face a choice between immediate performance marketing that keeps the lights on and brand-building that might secure long-term survival.
This gap explains why consolidation continues across publishing while a handful of premium brands pull further ahead.
The Publishing Conferences: Survival Strategies Emerge
Two London conferences in November delivered the year’s most practical insights. The PPA Independent Publisher Conference and NewsRewired mapped out how publishers are responding to existential threats.
The Traffic Crisis
David Buttle’s data stopped everyone in their tracks: 5-8% of traffic now comes from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, with zero monetisation opportunities. ChatGPT is growing three times faster than the early internet did, and Google’s competing AI features are already reducing publisher traffic.
For B2B publishers, the effect is more pronounced. Early AI adopters are seeing growth; late adopters are plateauing. When ChatGPT added real-time web access, usage rose across the board. The traditional search economy—where publishers ranked, received clicks, and served ads—is being replaced by generative search that provides direct answers.
The Licensing Battle Lines
Lucio Mesquita’s advice echoed through both conferences: treat AI companies as publishers should have treated Google 15 years ago. Don’t give away content. Demand compensation, brand credit and attribution in every deal.
The frustration is palpable. Companies like Axel Springer and News International have secured individual deals with OpenAI, leaving smaller publishers vulnerable to unauthorised use of their content. Mesquita’s call for collective licensing groups reflects recognition that publishers have more power together than apart.
Email Beats Social (Finally)
Jessica Crouch from Condé Nast delivered the stat that validated what many suspected: newsletter traffic now surpasses social media traffic. The New Yorker, Vogue, Wired, and GQ receive more visits from email than Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter combined.
Email subscribers contribute up to 50% more revenue over their lifecycles. Newsletter readers are 4.5 times more likely to subscribe. Wired recently introduced subscriber-only newsletters, directly competing with Substack by providing curated expertise.
The message: own your audience relationships. Platforms can change algorithms overnight; email lists remain yours.
The Creator Economy Reality Check
Professor Lucy Kueng’s keynote at NewsRewired laid out the challenge starkly. Scott Galloway generates £20 million in annual revenue with 18 people. L’Oréal and Unilever now spend 50% of their advertising budgets on creators rather than traditional media.
Goalhanger has built a 40-million-member community by rejecting algorithm-chasing and focusing on ambitious storytelling. Their business model spans podcasts, subscriptions, ads, video, events and direct partnerships. Multiple revenue streams matter, but the foundation is craft that drives genuine engagement.
The contrast with legacy publishing—with hundreds of staff, expensive infrastructure and declining revenues—couldn’t be starker.
The 80-20 Model
Justice Williams from Black Business Magazine presented perhaps the year’s most radical business model: stop pursuing advertisers altogether—80% of revenue from strategic brand partnerships, only 20% from traditional advertising and subscriptions.
This applies influencer economics to publishing: build audience and reputation, then establish partnerships with brands that support the vision. Lloyds Bank serves as their primary partner, acting as a strategic ally rather than a traditional advertiser. Twelve brand partnerships cover all operational costs before considering traditional revenue.
The Education Crisis
A survey of 170 journalism students and young professionals, commissioned by Tickaroo, revealed deep anxiety about AI replacing entry-level jobs—the roles that traditionally provide experience and skill development.
Andrew Grill, author of Digitally Curious, flagged the core problem: many schools ban the use of AI, treating it as cheating. Students arrive in workplaces where AI proficiency is assumed, like Microsoft Word skills, but they’ve been conditioned to avoid it.
The industry faces a talent development crisis. How do you train journalists when the entry-level roles that teach skills are being automated? How do you maintain editorial standards when experienced journalists are being laid off to cut costs?
What Actually Happened This Year
The pattern across every conference was consistent. Direct relationships now matter more than reach. Email is beating social. Communities beat audiences. Quality engagement trumps vanity metrics.
Publishers finally realised they need to charge AI companies for content. The era of giving away everything for free is ending—though individual publishers cutting separate deals weakens collective bargaining power.
Business models are diversifying out of necessity. Pure advertising-dependent models are failing. The successful operations combine subscriptions, partnerships, events and strategic brand relationships. Black Business Magazine’s 80-20 model—80% from partnerships, 20% from ads and subscriptions—represents where things are heading.
The creator economy stopped being the enemy and became the template. Scott Galloway’s 18-person operation, generating £20 million annually, demonstrates what lean, personality-driven media can achieve. Traditional publishers with hundreds of staff and expensive infrastructure are struggling to compete.
And schools are still banning AI while newsrooms require it. The talent development crisis is real. Entry-level roles that traditionally taught journalism skills are being automated, but no one has figured out what replaces them.
The Problem Nobody’s Solving
Here’s what’s frustrating: the industry understands the problems. The solutions exist. The tools are available.
But nobody’s moving fast enough. Publishers continue to cut individual deals with AI companies rather than negotiate collectively. Universities teach structures that won’t exist by the time students graduate. Newsrooms automate entry-level roles, then complain about talent gaps.
2026 will show which organisations understood the urgency and which ones believed they had more time than they did.
This year-in-review reflects my reporting from Cannes Lions 2025, the IPA Effectiveness Conference, INMA Media and Subscription Week, the PPA Publisher Conference, NewsRewired, and dozens of other events and conversations with industry leaders throughout the year. For detailed coverage of specific sessions and announcements, visit themediastack.co.uk/archive.
Direct relationships are more valuable than reach certainly resonates with the patterns I’m seeing. My last post for 2025 on my strategic comms Substack ‘White Wiki’ concludes the same, informed by similar experiences.
Keep up the great work on Substack. Have enjoyed all your articles so far.
The 80-20 model from Black Buisness Magazine is probably the most underrated insight here. Traditional publishers keep trying to optimize the old playbook when someone already built a working alternative. Getting 80% from strategic partnerships instead of chasing ads fundamentally flips the incentive structure. I've seen this dynamic play out on smaller scale with B2B pubs where the partnership revenue ends up beign way stickier than programmatic. The tricky bit though is that this only works if the publication's audience actully aligns with what a major partner needs longterm. Still, feels like more should be experimenting with this.