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.
Looking back at 2025, it’s clear this wasn’t just another year of industry change. Cannes Lions, the IPA Effectiveness Conference, INMA Subscription and Innovation Summits, 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 biggest shock: Omnicom completed its almost $10 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group, creating the world’s largest marketing services company. Within weeks, the human cost became clear: 10,000 jobs lost as DDB, FCB and MullenLowe brands disappear by mid-2026.
DDB—named Network of the Year at Cannes Lions 2025—created defining work for Volkswagen, John Lewis and McDonald’s. All gone, consolidated into three global networks. The decision came down to “positioning, client relationships and international footprint.”
The merger reordered the entire industry. Publicis dropped to second. WPP fell to third. Scale is now everything when pitching multinational accounts.
WPP: The Fall of a Giant
If Omnicom-IPG represented consolidation from strength, WPP’s 2025 represented collapse from weakness—December’s ultimate indignity: ejection from the FTSE 100 after 27 years.
The numbers are brutal. Market cap collapsed from £24 billion in 2017 to £3.1 billion by year-end. Share price plunged 62% in 2025 alone. Two profit warnings. Major client losses, including Coca-Cola, to Publicis. Revenue declining 5-6% year-on-year.
Mark Read announced his departure as CEO in June, after seven years and amid falling revenues. Cindy Rose replaced him in September, inheriting severe distress. Her assessment was blunt: WPP had “not gone far enough or fast enough.”
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 agencies like J. Walter Thompson and Young & Rubicam with tech specialists VML and Wunderman—undermined brand recognition without delivering comparable capabilities.
The GroupM restructuring came from weakness, not strength. Major accounts had already left. Analysts now view WPP as a takeover target.
The message is stark: in a market reshaped by AI and data, legacy operations and famous agency names provide no protection.
The Traffic Crisis Nobody’s Solving
David Buttle’s data at the PPA conference stopped everyone cold: 5-8% of publisher traffic now comes from ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity—with zero monetisation opportunities. ChatGPT is growing three times faster than the early internet did.
The traditional search economy—where publishers ranked, got clicks, and served ads is being replaced by generative search that provides direct answers. For B2B publishers, the effect is even more pronounced.
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. Platforms can change algorithms overnight. Email lists are yours.
The Creator Economy Template
Professor Lucy Kueng’s keynote at NewsRewired laid it out starkly: Scott Galloway generates £20 million annual revenue with 18 people. L’Oréal and Unilever now spend 50% of advertising budgets on creators rather than traditional media.
Legacy publishing—hundreds of staff, expensive infrastructure, declining revenues—looks increasingly unsustainable by comparison.
P&G’s Marc Pritchard emphasised long-term brand building. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy outlined how data and AI are reshaping commerce at a scale that makes traditional advertising look quaint. Creativity still matters—but only when powered by data and measurable outcomes.
The most significant announcement came later: the Creative Brand Lion for 2026 will recognise organisations that have built internal systems and capabilities to consistently produce world-class marketing. It’s a fundamental shift—rewarding organisational excellence over creative one-offs.
The Education Crisis
A Tickaroo survey of 170 journalism students revealed deep anxiety about AI replacing entry-level jobs. Andrew Grill flagged the core problem: schools ban AI use, treating it as cheating. Students arrive in workplaces where AI proficiency is assumed, but they’ve been conditioned to avoid it.
The industry faces a talent development crisis. Entry-level roles that traditionally taught journalism skills are being automated. Nobody’s figured out what replaces them.
The Problem Nobody’s Solving
The pattern across every conference was consistent. Direct relationships now matter more than reach. Email beats social. Communities beat audiences.
Publishers finally realised they need to charge AI companies for content. The era of giving everything away 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. Successful operations combine subscriptions, partnerships, events and strategic brand relationships.
What’s frustrating: the industry understands the problems. The solutions exist. The tools are available.
But nobody’s moving fast enough. Publishers continue cutting individual deals with AI companies rather than negotiating collectively. Universities teach structures that won’t exist when 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.
Read the full year-in-review on The Media Stack website.
This reflects my reporting from Cannes Lions 2025, the IPA Effectiveness Conference, INMA Innovation Week, PPA Publisher Conference, NewsRewired and dozens of conversations with industry leaders throughout the year.