In February 2026, WPP announced it would fold Ogilvy, VML and AKQA into a single creative entity called WPP Creative, as part of a broader restructure into four divisions targeting £500 million in gross annual savings by 2028. Revenue had fallen 8.1% year on year. The CFO confirmed the savings would 'inevitably involve headcount reductions.' The CEO said they'd be hiring 'AI-native' employees while cutting others. It has been presented as transformation. When in actual fact it's a consolidation. The distinction matters, because the two produce very different outcomes for the clients and the thousands of people caught in the middle.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a criticism of any of the agencies involved. Ogilvy, VML and AKQA each have genuine creative heritage and myriad incredibly talented people. The question isn't about the quality of what they do. It's about what happens to distinct creative cultures when they're merged under a shared P&L, governed by a holding company that needs to find half a billion pounds in savings — publicly stating that most of those savings are at the expense of people.

The holding company model was always built on a particular argument: that you could own multiple competing agencies, keep them culturally independent, and sell that independence to clients as a feature rather than a bug. Clients got genuine creative competition.

Agencies kept their identity.

The holding company took a margin.

It was a reasonable model when the economics held.

But the economics stopped holding. Clients started taking work in-house (something I've increasingly seen first-hand), AI started compressing the cost of production, and the talent premium that justified agency fees started eroding. The margin fell… then disappeared, and what's left is the structure without the justification.

What concerns me about the WPP move isn't the logic of it as in a business where your cost base is predominantly people, if you need to rapidly cut costs, buying less premium sparking water for the office isn't going to do the trick. So you cut people. That's not a cynical view — it's merely arithmetic.

What is most concerning is the creative consequence of merging agencies that have built distinct positioning over decades, then assuming that the sum will be at least as good as its parts. Creative culture isn't a spreadsheet line. It's the accumulated result of who a place hires, what it rewards, what it's willing to do and refuse, who leads it and what they care about. You can't preserve that in a merger deck and inch-thick report to management.

I've worked with and inside agency structures across my career, and the pattern is consistent. When agencies merge under financial pressure, the short-term savings are real and the long-term creative output suffers in ways that don't show up in the quarterly numbers until we've all travelled much farther down the road. The clients who valued the distinct voice of one of those agencies quietly start to look elsewhere. The talent who built that voice starts leaving. The merger that was supposed to create something stronger ends up with something larger, more faceless and more bland.

The harder question, which few if anyone at a holding company level seems to want to address directly, is whether the holding company model itself is the right structure for what clients actually need in 2026. If clients want integrated, AI-enabled, data-driven marketing delivered efficiently, a holding company with premium pricing and multiple overlapping agencies probably isn't the answer. If they want brilliant, distinctive creative work with genuine cultural authority, merging those agencies and cutting the headcount isn't the answer to that either.

WPP isn't alone in this. The whole sector is doing versions of the same thing, reorganising around a challenge they don't yet fully understand and are adapting to day-to-day, week-to-week. That's not a result of incompetence, but rather one of uncertainty. But calling it 'transformation' when it's actually survival doesn't make the decisions better.

As Judge Judy said in the title of her 1997 book: Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining.