For decades, the ritual of choosing a new marketing partner followed a predictable, grueling script. Major brands looking to award a multi-million-dollar account would initiate a year-long, seven-figure beauty contest. It was a marathon of logistics, calendar-wrangling, legal reviews, and intense internal politics.
However, recent commentary from top holding company executives—gleaned from quarterly earnings calls—suggests that this trillion-dollar industry milestone is undergoing a structural transformation. The traditional pitch is evolving, and for many of the world’s biggest advertisers, the year-long slog is no longer the default route.
Main Facts: The Changing Landscape of Agency Reviews
The modern agency search is no longer about gathering every major holding company for a sweeping beauty pageant. Instead, market leaders are opting for tight, highly targeted reviews, closed-door negotiations, or bypassing pitches altogether through strategic internal reorganization.
Recent high-profile movements highlight this shift:
- Coca-Cola: Following a shift where Publicis Groupe captured PepsiCo’s global media account in late 2024, Coca-Cola’s North American media account came loose. WPP notably sat the review out, leaving a truncated field of Omnicom and Dentsu to battle, with Omnicom ultimately prevailing.
- PepsiCo: Moved its global media account directly without conducting a traditional pitch process.
- Dyson: Evaluated the major holding company heavyweights at the start of the year before quietly settling on Omnicom.
- Jaguar Land Rover: Sought out a single holding company capable of building a bespoke, end-to-end unit to manage creative, media, and production under one cohesive roof.
According to David Muldoon, global managing director of marketing transformation at media management firm Ebiquity, clients are taking a far more proactive approach. "We’re working with clients three, four, and sometimes even five months in advance of a pitch process to ensure that they have that clarity before going to an agency," Muldoon noted.
Chronology: How the Pitch Process Has Shifted
Phase 1: The Era of the Beauty Contest (Historically)
For decades, brands operated under the assumption that moving an account required casting a wide net. Advertisers would invite every major agency holding company to pitch, running a complex, stage-gated process complete with exhaustive scorecards, multiple rounds of presentations, and massive legal resource allocation.
Phase 2: Consolidation and Market Realignment (Recent Years)
The playing field itself underwent massive structural changes. Omnicom’s absorption of IPG, Publicis’s relentless momentum, WPP’s ongoing structural rebuilds, and the regional pivot of groups like Dentsu and Havas drastically reduced the distinctiveness between traditional mega-agencies. At the same time, independent agencies began commanding serious consideration.
Phase 3: The Lean, Targeted Approach (Present Day)
On recent earnings calls, holding company leaders painted a clear picture of today’s market. Havas CFO and COO François Laroze emphasized a corporate focus on integrated pitches. Publicis CEO Arthur Sadoun noted that clients increasingly favor tight races pitting only one or two holding companies against each other. Meanwhile, Omnicom CEO John Wren highlighted an emphasis on helping clients directly extract value from their existing technology investments.
Supporting Data & Industry Insights
The fatigue surrounding traditional agency reviews is backed by first-hand accounts from media directors who have spent entire fiscal years refereeing pitch scorecards.
One media executive who managed a comprehensive pitch earlier in the year noted that the logistical hurdles—ranging from coordinating schedules around school half-terms to managing legal contracts and strict stage-gated briefs—ate up the better part of 12 months.
Ultimately, the executive noted that after all the effort, the holding companies "didn’t look all that different." Decisions frequently came down to fine margins:
- Commercial Viability: Is the financial structure sustainable and transparent?
- Service Differentiation: Does the offering genuinely stand apart?
- Personnel Quality: Are the specific individuals assigned to the account top-tier?
- True Integration: Do media, creative, and operational arms function as a singular unit rather than sharing a superficial logo?
Despite the friction, pitch management firms remain extraordinarily busy. Full-scale reviews continue to serve a critical administrative purpose: they establish a definitive market price. For large advertisers accountable to boards and shareholders, a competitive review offers verifiable proof that they secured the best commercial terms possible. Furthermore, some brands utilize the review process as leverage—calling a competitive review not to switch partners, but to force their incumbent agency to sharpen its operating model and pricing.
Official Responses and Executive Perspectives
Industry leaders have been vocal about the evolving mindset of modern CMOs and enterprise buyers.
"We see an increasing number of clients who know exactly what they want for their business, and actually truly understand the difference between the three of us."
— Arthur Sadoun, CEO, Publicis Groupe"Now what’s changed is that clients are actually looking inside their own organizations and looking at two things: what do they want to own and how can they be more integrated and more set up for success themselves."
— David Muldoon, Global Managing Director of Marketing Transformation, Ebiquity
Implications for Advertisers and Agencies
The transformation of the agency pitch carries significant downstream effects for the entire marketing ecosystem:
- Internal Audits Precede Agency Searches: Brands are increasingly looking inward before looking outward. By defining what capabilities they want to keep in-house versus what they need external partners to execute, brands eliminate the exploratory phases of traditional pitches.
- The Death of Superficial Switching: Because major holding companies offer increasingly homogenized capabilities, switching agencies simply for a "fresh coat of paint" is no longer justifiable to CFOs.
- Survival of the Agile: Agencies that cannot demonstrate true, frictionless integration across media, creative, and production risk being filtered out before a pitch even materializes.
- Rise of Closed Processes: When reviews do occur, they are more frequently closed, bilateral negotiations designed to save time on capability assessments, even if the legal and financial negotiations remain complex.
Broader Industry Snapshot: Q4 Briefing
While agency pitching dynamics evolve, the broader marketing technology and media landscape continues to shift rapidly across several key verticals:
- Meta’s AI Strategy and Muse: Meta is leaning heavily into its Muse AI agent as a core pillar of its future strategy, issuing new non-voting shares to fund its aggressive AI capital expenditures. While advertising integration for Muse remains a future consideration, Meta’s immediate focus rests on driving consumer adoption and establishing a robust data flywheel.
- The AI Shopping Hesitancy: Consumer adoption of AI-driven commerce platforms remains modest. Data indicates that 51% of U.S. digital shoppers have neither made purchases through AI platforms like ChatGPT or Google Gemini nor express any interest in doing so. However, early metrics for Meta’s Muse show an average purchase price of $200 among users actively engaging in AI-assisted shopping.
- Streaming and Ad Revenue Adjustments: Netflix has revised its full-year 2026 ad revenue forecast downward to $2.7 billion (adjusting from a previous $3 billion target). Meanwhile, Spotify announced a robust 306 million total premium subscribers in Q3 2026.
- Algorithmic Disruption for Creators and Advertisers: Meta’s upcoming rollout of in-app product browsing in live ads by default threatens to complicate advertiser reporting right ahead of the holiday shopping rush. Concurrently, YouTube’s testing of AI-generated answers at the top of desktop searches mirrors Google’s Search Generative Experience, sparking concern among digital creators regarding potential drops in organic views and site traffic.
