Scale has stopped being the advantage in creative and media, and the leadership built for it is the exposure.
The biggest businesses in creative and media are rebuilding themselves at the top. WPP folded GroupM into WPP Media and restructured into a single company. It left the FTSE 100 in December 2025 after 27 years. Its shares fell more than 60 per cent on the year. Omnicom absorbed Interpublic to become the largest advertising company by revenue. It displaced WPP from the position it had held for years.
For decades the value in these businesses sat in scale. It sat in the reach of a network and the pricing power of being the biggest buyer. AI is repricing that advantage towards zero. The leaders who rose by running scale are the ones a board now has to look at hardest.
The two largest boards in the industry are already betting opposite ways on it. No board across creative and media gets to abstain from the same decision.
The holding companies are dismantling scale
WPP built the largest advertising group in the world on scale, and in 2026 it began taking that structure apart. GroupM, the media-buying operation that anchored the model, is gone, folded into WPP Media. Trade coverage has every holding company rebuilding itself.
The money is already moving towards capability. WPP folded its production into a new AI-driven unit of more than ten thousand people. In Canada, Statistics Canada finds information and cultural businesses the most likely to use AI, more than two in five of them, against roughly one in five across all business. The advantage is moving from how big a business is to how well it uses the technology.
The brands repriced scale before the boards did
The first market to stop paying for scale was the brand. The ANA’s 2026 in-housing report has marketers five times more likely to say brands are in-housing more than ever than pulling back. Research for Adweek has 32 per cent of brands expecting to handle nearly all their creative in-house within a year, and 23 per cent at least half of it.
The agencies feel it. In Basis’s 2026 report, agency confidence fell below half for the first time, and a majority had lost work to brands building the capability themselves. IAB Canada’s Enterprise 2026 report reads the same way, with trust and accountability now harder to separate from performance. When a brand produces inside what it once bought for the network’s scale, the premium the network charged for that scale is gone. A company that still prices its business on scale is pricing an asset the buyer has already marked down.
The sector has split on scale
WPP and Omnicom read the same change and moved in opposite directions. WPP is pulling its structure apart and rebuilding around AI. Omnicom is doubling down on scale, absorbing Interpublic to become the largest group by revenue. One is betting that scale is the problem, the other that scale is still the answer.
The same split runs through the markets FPZ serves. Dentsu expects global ad spend to pass a trillion dollars in 2026, and names the algorithmic era as what now decides how growth is won. In Singapore, agencies are repositioning themselves as outcomes partners rather than volume shops, betting on fewer and culturally sharper campaigns. Wherever a company sits, it is placing a bet on where leadership value now lives, and doing nothing is the bet that scale still holds.
Neither bet is safe. WPP has already paid for its restructure in market value and its place in the index. Omnicom now carries the execution risk of the largest merger the sector has seen. A company watching from outside the top two owns the same call on a smaller balance sheet. The businesses setting the price of leadership in creative and media are the ones still arguing about it. Treating the question as settled is the one position the evidence does not support.
The board carries the leaders that scale rewarded
Scale did not run itself. Executives who rose managing networks and headcount ran it, rewarded for the scale they ran. That profile is the one the restructure is unwinding. The leadership a board built for the scale era is the exposure it now carries into the business that replaces it.
A creative strategy leader at a major US media network put the shift plainly.
“There used to be that perception that biggest was best. Now that fragmentation is definitely happening, because people are realising it is difficult to be such a huge group. It is turning an oil tanker versus a tugboat, particularly in the wake of AI.”
That accountability sits with the board and cannot be delegated. The leaders who made scale work are not automatically the leaders who run what replaces it, and telling the two apart is the board’s judgement to make. Its mandate is to reset the company’s leadership readiness for a business that no longer wins on size. A chair that reads scale as a permanent advantage will keep backing the leadership that ran it, long after the value has moved on.
Three questions decide whether a board has seen the repricing.
- Is our leadership built to run scale, or to lead the business that replaces it?
- Where in our structure is scale still priced as an advantage that has already gone?
- If value has moved off scale, who at the top can see where it went?
The leaders built for scale are what boards reset next.