Onstage, Backstage, Offstage.

The Financial Times broke the news Monday: WPP is creating "WPP Creative," bringing Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA under a single umbrella while maintaining the individual brands in market.

The industry's immediate reaction? Skepticism and cynicism.

Sir Martin Sorrell, who built WPP through decades of acquisitions, called the plan "carnage." The Drum ran a headline predicting "the sunsetting of VML, Ogilvy & AKQA to begin." Bloomberg reported: "job cuts expected as businesses will share more back-end resources."

The assumption, instant and universal, is that this is brand elimination disguised as integration. And that assumption reveals WPP's fundamental problem.

When people hear "WPP Creative," they can't imagine these agencies working together without merging. They can't conceive of genuine collaboration while maintaining distinct identities. And that reflexive skepticism exposes a cultural deficit that no reorganisation can fix.

Because the model that has been described can work. In fact it does work. The problem is not the idea, but the executional likelihood of success. Unfortunately, WPP does not have enough time and gumption to make this work.

I spent seven years on the Publicis Groupe Management Committee leading together this exact transformation. The one that Madison and Wall, the marketing analyst firm, specifically cited this week as the model WPP should follow. Publicis "successfully centralised its creative operations several years ago," they noted, "sensing correctly the preferences that global marketers were expressing."

Not enough people outside Publicis appear to really understand as the single widest strategic moat of the business: it wasn't a structural change. It was a culture war. And we barely won it.

The best way to understand what Publicis actually did, and why WPP can't simply copy the structure, is through the metaphor of a theatre.

In the traditional holding company model, each network agency ran its own "theatre" for their clients and prospects. Leo Burnett had stages in London, New York, Paris etc… Saatchi had their own stages in the same cities. BBH built separate theatres next door. If you worked in one theatre, you never worked in another theatre at the same time. This is Publicis history, pre 2017, and largely describes where WPP is today.

Each theatre operated with three environments:

Onstage: Client-facing talent. Account management, planning, creative. The performers the audience sees.

Backstage: Non-client-facing work supporting the performance. Production, studio, insights, analytics, project management. The crew making the show happen.

Offstage: Corporate functions. HR, legal, finance, IT. Not at the theatre, but keeping it operational.

The problem? The theatres competed with each other. Leo Burnett London pitched against Saatchi London for the same client. They maintained duplicate backstage teams. Separate production units. Independent vendor relationships. Distinct workflows and systems.

A client could choose the Leo Burnett theatre or the Saatchi theatre, but coordinating across them required navigating separate P&Ls, competing incentive structures, and tribal territorial politics.

In 2017 Publicis eliminated the separate theatres entirely.

One theatre per market. Not Leo Burnett's theatre and Saatchi's theatre. Publicis's theatre. The country leadership team became responsible for the quality, growth, and profit of the entire theatre, regardless of which brand performed on stage at any given point.

Brands stayed onstage. What was at the time called 'Publicis Communications' and now called 'Publicis Intelligent Creativity' was NEVER on stage. It was an operating model, not a client facing brand. You still pitch and deliver as Leo Burnett or Saatchi or BBH or perhaps a bespoke unit made for you. They maintain creative identity, client relationships, dedicated client-facing teams. The brands are real. They drive work quality and client partnerships and distinctiveness that commands a margin.

But everything changed behind the curtain.

Common backstage team. All non-client-facing roles merged operationally into one team serving every onstage brand. This became the umbrella clients never see. Production, studio, analytics, project management, insights… these functions support all creative brands simultaneously.

Then Offstage is Publicis Groupe. Global distributed delivery (near shoring and offshoring models), legal, finance, treasury, HR operate at holding company level serving all markets. Maximum centralisation of everything that doesn't directly create client value.

The objective: minimise what's onstage (expensive, brand-specific, client-facing), maximise what's offstage (efficient, centralised, shared), architect backstage ruthlessly around client outcomes rather than protecting agency brand margins.

Put another way, here is the Publicis Groupe operating model in two sentences: Groupe where possible, solutions where necessary and solutions where possible, brands where necessary. Global where possible, regional where necessary, and regional where possible, local where necessary.

This is the entire winning Publicis model on one page. It's not a secret. You can easily find the formula for Coca-Cola, but that doesn't mean you can make 'Coca-Cola'.

When clients consolidate with Publicis, they're buying;

But this only works because of culture.

Publicis is now the only holding company operating as an actual integrated company. WPP's stock is down 60% over the past year. Publicis just posted its seventh consecutive year of revenue growth.

This is where the industry's reaction to "WPP Creative" becomes diagnostic.

When the Financial Times reports that brands will "continue to operate independently," the industry hears: nothing actually changes except reporting structure.

When The Drum predicts "sunsetting" of the brands, they're revealing what decades of holding company observation teaches: you can't have agencies "operate independently" and genuinely integrate. The incentive structures don't work. The P&L protection instinct overwhelms collaborative intent.

Publicis succeeded because we eliminated the thing that made integration impossible: agency brand P&Ls.

The bifurcation in the industry is accelerating faster than most CMOs realise. On one end: Publicis and Accenture with genuinely integrated operations. One theatre per market. Brands onstage. Shared backstage. Centralised offstage. Culture that enables collaboration without merger.

On the other end: specialist agencies with focused expertise amplified by AI. Small troupes with deep capabilities and zero organisational friction.

In the middle: traditional holding companies carrying organisational friction they can't eliminate through restructuring announcements or McKinsey recommendations.

WPP's challenge isn't whether to create "WPP Creative" as this was an obvious outcome. The challenge is whether they can build the culture that makes Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA genuinely collaborate without eliminating the brands.

Can their leaders prioritise client outcomes over protecting agency margins? Can backstage teams actually integrate operationally, or will they maintain separate systems to preserve autonomy? Can compensation reward collaboration over individual agency performance?

These are cultural questions. Not structural ones.

Publicis fought this culture war from 2017-2020. It required a CEO with conviction to execute consistently despite investor skepticism and internal resistance. It demanded eliminating structures that many leaders built entire careers around. It forced identity transformation for thousands of employees.

It wasn't impossible. But it's exceptionally rare for large organisations to execute successfully.

Publicis took time, we did it when it wasn't yet urgent, and relentlessly stuck to a vision of collective success. WPP doesn't have enough time, they are running out of runway and cash. It's now too urgent. And the vision, shown by the press and rumour this week, is not clear.

You can't reorganise your way to cultural transformation.

Form must follow function. And if your culture can't imagine collaboration without merger, no amount of structural reorganisation will deliver what clients actually need: integrated solutions without organisational friction.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 12 February 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.