The Front Foot

Last week, WPP confirmed what its balance sheet had been saying for two years. Revenue down £1.2 billion. Operating profit down 71%. Free cash flow collapsed from £738 million to £202 million in a single year. My "Evaporate28" wasn't a commentary. It was a description.

And this week, the industry is doing what it always does with uncomfortable data. It is processing the WPP results as evidence of industry decline. It is reading the Omnicom-IPG integration chaos as further confirmation that the holding company era is ending.

The narrative writes itself. Platforms are taking the work. CMOs are taking it in-house. AI is doing the rest. The agency, in this telling, is in managed decline.

There is a different read. An optimistic one.

And Gartner just published the evidence for it.

On February 23, Gartner published findings from 402 senior marketing leaders across North America and Europe.

65% of CMOs say AI will dramatically change their role in the next two years. Only 32% believe they need significant new skills to meet that disruption. Incredibly, 20% believe no change is needed for them personally at all. Only 15% of CEOs believe their CMO is currently AI-savvy.

The trade press read this as a CMO crisis. A skills gap. An individual leadership failure requiring training interventions and capability programmes.

That is not what this data says.

What this data says is that 68% of CMOs are sitting with full knowledge of an oncoming transformation and are not moving toward it. Not because they're unintelligent. Not because they don't understand the stakes. Gartner is explicit: they understand them perfectly. They are stationary because the forces keeping them still such as internal politics, team resistance, personal career risk, the sheer gravity of existing practice are more powerful than the theoretical case for moving.

Those forces do not yield to internal pressure. An internal team has a P&L relationship with the CMO. They have careers that depend on the CMO's approval, budgets that flow through the CMO's signature, advancement that requires the CMO's endorsement. They cannot look across the table and name what's actually happening.

The agency can. That is, structurally, the entire point of having one.

The Gartner survey is not evidence that agencies are becoming less necessary. It is the most powerful demonstration of agency necessity the industry has produced in years. The 68% who are informed and stationary are not going to be moved by their internal teams. They are not going to be moved by platforms selling them tools. They are going to be moved by an external partner with no career dependence, no internal political cost, and a clear-eyed view of what standing still will cost them.

Step back from the immediate conversation about AI and ask the structural question.

Why does a CMO have an agency partner at all, when they could build an internal team, use platform self-service tools, and retain specialist consultants for specific needs? The economics of in-housing are increasingly viable. The platforms are increasingly capable. The AI tools are increasingly accessible.

The answer given most often is capability.

Agencies have skills you can't sustain internally, creative depth you can't justify hiring full-time, media access and data capabilities that require scale to build. All true. All increasingly challenged by platforms and technology.

The answer given second most often is demand management.

Agencies provide flexible capacity to scale up for a campaign, down for a quiet quarter, without the fixed cost of permanent headcount. Also true. Also increasingly replicable through project-based models and AI-augmented small teams.

But there is a third reason.

And it is the one that cannot be replicated by any platform, any in-house team, or any AI tool.

I learned this reason as a client myself. I was leading the Coca-Cola portfolio in the UK in 2002 and we were working with Mother. If you know Mother, you know they do not simply receive a brief and execute against it. They challenged my briefs constantly. They challenged my judgement. They were, at times, genuinely uncomfortable to be around, not because they were difficult, but because they refused to let good enough be good enough. I found myself frustrated enough that I went to my CMO for advice.

What she said I have never forgotten.

She told me that my entire career until that point, I had been driving Fords. The McCanns and Ogilvys of the world, across my different postings around the globe. They were reliable, professional, capable agencies that responded to direction and delivered against expectations. Mother, she said, was a Ferrari. You cannot just get in and drive it like a Ford. If you try, you will break it, and yourself. But if you learn to drive it you can make magic.

She was right. The work that came from that period was some of the best of my career. Not despite the friction. Because of it.

That is positive tension. And it is the specific function that justifies agency fees at a level that in-house teams and platform tools cannot command, because it is the one function that neither can provide. An in-house strategist who tells the CMO that the CMO's personal AI illiteracy is the primary constraint on transformation has made a career-limiting decision. The agency strategist who says the same thing has done their job.

The Gartner survey describes 68% of CMOs who need exactly that conversation. The agency is the only actor in their professional ecosystem with the structural freedom to have it.

Most CMOs have never had a Ferrari relationship. They have had Ford relationships. They do not know what they are missing, and a Ford agency will never show them.

Because a Ford agency doesn't know either.

A frightened agency does not challenge their clients.

I watched this pattern at close range through thirteen years at Publicis. The agencies that were struggling financially were the agencies that became most agreeable. They softened their points of view. They accepted briefs without questioning them. They optimised for relationship preservation rather than client development, because when you are not sure whether you will still have the client next year, the risk of a difficult conversation feels existential.

The holding company results are not just financial news. They are a signal about the quality of the agency conversations happening inside those relationships right now. At exactly the moment when the Gartner data tells us CMO clients need to be challenged most, the agencies most exposed to holdco pressure are least capable of providing that challenge.

Omnicom is digesting a merger while eliminating thousands of jobs and consolidating agency brands. Every professional inside that integration is managing their own uncertainty. The remaining talent is watching restructuring announcements and calculating personal risk.

That is not a culture that produces front-foot client relationships. It will accelerate the decline.

Put more plainly: why is Publicis winning share and will continue to win share? They are on the front foot. With a client-obsessed CEO who is not distracted by a merger like Omnicom or a deep and painful transformation like WPP.

The holdco results are real. The financial pressure is real. The anxiety is understandable.

But the Gartner data sitting alongside those results tells a more interesting story if you read it as an agency leader rather than as a market observer.

Thirty-two percent of CMOs are already moving. They have identified the gap and are closing it. They are building personal fluency, not just delegating AI to their teams. They are the clients who will be standing when 2027 arrives and they will remember, specifically and gratefully, which agency partner was in the room pushing them forward when pushing forward was harder than staying still.

Those clients exist in your current roster. Some of them you already know. Others are hiding inside what looks like a standard retainer relationship, waiting for someone to raise the standard of the conversation.

The agencies that emerge from this period with those relationships intact, with CMO clients who credit them when asked how they got ahead of the curve, will not be competing on price in the next review cycle. They will be competing on evidence. On the track record of challenge that produces a story the CMO can tell the board when the board asks.

That evidence is built in the next eighteen months. One difficult conversation at a time. One quarterly review where the gap is named rather than managed. One pitch room where the mandate being offered is genuinely accepted rather than just answered.

My CMO at Coca-Cola didn't tell me the Ferrari was comfortable. She told me it was worth learning to drive.

That is still the only honest thing to say about the agency's role right now. The question is which agencies are willing to be Ferraris, and which clients are ready to stop settling for Fords.

The front foot is available. The Gartner data has just told you that 68% of your clients need someone to drive them harder than they are currently being driven, and the holdco results have told you that the agencies most likely to do it are under the most financial pressure to do the opposite.

That is the gap. The agency that steps into it earns something no pitch can manufacture.

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 2 March 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.