Although we hope you’ll be there to participate and absorb the conversations onstage, in the town hall discussions and in the hallways of the JW Marriott Desert Ridge, here’s a breakdown of five themes affecting the media agency world.

AI’s deepening effect on media agencies across so many areas

Having just attended Advertising Week last week, the buzzword easily mentioned the most across the vast landscape of content was AI. That’s for good reason. Every agency is finding ways to use AI as a means to streamline work, free up staffers from rote tasks to think bigger and better, and to ideate at a level not seen before. 

AI has also transformed the scope of agency initiatives into much larger missions, with Known’s Skeptic platform offering a perfect example of something that started out as a way to corral data better and turned into a secret weapon for the independent agency.  

But potential potholes and pitfalls dot the agency landscape as AI swirls over it, not least of which is the erosion of entry-level jobs — that will likely lead to a drought of mid-level talent once today’s entry-level staffers move up the chain. Meet the People’s founder Tim Ringel will also address how to solve for regulatory and privacy issues, as well as warning against the danger that overuse of AI will lead to homogeneity in crafting solutions for clients.  

Finally, search has been completely upended in just a year’s time by the major AI firms, as well as the OG of search, Google, whose AI Overviews has ushered in the era of zero click search. Wpromote’s Christine Schrader will address this very topic at the summit. 

Creators and influencers have gone from fad to table stakes

Now comes the need to organize, and the holding companies are paying attention and buying up the independents, best evidenced by Publicis’ acquisition of Captiv8 this year, and Influential last year. Influencer’s Jenny Penich will walk through the magnitude of change as well as best practices to harness the power of this marketing channel.  

Independents continue to innovate and generate growth in the era of consolidation

Given how bulky and lumbering the holding companies sometimes appear and behave, it’s really not hard to expect that a well-run independent media agency can fare pretty well. And since the current wave of industry consolidation took root last December with Omnicom’s move on IPG, pretty much every analyst and most biz dev execs anticipate a steady dropping out of mid-size to large clients from the holdcos, due to the latter’s obsession with size and scale.

In other words, 2025 represents a sort of year of the independent, as waves of its own consolidation (from Havas and Horizon Media’s JV to Brainlabs’ acquisition of Exverus Media) and the beefing up of resources extends across the indie landscape. 

One side effect of this boosting of independent fortunes is interest from private equity and venture capital firms in building scale at the level of attracting those refugee clients leaving the holdcos. But there are also investors like Vikram Seth of Know Co., which takes stakes in Indies to help them access tech and funds to grow on their own without being plundered by PE. Seth will also speak at the summit this week.

The role of DSPs and the open web is affecting the way agencies plan and invest

According to Digiday’s Sam Bradley, who often writes about the opportunities and vagaries of today’s programmatic-driven and partly automated ad marketplace, part of the reason we’re seeing agencies push so hard on bespoke post-cookie targeting approaches like contextual ad tools and the use of lookalikes is to emphasize their importance. It’s a way of pushing back against a surge of DSPs diminishing their role them through media buying automation and joint business deals and one-stop-shop menus.

Take, for example, all the partnerships Amazon has established — it’s looking in many ways to be the be-all end-all for the ad marketplace, far from its origins as an e-commerce destination.

Whether it signals the end of the open web remains to be debated. But there’s no doubt that between the stranglehold the walled gardens have had on digital media, and the evolving influence of DSPs on attracting a larger share of ad dollars, the buying and selling of media keeps getting more complicated than ever before. 

Retail media and commerce keep growing but also hit growing pains

Although its breakneck pace of growth has slowed down somewhat, retail media and the broader definition of commerce media remains an area every agency has spent time investing in and guiding clients. Meantime, the number of marketers throwing their hats (and data) into the selling ring continues to grow to outwardly large numbers — the latest entrants being American Express and Mastercard.

The summit will offer insights from that latest entrant, Mastercard, on how retail and commerce media fit in broader media planning, given their ability to approximate attribution. 

That said, nearly every analyst agrees the shakeout of players is inevitable, and could impact the industry as early as 2026. It’s estimated that the 250 players could shake out to about 10-20 top players (like Amazon, Walmart and a handful of others). 

As Sarah Marzano, principal analyst at eMarketer, told Modern Retail’s Anna Hensel in September, “[Retail media] has gone from an emerging media channel to a major media channel, and with that maturity, it’s somewhat inevitable, as we’re comping a much larger base, that we’re going to see the rates of growth start to decelerate year over year.”

Color by numbers

One single number stood out last week as an indicator of how pervasive generative AI has become to the world at large. OpenAI’s new video-generation app, Sora, generated a 5,040% surge in searches for “Sora invite code”, which could lead to a massive influx of AI slop into the social media sphere. “There will soon be a tsunami of AI-generated videos on social feeds,” said Saul Marquez, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Outcomes Rocket. “As we see services like Sora become mainstream, everything in a scroll could be synthetic … This creates a big problem for brands that are founded on authenticity.”

Takeoff & landing

• M+C Saatchi acquired The Women’s Sports Group, a media rights consultancy. WSG will become part of M+C Saatchi Sport & Entertainment, with Rachel Knight and Steph Harries as co-MDs of the division.
• Media by Mother opened up a London office, four years after launching in New York, and will be led by CEO David Gaines and Tara Grimes, who’s been head of media planning but moves over the pond to become director of media.  
• OOH media agency Billups named several executives to leadership positions as it expands globally. Marc Marienfeld was named managing director for Germany, based in Munich, and comes HYGH AG where he was chief growth officer. Salvador García was named managing directorfor Latin America, based in Mexico. And Sunil Yadav was named head of revenue, APAC, based in Singapore.
• Account moves: Delta Air Lines put its media business up for review, currently handled by Omnicom’s PHD … IPG Mediabrands landed media AOR duties for retailer H&M in six APAC markets: Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam … Mediaplus Group landed Burger King’s media strategy, planning, and buying across Germany … Canadian digital bank EQ Bank tapped Arrivals + Departures to be its media and creative AOR. 
• Personnel moves: WPP Media’s CEO of North America Sharb Farjami is leaving the holdco, and his role will be temporarily filled by global CEO Brian Lesser while a replacement is found … Publicis Sports hired Suzy Deering, former CMO of Ford and eBay as its new CEO. Deering is a Publicis boomerang, having been CEO of Moxie from 2012-15 … Gravity Global promoted Jose Lozano from president to CEO, replacing Mark Lethbridge who becomes executive chairman … Independent Siberia hired Jeff Brecker to be its partner, for growth & innovation … Razorfish hired Will Ferguson to be its chief growth officer, coming over from a similar role at Dentsu Media … Novus named Adam Weiler to be svp of data & analytics, coming over from Razorfish. 

Direct quote

“FAST channels have taken on greater importance in the CTV landscape as their viewership has steadily increased over the past few years. A partnership with Viant shows that Tubi understands the value of a consolidated identity space, which is critical to reaching the precise audience an advertiser wants and managing frequency to targets within that audience.”
— Harry Browne, vp of TV at Tinuiti, as told to Sam Bradley

Speed reading

• Sam Bradley covered the long-tail aspirations of FAST channel Tubi, as it strikes a deal with DSP Viant. 
• I wrote about attention metrics firm Adelaide striking a partnership with Nielsen to be included in its outcomes measurement service as part of Nielsen ONE. 
• Bradley also caught up with FanDuel’s president of sports Mike Raffensperger to discuss the ins and outs of the betting firm’s unique deal to sponsor the NBA on NBC Universal.