Through December we ran a year-ender series on our website asking leaders across advertising, media and marketing about the biggest development in 2024 and one thing they're manifesting for the industry they work in.
Unsurprisingly, the majority of the leaders listed AI as the biggest development in 2024.
It’s not only these leaders but any conversation with anyone in the above domains, leads towards AI. As one spends more time conversing – the conversation steers towards it being ‘par for the cause’ and a requirement.
Not for one second am I doubting AI and its impact.
But as seen in the last few months, another word has stronger implications for the industry.
Consolidation.
Omnicom just acquired IPG. JioStar was recently created out of a merger between Reliance Industries and The Walt Disney Company.
While the scale of these two mega-mergers may not be met next year, we expect this trend to continue.
Senior agency leaders moved on to create their own agencies over the last few years. While we aren’t getting into the pros and cons of having so many agency options for marketers, we are getting to that life stage of those agencies now looking to ‘scale’ and achieve a certain size.
In the January issue of Manifest (which can be bought here), Ashish Khazanchi reveals that Enormous itself is looking at options in the agency space. Wondrlab has been doing so since it launched in 2020. Dept is in the market as well looking for strong options. Other independent agencies have had several conversations hinting at acquisitions (either making them or wanting to be acquired).
In 2023, we saw the VMLY&R-Wunderman Thompson merger which made the latter defunct.
And if water cooler conversations are to be believed (after all there’s no smoke without fire), we can expect more such ‘consolidations’ among the big holding companies.
Many more iconic agency brands on both the advertising and media side will be impacted by these changes.
Will it be good for the industry?
While the human and logical answer is we need to wait and watch, we have asked AI the same question as part of our ‘AI Gyaan’ column in the January issue and one among the respondents, ChatGPT had the cons outweigh the pros, in a 5:4 ratio.
So AI rules that consolidations are bad for the industry, while leaders obviously believe in it because they’re pushing for it.
Who wins?
Let 2025 and beyond unveil it.
Wishing all our readers a great 2025!
The author is founder and editor, Manifest. This first appeared in the January issue, the copy can be bought here.