This isn’t just consolidation; it’s advertising’s Great Reset.
This is surely the correct answer, and surely not the one that will emerge.
Two brands, one platform. It’s what McKinsey would recommend, what shareholders dream about, and something that would actually compete with Publicis’s Power of One.
But here’s the tragedy: advertising people are nostalgic. They can offer great advice to clients, but run their own businesses incredibly poorly.
Point advertising people at a client in a similar situation, and there would be a unanimous push for consolidation. But these doctors never heal themselves, and the board does not have the stones for this level of disruption.
The Nuclear Option requires a wartime CEO, not John Wren, who for all his significant qualities, is a peacetime general managing decline, not revolution.
The most successful mammal on the planet is the brown rat. They dominate our planet. And the reason for their populous success is grisly: the mother rat will, if stressed, threatened, or hungry, cull a significant proportion of her brood. It’s a horrendous but fundamental act that ensures her survival, and the survival of the strongest of her litter.
This merger is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to focus and evolve. And the question at the heart of all of this is not which brands the new company should kill. That always leads to a soft and partial answer. The proper question is how many brands the new company needs to succeed.
Mark Ritson will teach the ADWEEK MiniMBA in Marketing in April 2026, a ten-week MBA level program for senior managers who never received (or have completely forgotten) proper marketing training. Sign up here.
