• by Joe Mandese , 11 hours ago

As the dust settles on the post-IPG Omnicom, it now seems my speculation was correct that it isn't just sunsetting legacy Interpublic brands like IPG Mediabrands, Magna and FCB, but one of its longest ad industry legacies -- it is also sunsetting its role in benchmarking ad industry spending.

I predicted as much in my October 22 column speculating that IPG's Magna unit failed to issue a third=quarter forecast update and that it looked uncertain that it would be part of the big agency holding company year-end forecasts for the upcoming ad-spending year.

While Omnicom execs say the holding company likely will incorporate some of Magna's forecasting and marketplace intelligence capabilities into other internal Omnicom reports, it's unlikely they will be publicly released to the industry-at-large, effectively ending a legacy that began when the late industry forecaster Bob Coen joined IPG's McCann-Erickson unit in 1948.

And now that I think about it, that means 2025 will end with three fewer agency holding company forecasting brands -- Publicis' Zenith Media (which previously bowed out), GroupM (which has been rebranded WPP Media), and Magna (which has been subsumed into Omnicom) -- than the four we ended 2024 with. The last one standing, Dentsu.

If that seems volatile, consider that both Dentsu and WPP Media's parent WPP Group currently are exploring strategic alternatives as freestanding holding companies, so who knows what the next year will bring.

The good news is that new alternatives have emerged in their place, including research and analytics firm Guideline, consultant and newsletter publisher Madison and Wall, and a range of other third party consultants, analytics firms and Wall Street securities analysts.

The problem is many use different methodologies, including the taxonomy of line items they use to benchmark overall ad-spending growth.

And if you thought there were comparative apples-to-oranges differences among the big agency holding companies in the past, imagine the lack of industry standardization that will emerge in the wake of Interpublic's demise.

I've written before how Bob Coen once shared a spreadsheet with me showing annual ad spending -- by medium -- dating back to 1776. It was a hard copy, and I lost it over the years, but after writing about that, PQ Media Executive Vice President-Research Leo Kivijarv passed along a resurrected version, which I'm posting here for posterity. Because, you know, there still is some.

PQ, I might add, has done an incredible job of maintaining continuity with its own version of advertising, marketing and communications industry benchmarking and forecasting, picking up on a legacy previously founded by Veronis Suhler Associates.

But it is PQ's way of looking at the world, not the way an agency holding company would. And certainly not the way an agency holding company pioneering the field of agency forecasting following a research endowment conducted by Harvard University to understand the impact the ad industry has on the economy would back in the 1940s.

I'm not saying Interpublic's standard and methods were gospel, or even sacrosanct. I'm just saying it was a foundational model and had some continuity to it.

The truth is, Brian Wieser long ago rebooted Coen's original top-down methodology for counting ad spending to his own ground-up version during his stint at Interpublic, and he continued using that method when he firmly established GroupM's (now WPP Media).

And some of the most fascinating and insightful perspective on what advertising actually is -- much less what numbers should be included in benchmarks and forecasts -- came from the ongoing banter between Wieser and his colleague Kate Scott-Dawkins as they debated the merits of including, excluding or redefining many of the line items that went into it while he still was at GroupM.

Scott-Dawkins, of course, remains the most visible individual holding company forecasting executive, and is set to join former Magna exec Luke Stillman, now managing director of Wieser's Madison and Wall at Monday's opening ad forecasting panel at UBS' annual communications industry conference in New York.

So let me ask you readers who the new ad industry forecasting authorities are that MediaPost should use as part of our periodic reporting on the ad economy's growth?

For the past several years, we continuously updated a "consensus forecast" based on a composite of Interpublic's, Publicis', WPP's and Dentsu's public updates, but that seems a little thin with WPP Media publishing a couple annually and Dentsu normally publishing just one.

Should we reboot a new running composite featuring WPP Media, Dentsu, Madison and Wall, PQ Media, Guideline, and any others?

Or like Omnicom, should we just sunset the whole darn thing and call it a day and just ask ChatGPT to estimate it for us (see one below, based on a prompt made this morning)?

Heck, I'm open to ideas.