Welcome to 2026, where everything in advertising is getting duct-taped to everything else in the name of “transformation.” SPINS slaps MikMak on its natural-wellness dashboard and calls it commerce media 2.0. Google opens a sliver of Performance Max and sells it as “transparency.” Accenture Song eats agencies from the inside out while Omnicom and IPG morph into one giant PowerPoint deck. It’s not consolidation—it’s creative entropy. If you’re not merging, reinventing, or spinning up a proprietary OS, are you even in the business anymore?

Meanwhile, publishers are getting robbed in broad daylight by AI scrapers, Dentsu can’t give itself away, and the indie shops are building platforms that actually work. The only throughline? Every company is pretending their chaos is a feature, not a glitch. The marketing industrial complex has entered its “Frankenstein eats brunch” era—bloated, bolted together, and still asking for more funding.

SPINS, the Whole Foods whisperer of retail data, just bought MikMak, the ecommerce optimizer best known for turning click-to-cart into a religion. Terms of the deal? Undisclosed, but let’s assume it involved spreadsheets, some kombucha, and a shared hatred of siloed attribution. The real headline: commerce media is no longer a playground—it’s a battleground. SPINS wants the digital edge. MikMak wants actual shelf visibility. Together, they’re trying to become the Shopify-GPS of CPG.

This isn’t synergy. It’s survival. Brands want to know if that TikTok ad sold oat milk in Toledo. Now they might finally get an answer—just don’t ask how long the dashboard will take to load.

You can finally split-test creative in Google’s Performance Max. Rejoice, you’ve been granted permission to peek behind the algorithmic curtain—but only on weekends, and only if the machine spirit allows it. Run your tests, wait four weeks, pray the metrics make sense. Google's basically saying: "Sure, test your assets. We’ll still decide the winner."

The only real surprise? Advertisers are calling it “promising,” which is ad-speak for “we don’t want to piss off the machine that controls our ROAS.”

Dentsu tried to offload its international business and got ghosted harder than a bad Tinder date. Apollo bailed. Bain bailed. Even rival holdcos said, “Hard pass.” Now CEO Hiroshi Igarashi is facing a potential no-confidence vote, and the big “One Dentsu” dream is melting like a Tokyo snowman in Miami.

The lesson? You can’t run a global agency like it’s a regional fish market. Clients want leadership in London or New York, not polite emails from 13 time zones away. Madison & Wall politely called for “a fresh pair of eyes.” Translation: it’s over, Hiroshi.

Google just drew a fat, smug line in the sand: it’ll pay to access your journalism—but not to train on it. In front of UK lawmakers, Google said the quiet part out loud: AI training is just “statistical analysis,” not copyright infringement. Sorry, newsrooms—those AI Overviews cannibalizing your traffic? Totally legal. Totally free.

Want to opt out? Google gives you two options: nuke your traffic or stay and be silently scraped. It's like asking if you want your leg broken above or below the knee. Publishers are calling BS. Google’s calling it “policy.” Either way, you’re not getting paid.

Accenture Song isn’t playing the agency game—they’re building the entire damn stadium. With $20 billion in revenue and a Rolodex full of CEOs, they’re not pitching. They’re replacing the marketing department from the inside. Media plans? Cute. They’re architecting martech stacks, retraining teams, and building AI workflows like it’s SimCity for CMOs.

While holdcos jostle for shrinking media budgets, Song is upstream, telling Mondelez how to cut content costs by 50% and still hit the quarterly numbers. Not a campaign. A system. Not a brand refresh. A corporate rewire. The ad industry keeps asking if consultants will eat their lunch. Newsflash: they already own the cafeteria.

Omnicom kicked off 2026 by reminding everyone it’s now the biggest ad beast on the block. After acquiring IPG, it rolled into CES with Gwyneth Paltrow and a PowerPoint that screamed “please be impressed.” The pitch? This isn’t a merger. It’s a strength workout. Because nothing says innovation like 40,000 media buyers and 70 markets of synchronized slide decks.

They claim it’s not “scale for scale’s sake,” but come on—you don’t spend billions just to vibe harder. The message is clear: if you’re a client, bet on big. Just don’t expect them to remember your name.

Horizon Media, the original indie heavyweight, dropped HorizonOS—a new platform promising to rethink marketing ops without the holdco bloat. It’s open. It’s AI-driven. And it’s a shot across the bow at every corporate overlord still duct-taping their data stacks together.

The indie pitch is simple: we can build smarter, move faster, and not charge you five layers of overhead to do it. Horizon’s not alone, either—expect a wave of indie tech flexing in 2026. The shakeout is coming. Medium-sized clients are watching. The holdcos should be nervous.

After a two-year frostbite session, the creator economy is back in heat. M&A deals jumped 17% last year. Vimeo got snapped up for $1.4 billion. Tastemade went to Wonder for $90 million. Even Publicis is buying influencer platforms like it's stocking up for Y2K.

The money’s flowing, but the vibe is different. This isn’t frothy hype—it’s consolidation with purpose. The new kings? AI-powered social commerce tools and platforms that can actually prove ROI. If 2021 was the party, 2025 was the detox. Now? We’re in the “build or be bought” phase. And the private equity sharks smell blood.

Stay Bold. Stay Curious. Know More Than You Did Yesterday.

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Let me be clear: Dentsu's spectacular failure to sell its international business isn't just one company's problem. It's a verdict on an entire model, delivered by the market with surgical precision.

Here's what actually happened. Dentsu tried to offload its UK-based international unit—over $4.5 billion in net revenues, not exactly a lemonade stand—to rival holding companies and private equity firms. Apollo walked. Trade buyers lost interest. Bain Capital is now described, with delicious understatement, as "interested with significant reservations," which in M&A-speak translates to "we're backing away slowly without making eye contact." The stock dropped 11% when the news broke. Board briefings reportedly characterize the sale process as having "fallen apart."

Think about that. Nobody—not strategic buyers already in the business, not private equity firms whose entire job is to see value where others don't—wanted a $4.5 billion revenue platform badly enough to actually write a check. That's not a negotiating position. That's a judgment.

Why did buyers flee? Because Dentsu International is what happens when you bolt together legacy Aegis assets, make scattered CXM bets, add some production capabilities, wrap it all in a "One Dentsu" governance model run from Tokyo, and then spend years failing to fix any of it.

Any acquirer would be underwriting massive restructuring—Dentsu itself has already flagged 3,400+ role cuts—plus execution risk in markets where the company has chronically lagged peers. At today's multiples, with today's client pressures, that's not a turnaround opportunity. It's a liability you inherit.

Strategics already have their own global networks and, according to Financial Times reporting, showed little enthusiasm for bolting on "parts" of Dentsu. Even PE firms, who theoretically love a messy situation they can optimize, circled with "significant reservations" instead of conviction. That tells you everything.

The irony is painful. Dentsu centralized power in Tokyo and pushed for tighter integration across Japan and international operations under the "One Dentsu" banner. The theory: global coordination would unlock value. The reality: it created a control problem, not a growth platform.

Madison & Wall—whose analysis has been bracingly clear throughout this mess—has argued the group might be better off returning the international arm to semi-independent status. Translation: the centralization experiment failed, and now even restructuring advocates are suggesting you undo what you spent years implementing.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: a Japan-centric command structure trying to tightly manage complex Western client relationships from afar has struggled to convince multinational marketers that Dentsu can lead from London, New York, or other key hubs where decisions are actually made. Clients want senior talent with real authority sitting across from them, not regional outposts reporting to Tokyo.

Investors are now openly questioning CEO Hiroshi Igarashi's tenure. Reports suggest concern that shareholders may vote against his reappointment at the March AGM, effectively turning it into a referendum on his strategy. Madison & Wall's diplomatic call for "fresh eyes" is what people say when they mean "this isn't working and everyone knows it."

With activist investor Oasis already in the stock and a failed sale now public, the power balance has shifted. Management must present a credible turnaround plan or accept that governance changes may be imposed from the outside. Those are the only options left.

The Dentsu collapse is a flashing red warning sign for legacy holding-company models built on scale, financial engineering, and brand roll-ups. It's simultaneously a tailwind for the few that have already re-wired around product, data, and talent.

The market just told everyone that a $4.5 billion revenue network without a credible modern operating model is not an asset. It's a liability that even private equity won't underwrite.

For big holdcos: The ceiling on "efficiency plays" is now visible. After Omnicom–IPG, WPP's brand culls, and Dentsu's own consolidation of 100+ brands, investors are asking what value exists beyond cost cutting and headcount reductions. Publicis's relative outperformance—"the only one that is growing," as they like to remind everyone—sets a benchmark. If your model doesn't look like a tech-and-data platform with real client pull, your multiple compresses. A Dentsu-style "One X" re-org, executed without a sharp product point of view or empowered local leadership, is now a cautionary tale.

For clients: They just watched the market refuse to buy one of the world's largest agency platforms. That reinforces the narrative that "holding company scale" is not the same as effective global leadership on their business. It strengthens procurement's hand to push fees down ("if nobody wants to own this, why am I paying a premium for it?") and accelerates CMO openness to mixing independents, specialists, and in-house teams. In a world of in-housing and AI-assisted buying, the bar for external partners becomes very specific: senior talent, hard accountability, differentiated data and tech. Generic "global network" rhetoric is now actively discounted.

For independents: This is narrative oxygen. They can credibly argue that agility, senior access, and cultural coherence beat sprawling matrices that even the stock market won't touch. Talent already disillusioned inside holdcos—60% reporting negative morale in recent surveys—has one more proof point that the conglomerate game is about balance sheets, not careers or craft. That feeds the ongoing brain drain into independents, platforms, and brand-side roles.

For PE and M&A: Private equity just reset the risk pricing on big agency platforms. You can't lever up a drifting, culturally misaligned global network and assume a "synergies + digital spin" story will clear the investment committee anymore. Future deals will likely be more surgical: capabilities, regions, vertical specialists. Not "one more global network." For other holding companies, the lesson is brutal: if you don't fix the underlying operating model, there may be no exit other than a fire-sale of parts. The era of buying broken scale and hoping for the best just ended in public.

Here's what you don't want to hear: this could be you.

If you're running a holding company on the theory that global scale, procurement relationships, and "one-stop-shop" positioning will carry you through, the market just told you it won't. If you're centralizing decision-making without empowering local leaders who actually sit across from clients, you're building the problem Dentsu couldn't sell. If your growth strategy is cost cuts and "efficiency," you're in the same boat.

The few that are winning—Publicis, certain specialists, the strongest independents—have already moved past the old model. They've rebuilt around modern capabilities: data platforms, commerce infrastructure, senior talent with real authority, cultures that don't require 100-brand portfolios to pretend they're differentiated.

Everyone else is in the warning-sign business now. Dentsu is just the first to have it spelled out in public, with a failed sale and a leadership crisis to prove the point.

The question isn't whether your model is sustainable. The market already answered that. The question is whether you'll fix it before someone else makes you.

Behind the paywall is the part everyone actually cares about: the receipts, the whispered-over-latte power plays, the charts that make CMOs sweat, and the stuff PR teams wish you’d stop noticing. If the free feed is the trailer, ADOTAT+ is the director’s cut where the knives come out and the plot twists finally make sense.

Stay Bold, Stay Curious, and Know More than You Did Yesterday.