Buying Creativity: What 2025’s Advertising-M&A Wave Means for Marketing Procurement
At RAUS Global, we spend time following the deals across the advertising industry because we believe new trends can be spotted before “everyone catches on”. Over the past couple of years, we have heard about the different buyers — Consultancies, Independents & New-wave networks, Private equity (PE) and finally the old school Holding companies.
The ANA recognized that marketing procurement and brand-side stakeholders were becoming a bit uneasy with all the movements, and they invited Lori Murphree, Founder & Managing Partner, Evalla Advisors to share some M&A statistics and provide recommendations on how to best work with the mergers happening now. This was one of the more captivating sessions at the ANA Advertising Financial Management conference held in Carlsbad, CA late April, 2025.
Who is buying?
Lori started by highlighting which types of buyers are “in the market” and what they are often looking for. Here are some of the statistics we found relevant:
- Private-equity platforms now account for ~40% of all marketing-services transactions.
- Legacy holding companies have pulled back, dropping from roughly 150 acquisitions a year in the late 2000s to just 26 in 2024.
- New-wave networks such as S4, Stagwell and Brandtech bolt on specialist shops at speed, fueled by data and AI ambitions.
- Consultancies and large independents raid the creative cupboard when they need storytelling to wrap around their process and data engines.
We also heard that Latin America has emerged as the geographic hotspot of choice — a blend of fast talent pipelines and cost advantage that interest buyers. Latin America is a region where traditional holding companies have tried but struggled to enter for many years. Reasons have been currency restrictions, non-transparency and difference in how to do business successfully. Latin America has always been in the top for creative excellence and now this is on the list for buyers.
Finally, the major gorilla in the room, the still-forming Omnicom–IPG marriage, with a promised US $750 million in cost savings, is forcing every rival to re-evaluate its current cost structure and to gage how they can take advantage of any crumble that may fall off the giant deal. For example, we have already seen both HUGE and R/GA be unloaded from the IPG books.
Why are buyers buying?
Let’s take a deeper look at why the different buyers are in the marketplace.
1. Private equity: scale fast, exit faster
A modern PE deal opens with a platform agency that keeps its logo, culture and P&L, then stacks bolt-on specialists — 85 add-ons across ten PE-backed platforms to date. The math is simple: flip in five-to-seven years at roughly four-times entry value. To hit that internal-rate-of-return hurdle, PE owners strip duplicate back-office costs, cross-sell like their bonuses depend on it (they do), and prize anything that turns margin quickly — performance media, commerce enablement, proprietary AI.
2. Legacy holding companies: plug the gaps, defend the core
Cash matters more than headlines. With investors punishing debt-heavy conglomerates, the big networks cherry-pick capability holes — commerce, influencer — while squeezing shared services, real-estate footprints and vendor stacks for efficiencies. The Omnicom-IPG union is textbook: one-part defensive scale, one part digital-transformation Hail-Mary.
3. Challenger groups & independents: culture over concrete
Founders who watched the old networks implode under bureaucracy have built lighter structures, often starting with a “clean sheet”- balance sheet. They buy “bite-size” agencies that won’t choke assimilation and promise autonomy at the execution level while integrating finance, HR and IT just enough to bank savings.
4. Consultancies: data wants drama
Ever since Deloitte swallowed Heat and Accenture snapped up Droga5, tech-consulting giants have understood that algorithms still need arresting ideas. They acquire when a shop’s creative muscle can be industrialized across enterprise clients — and when the price of building in-house would leave them trailing the holding companies by years.
Cross-cutting catalyst: Wherever you look, proprietary AI and data IP command premium pricing; sellers that can prove real code and clean first-party datasets find themselves at the center of bidding wars.
The anatomy of a successful merger
Lori has been “in the industry” for around 20 years and when she looks back, there are a few tell-tale signs that can help a Brand (and its marketing procurement partner) better understand if the deal will be successful or if the merger is bound to fail.
- Transparent books win the day. Buyers claw back price later if diligence turns up “numbers that don’t match”, so sellers that hand over clean, reconcilable numbers walk into integration planning stronger and leave fewer dollars on the table.
- Client continuity is the North Star. The best deals feel invisible to brands: service KPIs, escalation paths and governance forums are locked-in before day one.
- Cultural alignment plus “internal selling”. Post-close revenue synergies die when acquired leaders retreat into silos. Savvy CEOs brief as many internal stakeholders as external ones because they know a new sibling can be both competitor and channel partner.
- Ring-fenced talent. Key executives sign retention packages and know exactly who they report to; nobody wants their account director updating LinkedIn the morning after the press release.
- Back-office convergence — without suffocation. Finance and tech harmonization pay for a deal, but over-integration flattens culture. The art is deciding which systems migrate now, which in year two, and which stay local forever.
Get those five levers right and the promised cost synergies (usually 5–15% of combined overhead) often arrive on schedule. Miss them and CFOs discover that “one-off integration charges” are contagious.
How marketing-procurement can turn turbulence into advantage
You cannot prevent your roster agency from being courted — but you can turn somebody else’s strategy into concrete gains for your Brand. Think of the following measures as a layered defense-and-opportunity stack.
1. Lock in foresight
Add an M&A rider to every master services agreement (MSA). It should force the agency to give 90 days’ advance written notice of any change of control and to present a continuity-of-service plan within 30 days of that notice. Those three months are when you decide whether to renegotiate, re-scope, or re-pitch.
2. Price in performance guarantees
Service dips tend to spike between announcement and full integration. Peg 10–15 % of fees to “no-slip” KPIs — response times, error rates, on-time deliverables — for at least the first 12 months post-close. If the newly merged entity gets distracted, your key team is dispersed, competitors show up in the agency portfolio etc. your claw-back funds the fix. Also make sure that your brand gets pushed down the priority list if the agency now has other “top clients” to focus all their energy on. For a brand, it is often better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a large pond.
3. Guard the people who guard the brand
Use “named team” and “keyperson” clauses that require prior written approval for replacements. Lori flagged talent flight as the single largest post-merger mistake if the agencies are not thoughtful in integration planning; make sure you, not the buyer or the seller, decide who replaces your best people!
4. Benchmark your fees — don’t roll over
Depending on which type the buyer is, check any increases in fees or changes in rate-cards. Due to the touted synergy savings, not only the combined new entity should benefit, but so should you as a client of that new entity. If the buyer is PE backed, negotiate rate-card freezes for year one and caps tied to CPI thereafter unless scope expands materially. If the reason for the merger is synergies — ask for a share of the savings — it will impact your overhead rates.
5. Mine the upside
Mergers can unlock scale and smarts you never had access to. Negotiate “most-favored-client” rates for any new capability the parent group can now offer — be that a LATAM production hub, an AI content studio, or a retail-media toolset. Build option scopes into the MSA that let you trial these services at favorable prices.
6. Protect your data spine
Holding-company marriages usually trigger vendor and platform rationalization. Reserve veto rights over any tech-stack switch that impairs data ownership, log-level access or auditability. The Omnicom–IPG plan to cut tool overlap for savings is precisely the kind of move that could scramble dashboards your Brand depends on.
7. Elevate monitoring cadence
Flag PE-owned or newly acquired agencies in the supplier-risk matrix and review them quarterly. PE houses chasing a four-fold uplift move fast — sometimes faster than their own SLAs can keep up.
Reading the road ahead
The consolidation curve often follows the price of money — our interest-rate cycles, but the under-currents are more than ad hoc buying trends: platform-hungry PE funds, tech-focused consultancies, challenger groups surfing culture to steal market share. That makes marketing-procurement’s job less about predicting which shop sells next and more about institutionalizing agility — contracts, dashboards and relationship protocols that flex without always trying to beat the market’s trend cycle.
Here are three — Out of the Box ideas to make sure Marketing Procurement keeps bringing value to the table during times of change.
- Treat ownership change as routine, not a black swan. An agency that cannot show you an integration playbook before the merger is completed probably has bigger governance gaps than you expected, and you should address then sooner rather than later.
- Move from cost police to capability broker. The cheapest response to an M&A wave is often to re-scope, not re-price — leveraging new tools, talent and time-zones that the buyer brought to the table.
- Invest in procurement brand equity. The function that shows up early, with informed questions and value-positive ideas, becomes a trusted navigator — not the compliance officer everyone loops in at the eleventh hour.
One speaker asked the room to imagine a world with no M&A: “Would we be doing anything new?” The answer is, almost certainly, less. Change hurts, but it also teaches. For marketing procurement professionals who prepare — clean MSAs, sharp KPIs, seat-at-the-table integration reviews — every takeover notice is an invitation to renegotiate the value equation in their favor.
So keep the rider templates handy, track the multiples, know your roster’s ownership tree — and welcome the next press release. Because when the ownership charts redraw, the brand that is ready wins.
