Miša Lukić: The Future of Agencies

Exactly five years ago, I published the article  – “Advertising: From Alchemists to Distributors… and Back Again” and it became the most-read piece in Media Marketing’s history.

At the time, I said that if agency networks didn’t transform, they would collapse.
And now, five years later, I’m here to say – that collapse is already underway.

If you had listened to that warning in 2020 and decided not to invest in agency networks, the numbers today would say everything I possibly could – and more.

In July 2020, had you invested $100,000 in WPP, the largest global agency holding company at the time, your stake would have shrunk to just $49,200 by August 2025 — a painful −51% collapse. That’s not a market fluctuation. That’s a business model in free fall.

Meanwhile, had you placed the same $100,000 into Microsoft, a company built on platform logic and exponential intelligence, you’d now be sitting on $268,700 – a +169% gain.

The agency model didn’t just underperform. It betrayed its own potential.

The titans of creativity (WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, IPG), are not collapsing because of a single crisis. They are unraveling because they were built for a reality that no longer exists.

WPP is no longer too big to fail. It’s simply too big to move.

Unless it radically rethinks what it is, why it exists, and how it creates value in an intelligent economy, its current trajectory leads not to collapse but to irrelevance through erosion.

Publicis Groupe – The Best-Looking House on a Sinking Street

Let’s be clear: a 24% YTD decline is not a footnote. It’s a flashing signal.
The market has stopped rewarding transformation stories and started demanding performance proof at AI speed, modular cost, and systemic value creation.

Omnicom Group + IPG – This isn’t the creation of a super-agency.

It’s the collapse of two old empires into a single, slower-moving one.
In a world that rewards speed, intelligence, modularity, and purpose, adding mass isn’t the answer. It’s the final delay before the reckoning.

What Agencies must do now

The agency model, as we’ve known it, is over, not because it failed, but because it refused to evolve fast enough.
The agency model isn’t being disrupted by other agencies – it’s being replaced by platform titans like Meta, Google, Amazon and very soon OpenAI, designing the tools, systems, and intelligence layers brands now depend on. But the disruption isn’t just top-down. It’s also coming from below – from modular startups, micro studios, and freelance networks armed with AI and plugged into real-time workflows.

This is not a shift in competition. It’s a shift in logic.

So what must agencies do now?

Everything. Or nothing.

Because the time for incremental change has passed. This is not about adapting.

It’s about rebuilding from the ground up.