The merger playbook in PR and marketing is alive and well. The newly merged Golin Ketchum just launched. Last November its parent company Omnicom acquired IPG for $8.9 billion.
We know these M&A deals are good for the bottom line, that’s why the industry is fond of them: OPR’s Q1 revenue jumped 81.9% year-over-year driven by the acquisition.
But are these balance sheet deals actually good for the PR client?
Not if you understand whose business they’re serving.
Holding companies are in the business of reselling media inventory, and PR exists inside them to justify access to massive media budgets. That’s why independent agencies, where communications is the main business, consistently put client outcomes first. The holding company PR model is structured to do the opposite.
The Business Model
WPP principal media buying alone, known as non-product related income, has generated more than $1 billion annually, according to public filings, while PR revenue fell 1.7% and creative agencies declined 3.9% in 2024.
Media buying is the real goal for these large corporations. They want the client to give them a $2 billion media budget worldwide. Then they throw in the PR, creative and other services.
But they get larger margins on the media buying. So the public relations arms of these holding companies exist to justify the access to the media budgets, not as standalone value drivers. That’s bad news for the earned media strategy of PR clients.
Meanwhlie, this whole model is getting transformed before our eyes. When major platforms mature, the margins on the media arbitrage model compress. Google and Meta built open ecosystems that attracted holding company ad spend, but then they later moved programmatic buying in-house and squeezed the markup. It’s a common pattern. When the arbitrage margin compresses, the overhead built around it has nowhere to go. That’s when the brands get consolidated and mergers happen.
In the Golin-Ketchum case, Golin was growing 8% in 2025 to $435 million while Ketchum was shrinking down 8% to $530 million, per PRWeek. So this was a structural fix, not a growth strategy.
The irony is that while this media arbitrage model has been collapsing, PR has never been more valuable to clients. The rates charged for it tell a different story.
Why Do Holding Companies Treat PR as a Loss Leader?
For years, holding companies have given PR away as a sweetener to win media buying, which trained the market to undervalue PR. Major account decisions get made in CFO offices and passed down to PR teams that are told to turn a profit on a deal that was not structured to work.
This resulted in junior-heavy staffing and clients that can’t meet their objectives. Without clear PR measurement tied to business outcomes, clients have no way to push back on the rates they’re being charged or the junior staffing they’re receiving. Meanwhile, PR billing rates have stayed flat with inflation for decades, while legal, accounting and consulting rates have climbed.
This has happened while PR’s strategic importance and communications leadership inside companies has grown dramatically as companies try to rise above the noise. CCOs now report directly to CEOs and integrated communication budgets have expanded. Yet the rates that PR agencies charge have not kept pace. If there’s a choice between investing in the media buying business and investing in the PR side, the choice is clear.
When PR is underfunded and undervalued inside a holding company, the people doing the work notice. Then they leave.
Talent and Scale
Holding companies have had several waves of layoffs in recent years. That has pushed tens of thousands of experienced practitioners into consulting and freelancing. Holding companies argue that consolidation gives clients access to a deeper talent pool, but when they restructure and have layoffs, that argument doesn’t hold water.
The talent is still there. It’s just no longer inside the holding company. The talent war is a meritocracy, regardless of which agency people come from.
Independent agencies aren’t at a disadvantage when it comes to talent, because top talent wants to do the best work. They know that they have the freedom to do it at independent agencies. Independent agencies recruit from the same talent pool, serve the same clients and compete for the same briefs. The difference is what happens after they win the business.
What Independence Means
At an independent or boutique PR agency, every decision connects to a simple question: Does this serve the client? There’s no holding company CFO setting bill rates to protect a media buying relationship. No quarterly margin target inherited from an acquisition. No earnings call where PR is a line item to be managed. They are laser-focused on their clients’ PR needs because their business depends on it.
When we built Audit*E at Bospar, we weren’t responding to shareholder pressure to announce an AI investment. We were responding to a specific client problem: Brands were becoming invisible in AI-generated answers, and the tools to measure and fix that didn’t exist yet.
A focused investment deployed with real adoption across client work produces more than a $200 million holding company initiative that employees don’t know how to use.
The merger playbook will continue. There will be another combination announced, another rebrand, another promise to transform the industry. But the underlying math doesn’t change.
If your agency’s biggest business decisions get made in a CFO office to protect a media buying relationship, your PR program is a sweetener, not a priority. For any brand thinking seriously about communications budget allocation strategy, the structure of your agency relationship matters as much as the talent inside it. The question worth asking before your next agency of record review: Whose business is your agency actually running?
