A decade ago, the chief executives of the major advertising holding companies gazed toward China with the particular optimism that attends the discovery of a market containing 1.4 billion potential consumers. The growth that had become difficult to promise shareholders in New York and London seemed to be waiting, patient and enormous, in Shanghai and Beijing.

That optimism has since encountered certain complications.

The global pandemic played its role, but the more durable difficulty for WPP, Dentsu and their peers has been structural: Chinese advertisers have moved their spending away from traditional channels — the television campaigns and print placements where Western agencies have long collected comfortable fees — and toward e-commerce, influencers (known throughout the Asia-Pacific region as "key opinion leaders," or KOLs) and the digital platforms that increasingly intermediate all commercial life in China.

"Holding companies in China are under more pressure than ever in their history," said Greg Paull, co-founder of R3 China.

The numbers bear this out. According to COMvergence data, WPP Media retained the largest market share among international holding companies in 2025, at 8.4 percent, but saw its billings contract by 5.5 percent. Dentsu and Havas also experienced declines. Publicis Groupe and Omnicom have fared better — Publicis saw billings growth of 13.6 percent last year — though whether this represents genuine competitive advantage or merely a gentler rate of displacement remains to be seen.

The underlying arithmetic is discouraging. Digital channels now account for 86 percent of Chinese media spending, according to Ebiquity, and eight platform companies — Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and Baidu among them — collect 85 percent of that digital spending directly. The KOL market alone, valued at €11.7 billion, represents 17 percent of total advertising expenditure in the country.

(One might note that when 85 percent of the money flows directly to eight companies, the role of the intermediary becomes somewhat philosophical.)

The holding companies have responded with the tools available to them: leadership changes, regional reorganizations, the hiring of executives familiar with digital commerce. Publicis installed Jane Lin-Baden, a former Isobar executive, as its Asia-Pacific chief in 2022. Omnicom reshuffled its Chinese leadership this June.

But leadership changes, however astute, cannot redirect the flow of advertiser money toward platforms that require no agency to book an influencer or purchase inventory programmatically.

For those in New York and London who once believed China would show them the future of advertising, it has. The future just turned out to include rather fewer holding companies than they had hoped.

Original story published in Digiday: "Ex-WPP chief's bribery case highlight China challenges", by Sam Bradley