There is something almost touching about watching an industry that spent years arguing about the shape of the future discover that everyone was drawing the same picture all along.

The major advertising holding companies — Publicis Groupe, WPP, Omnicom, Havas and S4 Capital — have emerged from their latest earnings season speaking what amounts to a single language. The vocabulary varies by corporate culture, but the sentence structure is identical: tear down internal walls, connect creative and media and data and technology, run it all through an artificial intelligence platform, and make the whole apparatus easier for clients to buy.

This represents, if not quite a truce, then at least a consensus. After years of positioning themselves as representing fundamentally different visions of what an advertising conglomerate should become, the big groups have converged on a model that looks rather like what a thoughtful observer might have predicted in 2018. (The thoughtful observer would also have predicted it would take longer than expected to get there, and would have been correct about that too.)

The financial pictures remain distinct, of course. Publicis, under Arthur Sadoun, presents itself as the group that can invest while maintaining margins. WPP, now led by Cindy Rose, is in what she describes as a "stabilize" phase, with a return to organic growth targeted for 2027. S4 Capital, Sir Martin Sorrell's post-WPP venture, more than doubled its operational EBITDA and continued reducing debt.

What unites them is the pitch: a client who enters through one door can be persuaded to use several others.

The irony, as several executives have noted with varying degrees of directness, is that convergence on a single model makes differentiation more important, not less. When everyone promises creativity and media and data and commerce and technology, connected by artificial intelligence and delivered with fewer internal walls, the question becomes whose version of that promise a client finds most convincing.

It is a familiar problem in advertising, actually — one the holding companies have been helping their clients solve for decades.

Original story published in The Drum: "Forget the agency of the future debate, the holdcos have reached the same conclusion | The Drum"