Dr. Seuss’s 1957 book The Cat in the Hat is a classic in the lexicon of children’s literature. If you never read this book (or had it read to you), here’s a brief recap of the plot. The Cat, a tall character in a red bow tie and red-and-white-striped top hat, descends upon the house of Sally and her brother on a rainy afternoon when the kids are stuck indoors and their mother is out. The Cat instigates all manner of mayhem to entertain the kids. In the process, the house becomes a shambles. But at the eleventh hour, the Cat unleashes Voom, a fantasy vacuum cleaner that wipes, sweeps, sucks, and restores the house to its previous “neat and tidy” state—only moments before the kids’ mother returns.

The Cat’s Voom is an apt metaphor for the holding companies that have been sucking up ad agencies for years. No business sector is immune to consolidation and mergers. As one industry veteran remarked, “Everybody outside the ad agency business is dying to get in; everybody inside is dying to get out.” And some owners just get fed up and sell out. But attrition has hit the advertising business particularly hard as smaller creative shops are bought up by monolithic agencies or holding companies for reasons that range from taking their competitors off the market to acquiring key accounts and creative firepower. 

Another Voom sucking is in the offing on a scale that makes The Cat in the Hat’s efforts look Lilliputian. In December of last year, Omnicom, one of the “Big Six” global holding companies, announced its intention to merge with another Big Sixer, Interpublic. It’s worth noting that this bride and groom have been to the altar before. The same couple attempted matrimony back in 2013. However, as is typical with transactions of such magnitude, the devil is in the details and the deal fell apart. If they succeed this time, the result would be the largest marketing entity in the world, with 130,000 total employees—or I should say 130,000 before the layoffs.

When companies merge, layoffs are almost inevitable. Omnicom execs have already said publicly that they’ve identified $750 million in annual cost savings when the two entities combine. That’s a lot of pink slips as accountants deduce that a department of twelve people is unnecessary and cut it to three. I hate to overthink these things, but frankly I’m a bit puzzled as to why Omnicom finds Interpublic such an attractive bride in the first place. Maybe they see her as “the one that got away” back in 2013. Maybe they’re fond of fixer-uppers. The Interpublic balance sheet isn’t very flattering—flat revenue in 2023, with growth of only one percent predicted in 2024. They’ve also lost a couple of big accounts in recent times: Verizon ($3.82 billion in domestic ad spending) and BMW ($180 million in domestic ad spending).

Jay Chiat, founder of Chiat Day (now TBWA/Chiat Day)—the agency that created top-drawer work for Nissan and other brands—once speculated on how big his agency could get before the creative work got bad. (Chiat sold out to TBWA in 1995; TBWA is an Omnicom subsidiary.) Whatever the merits of these mergers, a better creative product is seldom the outcome. Why? Simple. Creatives are like kids: they thrive in a fertile environment. In a “merged” environment where layoffs are inevitable, however, they behave like nervous chickens, laying thin-shelled eggs that break before they can be brought out of the nest.

There’s a lot of blame to go around for how things got to be this way. Today the ad business is almost unrecognizable to Madison Avenue’s heyday, when the Don Drapers of the business sucked down martinis and actually stood for something. The evolving of digital media and incursions by Google and Meta have stolen the traditional agency’s lunch by devaluing the creative product in favor of technology. With companies hanging so much on social media these days, the prevailing attitude seems to be, “How creative does it need to be anyway? They’ll post something else tomorrow.” And the next day. Increasingly, it’s quantity over quality–like one of those all-you-can-eat buffets. The food is really mediocre but there sure is a lot of it.

Contributor Lance Evans, writing for the online magazine Creative Bloq, provides keen insight on the plight of creatives in the current climate. Evans worked in the creative departments of Della Femina Travisano & Partners, Bates, and Foote, Cone & Belding during their mergers. Reflecting on the realities of the business today, Evans states, “The future of advertising appears to be lean and mean, and the big dollars are going to the best technologies. No longer the best creatives.”

Is it any wonder that the best work still comes out of independent shops like Wieden + Kennedy? For almost 43 years, Wieden has remained an independent agency. Dan Wieden, who passed away in 2022, said, both privately and publicly, that they will never sell out. He remarked, “It just isn’t fair that a handful of people would walk off with great gobs of money, and those left behind will either face salary cuts or be fired and the culture will be destroyed.” Wieden disclosed that he and the partners got together a couple of years ago and put all their shares in the agency into a trust. That trust has one directive: never sell the agency.

As far as the debate over whether technology or creativiy should be more highly valued, I’ll stick with Albert Einstein, who famously said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” There you have it. Mr. and Mrs. Omnipublic, I wish you all the luck in the world. And would one of you please throw the bouquet?