The stock market rendered its verdict on agency stocks in 2025, and it wasn’t kind. WPP has plunged 62% and is dropping from the FTSE 100 after 27 years.
The 2025 Scorecard:
WPP: -62% YTD, market cap collapsed from ยฃ24B to ยฃ3.1B, exits FTSE 100
Publicis: -25% YTD, but analyst ratings at multi-year highs (data + AI capabilities lead)
Omnicom: -18% YTD, IPG merger closed, world’s largest holding company
Dentsu: Strategic review, overseas operations under evaluation
WPP’s fall is particularly instructive. The company lost a string of high-profile clients (including Coca-Cola’s US and Canada media business to Publicis), issued two profit warnings, and saw new CEO declare the previous trajectory “unacceptable.”
The Pattern: Winners invest in technology platforms and data assets. Losers optimize legacy operations. The gap compounds as AI capabilities scale.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
