Big Tech Growth Puts Agency CEOs Under Pressure | #MediaSnack

Senior advertisers are being squeezed from three directions at once.

Big tech platforms are still posting strong ad growth, agency CEOs are trading blows in public, and a critical piece of neutral identity tech, LiveRamp, now sits inside Publicis. This #MediaSnack episode is about how you respond without flinching or wasting money.

Watch the replay below. 

The ID Comms Breakdown

This episode unpacks how big tech's surging ad revenues, a public WPP versus Publicis spat, and Publicis buying LiveRamp all converge on one pressure point for CMOs: how to run media agency pitches and platform deals that create outcomes, not just noise, risk and higher prices.

Whats going on?

We open with the latest Q3 numbers from the platforms that dominate your media investment. Alphabet sits at around 88 billion dollars in quarterly revenue, up roughly 15 percent year on year, with Google advertising up about 10 percent and Google Search and YouTube both growing in the low teens.

Meta reports approximately 63 billion dollars of revenue, up around 26 percent, and Amazon’s advertising revenue is up about 11 percent. Reddit, while much smaller, is growing fastest, with ad revenues up roughly 54 percent year on year and a rapidly maturing ad proposition. Reddit has also generated about 33 million dollars in a year from licensing its data for AI model training, a 500 percent increase, which signals how valuable high intent social data has become.

These results are consistent with recent market coverage. Storyboard18 reports that Alphabet’s advertising revenue rose about 10.6 percent to more than 82 billion dollars in a recent quarter, with Search up 12 percent, while Meta’s ad revenue grew to around 63 billion dollars and Amazon’s ad services business increased by roughly 11 percent. Reddit’s ad revenues rose by about 54 percent, off a smaller base.

Alongside this, you have a visible public spat between WPP’s CEO Cindy Rose and Publicis. On WPP’s Q3 earnings call, Rose questioned the rise of pitchless account awards, suggesting that some business was moving on a CEO handshake. Publicis responded with a very public ‘Dear Cindy’ letter on Instagram, calling that an insult to client intelligence and citing wins like PepsiCo and Microsoft as the result of months of testing, not coffees and nods.

Then there is the LiveRamp deal. Publicis has now been cleared by the FTC to acquire LiveRamp for about 2.2 billion dollars. LiveRamp has been one of the most widely used, holding company agnostic identity platforms, connecting advertiser first party data to third party audiences and platforms. It is now owned by one holding company, with guardrails imposed by regulators but real strategic questions for everyone else. 

What are the implications?

The first implication is simple. The big platforms are still vacuuming up ad spend, growing faster than the holding companies, and increasingly going direct to advertisers. Meta reports that a million advertisers have already used its generative AI creative tools, which have produced around 15 million assets that Meta can optimize and deploy. That is a lot of work that might previously have sat with an agency creative or production team.

The second implication is cultural. The Dear Cindy exchange reveals the level of pressure holding company CEOs are under. When one CEO questions pitchless moves and the other fires back in public, you get a glimpse of the strain behind the scenes. Agencies are worried about the cost and fatigue of big pitches. Publicis wants credit for rigorous but non theatrical diligence. Advertisers sit in the middle of that tension.

The third implication is structural. A previously neutral piece of identity infrastructure now sits inside Publicis. The FTC has required nondiscriminatory access and firewalls, but the very fact that regulators felt compelled to act tells you the stakes. For non Publicis clients, this is not a minor procurement choice, it is about whether a core part of your data spine lives inside a competitor’s holding company.

How should marketers be thinking?

Our stance is blunt. This is not the moment to drift along with the market. Big platforms, big agencies, and big adtech are all reorganizing around their own advantage. If you do not take an equally deliberate view of your pitches, your joint business plans, and your identity stack, you will be paying for other people’s strategies, not your own.

You need three lenses. First, outcome validation on platforms, not just impression and cost comfort. Second, a governance reset on when and how you run agency pitches, and where renegotiation or transformation deals are a better route. Third, a professional risk assessment of your identity tools, especially LiveRamp, that covers neutrality, data protection, and your walk away options.

Big tech Q3: where your media money is really working

The headline is that big tech ad growth is still strong, even if analysts see the first hints of cooling. AdNews reports that in a recent Q3, Google ad revenue rose about 10.6 percent to roughly 82 billion dollars, Amazon’s ad revenue increased 11 percent to almost 20 billion dollars, and Meta again delivered around 26 percent growth. AdNews

For a CMO or Procurement Director, the real question is not whether these numbers are impressive. They obviously are. The question is where your incremental dollar is actually working. We described a boardroom conversation with a very senior FMCG leader who was spending hundreds of millions on one major platform and was unconvinced it was right for the business.

That executive confronted the platform with a challenge. If the platform insisted the problem was creative rather than inventory, the brand would keep spend level for six months but impose a new rule. No ad would run unless the platform had pre approved the creative. After six months, business performance had not moved at all, so the advertiser shut the spend down.

This is a useful prototype. Do not confuse platform growth with your own growth. Just because Alphabet, Meta or Amazon prints double digit gains does not mean your campaigns are delivering incremental outcomes. You should be building your own validation routines, not relying on platform case studies or generic benchmarks.

There are three practical moves we are already seeing from sophisticated advertisers.

• First, doubling down on structured joint business plans with the big platforms that hard wire outcome metrics, test budgets, and clear review cadences into the relationship.

• Second, running regular performance audits that separate business results from platform reported proxies, using independent analytics where possible.

• Third, insisting that your agency articulates a simple, point of view on what each platform is for in your portfolio.

The Reddit example from the episode shows why this matters. Reddit’s ad revenue is growing fast and its data licensing to AI models has increased 500 percent year on year. That makes it attractive, but also raises questions. Where does Reddit fit in your mix. What signals are you really buying. If you treat it simply as another cheap reach vehicle you ignore the specific value in community and high intent discourse, and you risk overpaying for under leveraged attention.

The same goes for Meta’s million advertisers using its gen AI creative tools. There may be a role for machine generated creative variations, but the question is whether they shift business outcomes at acceptable marginal cost. Your job is not to chase every feature. It is to harness this innovation where it compounds brand and performance, and to walk away where it only serves the platform’s revenue line.

Pitches, platforms and the "Dear Cindy " debate

The WPP versus Publicis back and forth has reignited an old seasonal question. Is the traditional media agency pitch broken. On the WPP earnings call, Cindy Rose talked about the burden and cost of pitching and critizised "pitchless" decisions that looked like CEO handshake deals, warning against bypassing proper due diligence.

Publicis’ open letter, posted as Dear Cindy on Instagram, took that personally. It argued that big wins like PepsiCo and Microsoft are not the result of handshakes but of months of testing by marketers, engineers, data architects, and procurement teams. The letter called any suggestion otherwise an insult to client intelligence and finished with a pointed reference to WPP exiting the Coca Cola US pitch.

Strip away the theatre and you have two truths that can coexist.

• First, some large deals really do start with a very big number floated in a small room, before the operational teams are asked to make reality match the promise. We have both sat inside negotiations where an attractive number neutralized a potential pitch and procurement teams were then left with an almost impossible enforcement task.

• Second, when major global advertisers move billions of dollars of media, there is inevitably a huge amount of work behind the scenes. Whether you badge it as a pitch, a transformation sprint, or a strategic partnership, you are rewiring contracts, scopes, workflows, platforms, and people across many markets. That does not happen over an espresso.

So is the pitch broken? 

The honest answer is that the lazy pitch is broken. A multi month theatre of chemistry meetings, speculative strategy decks, and bread buying to impress clients, without a clear change thesis, is an expensive distraction for you and for agencies. A focused process that is anchored on specific improvements, with tight scopes and outcome metrics, is still one of the most powerful tools you have.

Practically, you need a decision lens. Start by asking five questions.

1. Can you articulate the top five improvements you need from your media agency over the next 18 to 24 months.

2. Do you believe your incumbent can deliver them with a properly structured transformation plan.

3. Is there evidence of agency fatigue, such that another pitch would simply burn cycles rather than sharpen performance.

4. Are there structural shifts, such as the LiveRamp acquisition or a holding company level realignment, that fundamentally change the landscape.

5. Do you have the internal capacity to run a genuinely professional pitch, or would a high integrity renegotiation backed by external advisors produce better value.

If you cannot answer those questions cleanly, postponing a pitch and clarifying your needs is often the bravest, and best, decision.

LiveRamp, identity and your data governance risk

LiveRamp has sat for years as one of the main neutral pipes in digital advertising. It connects your first party data to a wide web of audience profiles and platforms, and its RampID has become a common currency. With Publicis now acquiring LiveRamp for about 2.2 billion dollars, that pipe effectively sits inside one holding company. Digiday

The Federal Trade Commission stepped in precisely because of the competitive risk. Its consent order requires Publicis to provide neutral, nondiscriminatory access to LiveRamp products and services, to keep strict firewalls between LiveRamp customer data and Publicis, and to submit to independent audits for several years. The regulator’s stated concern is that Publicis could otherwise use LiveRamp control to nudge clients toward its own media agencies, even when those clients prefer competitors.FTC

For Publicis clients, there is a potential upside. You sit closer to a powerful combination of LiveRamp, Epsilon, and the broader Publicis stack. For everyone else, there is a clear dilemma. Do you stay with LiveRamp under Publicis ownership, trusting the firewalls and audits, or do you move to an alternative identity solution and accept the transition cost. Digiday lays out both sides of that choice in some detail, from neutrality and feature set to migration risk.

Our advice is to treat this as a governance decision rather than a procurement footnote. Start by mapping exactly where LiveRamp touches your ecosystem today. Which data sources feed in. Which activation platforms rely on its IDs. Which measurement and attribution processes use RampID. Without that map, you cannot quantify risk or change cost.

Then, define your red lines. For some advertisers, the key concern will be competitive sensitivity within a category. For others, it will be keeping agency selection and identity infrastructure selection separate, so that they can change one without collapsing the other. If your current media agency sits in a different holding company, you should at least scenario plan what happens if that partner, or its group, decides to step away from LiveRamp.

Finally, build your options. That might mean testing an alternative ID solution in one or two priority markets, establishing explicit rights in contracts to port IDs and audiences if you move, or using this moment to clarify how your data, privacy, and security obligations are enforced with every partner, including LiveRamp. The point is not to panic. It is to ensure that you are choosing where your data spine sits and on what terms, rather than having that choice made for you by corporate M&A.

If you want a practitioner level view of that risk, this is exactly the sort of assessment we do quietly for advertisers. Sometimes the right answer is to stay with LiveRamp under new ownership, with tougher governance. Sometimes it is the trigger to future proof your identity stack elsewhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is big tech ad growth still outpacing the rest of the market.
Yes, the largest platforms are still growing ad revenues in double digits. Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Reddit all reported strong Q3 gains, with Reddit’s ad business up roughly 54 percent year on year, even as analysts expect growth to normalize over time.

2. Does strong platform growth automatically mean my campaigns are working.
No. The CPG / FMCG example we shared shows that hundreds of millions invested in a single platform did not move business performance, even after six months of platform approved creative. You must validate outcomes yourself rather than assuming platform growth equals your growth.

3. Are media agency pitches really broken after the Dear Cindy spat.
The lazy, theatrical pitch is broken, not the disciplined one. Huge chemistry shows and endless decks without a clear change thesis waste time on all sides. Focused processes that pursue specific improvements, with evidence based evaluation, still create real competitive advantage for advertisers.

4. Should I avoid pitchless moves because they look like CEO handshakes.
Not necessarily. Some highly disciplined transformations happen without a formal competitive pitch, but with months of testing and diligence. The key is whether you can see the evidence, understand the commercial logic, and enforce the deal, not whether the process ticks a traditional pitch checklist.

5. What should I be asking my agency about big tech joint business plans.
Ask for a clear articulation of what each major platform is meant to do in your mix, how success will be measured beyond platform reported proxies, and what tests you will run this year. Then lock those expectations into joint business plans that both the agency and the platform sign up to.

6. How worried should I be about Meta’s gen AI creative tools.
Treat them as another tool, not magic. With a million advertisers generating around 15 million creatives, there is clear momentum, but the question is incremental business impact. Make your agency prove where machine generated variants lift performance versus well crafted human creative, and cap testing budgets accordingly.

7. What are the practical risks of Publicis owning LiveRamp for non Publicis clients.
The main risks are perceived loss of neutrality and potential pressure, over time, to align identity infrastructure with agency selection. The FTC’s order introduces firewalls and audits, but you should still map dependencies, define red lines, and build alternatives so you are never trapped.

8. Should I rush to switch away from LiveRamp now.
Not by default. For many advertisers, the best move is a structured review: confirm the protections in place, test at least one alternative ID solution in a controlled market, and negotiate explicit portability rights. Switch only when you have a clear performance and governance case, not on emotion alone.

9. How do I decide between pitching, renegotiating, or transforming in place.
Use a simple lens. If your needs are clear and your incumbent is structurally unable or unwilling to meet them, a pitch is valid. If the relationship is strong but misaligned, a tough renegotiation or transformation sprint is often better. If you cannot state the top improvements you need, pause and diagnose first.

10. Where can I get an independent view of my media gameplan.
This is the work ID Comms does every week with CMOs, Procurement Directors, and Global Heads of Media. Sometimes our work is entirely behind the scenes, pressure testing platforms, agencies, and data partners so that your next move improves competitive advantage rather than adding noise.

Episode Transcript

Okay, we are live. Welcome to MediaSnack Live. Those big ad tech, big tech revenues are surging in Q3, so we are going to look at that. Meanwhile, the pressure is clearly building on the agency CEOs, spilling over into this public spat between Publicis and WPP.

Who is right, who is wrong, and does it really matter. We will find out. We are also asking if the traditional agency pitch is officially broken. It seems like a seasonal topic, everybody asks that every few months. Where is advertiser money really generating a return when you invest in pitches.

If you stay until the end, we will give our view on the confirmation that Publicis has been green lighted to acquire LiveRamp, and what the implications and watch outs are for advertisers.

Live from New York and live from London, it is MediaSnack Live.

Hello, I am Tom Denford in New York.

And I am David Indo from London. Welcome to MediaSnack Live.

This is our weekly roundup of the important news, stories, and trends you need to know about the global media and marketing industry. In every show we ask three questions. What is going on. What are the implications for advertisers. And what should marketers be thinking about next.

Thanks for joining us. Let us get into this week’s show.

All the gossip is centred on this unusual public story. We joked about Queen Cindy and King Arthur going to war, the War of the Roses. The gloves are off between WPP and Publicis, and we will get to that because people want to hear the gossip and the implications.

First, we are going to dive into some of the big tech Q3 results. Last week we looked at the holding companies’ Q3 numbers. They were a mixed bag but, on the whole, mid single digit year on year growth, suggesting the market is moving in the right direction.

Now we have the big tech Q3 results from Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon. These businesses account for about 60 percent of the roughly trillion dollar marketplace that we operate in, so comparing their Q3 results with the holding companies tells an important story.

David runs through the numbers. Alphabet, the biggest of all, has cumulative revenues of about 88 billion dollars, up 15 percent year on year. Google advertising inside that is up about 10 percent. Google Search is up 12 percent. YouTube is up 12 percent year on year. These are big double digit gains.

Meta is next. Its revenue sits at about 63 billion dollars, up 26 percent, with advertising also up 26 percent. Amazon, the third leg of this massive stool, is up about 11 percent in advertising revenue. These businesses dominate so much advertiser spend and exposure, and they are bringing in remarkable amounts of money.

One result that stands out is Reddit. Its revenues are up 54 percent year on year. The absolute numbers are much smaller than Alphabet or Meta, but 54 percent growth in 12 months is staggering. Reddit has been taking advertising seriously for the last couple of years and is now a legitimate part of the ad platform environment.

Reddit also made about 33 million dollars in licensing its data to AI training models, a 500 percent year on year increase, and that is likely to keep growing. Reddit is a rich source of model training data, and more advertisers are recognising it as an ad platform.

These platform results underline how dominant the big tech players remain. Agencies have traditionally felt that they sat at the top of the pile. They gathered advertiser spend, aggregated it, and decided how budgets were divvied up. Now, in many ways, they are subservient to the platforms.

The platforms are not only taking more money directly than flows through agencies, they are also the technology suppliers to agencies. That is a double threat to the agency CEO who looks at these numbers and sees the platforms getting stronger and stronger.

Looking one level deeper into the data makes this clearer. Within Meta’s reporting, not only is ad yield going up, but impression volume is about 7 percent up. That suggests usership and time spent are rising. The average price per ad is about 11 percent up.

Mark Zuckerberg previously told advertisers to come directly to Meta, not to agencies, and promised that Meta would plan and create the ads, taking the risk and optimizing to outcomes. That statement had agencies scrambling to reframe themselves around outcomes so they would not lose budgets directly to Google and Meta.

Now Meta is reporting numbers for its AI tools. According to Meta, a million advertisers have used its generative AI creative tools and they have served about 15 million pieces of creative completely managed by Meta. That is a strong indicator that, if this momentum builds, it will eat further into agency income.

Reddit’s IPO last year looks increasingly legitimate. Revenues are up, ad products are maturing, and the data licensing business is exploding. More advertisers are acknowledging Reddit as an advertising platform, which is good for competition but also adds complexity to media planning.

For advertisers, all this accelerates consolidation. There are questions about whether the open web is being squeezed, even as some independent players like The Trade Desk still report positive results. Some observers warn that open web advertising could be throttled as walled gardens tighten their grip.

Tom and David argue that advertisers should double down on joint business plans with the large platforms and stay close to platform innovation. There is arguably more innovation coming directly from platforms than from agencies, so marketers need those direct relationships. At the same time, advertisers must talk with agencies about how to manage price inflation and how to respond to increasingly monopolistic dynamics.

David warns against blindly following the trend just because everyone else is investing in the same platforms. He shares the story of the FMCG boardroom, where the most senior stakeholder questioned whether a major platform was right for the business because they were spending hundreds of millions there without being convinced.

That executive told the platform that if its teams were so sure the problem was creative, not the platform, then no creative would appear on the platform unless its teams had approved it. The brand maintained spend levels for six months, then reviewed performance. Nothing had changed, so they withdrew all their money.

The point is to validate performance rather than simply assuming it is working. David’s advice to marketers is clear. First, validate performance. Second, establish direct relationships with the major platforms because they are too important to leave at arm’s length. Third, protect your data with the right governance protocols.

Tom adds that ID Comms provides analytics and advisory services that break out platform spend and help advertisers identify what is effective. The firm typically gives clients two or three concrete actions they can take immediately to improve impact.

The conversation then shifts to the Dear Cindy letter.

Tom recaps the situation. On WPP’s Q3 earnings call, CEO Cindy Rose criticized a rise in pitchless account awards that she characterized as CEO handshake deals. She suggested that the famous PepsiCo move from Omnicom to Publicis, apparently without a pitch, fell into this category.

Her comments sounded like sour grapes to some, especially as insiders know that large moves like PepsiCo or Microsoft involve a lot of diligence. The remarks also came after WPP withdrew from Coca Cola’s North American media review, citing exhaustion and a desire not to put teams through another intense pitch, even though WPP kept other parts of the Coca Cola business.

Publicis responded with an open letter titled Dear Cindy on Instagram. The tone was cheeky and, in the eyes of Tom and David, somewhat classless. Publicis argued that calling such moves CEO handshake deals was insulting to client intelligence because no global company would hand over the keys to its data, media, and technology on the basis of a friendly espresso.

The letter referenced Microsoft, where Cindy Rose had previously worked, and the decision by Microsoft to move its global media account to Publicis as part of a wider strategic partnership. It implied that she knew how much diligence those decisions involved.

Publicis also took a swipe at WPP’s withdrawal from the Coca Cola US review, suggesting you cannot be a passionate defender of pitch culture and then plead exhaustion. The whole exchange struck Tom and David as unedifying and unnecessary.

David notes that Publicis is in the ascendancy and does not need to engage in that sort of public point scoring. Many people inside Publicis reportedly felt the letter was tone deaf, especially when they are working flat out to onboard new business without always seeing those successes reflected internally.

Tom and David broaden the conversation. They acknowledge that, in some cases, Cindy Rose is right to say that big numbers get agreed in small rooms. They have seen situations where a very seductive commercial number neutralizes a potential pitch or wins a piece of business, only for procurement teams to be told to figure out how to hold the deal to account later.

Those handshakes usually happen in good faith but can create impossible pressure on the teams who then have to deliver on unrealistic promises. ID Comms has been dropped into some of those situations to help salvage or renegotiate deals that started with an attractive headline number and little operational realism.

Equally, they recognise that Publicis is correct to say that renegotiations and transformation deals can have as much forensic integrity as traditional pitches. There are intense, closed door negotiations where marketers, engineers, data architects, and procurement leaders stress test agency propositions over many months without a formal pitch circus.

The deeper advertiser question is whether pitches remain valid. From ID Comms’ perspective, they absolutely do, when they are used for the right reasons. The firm has as close a view as anyone of what really goes into major holding company pitches and the rigor required from advertisers.

These are multi million, sometimes multi billion dollar contracts. Moving an account is not simply swapping agencies. It is shifting complex marketing organizations across many geographies, time zones, cultures, and systems. That demands a giant stakeholder management exercise and a lot of rewiring.

Tom suggests that perhaps the word pitch is tired, but the underlying diligence is non negotiable. Whether you call it a pitch, a transformation sprint, or something else, the work still has to be done. The opportunity to get it right is compelling, but it takes commitment from both advertisers and agencies.

He also notes that if agencies are concerned about the rising cost of pitching, a lot of that cost is self inflicted. Agencies often buy a lot of bread and put on elaborate theatre that advertisers do not ask for. If everyone focused on substance instead of performance, the burden would be lighter.

The episode then moves to LiveRamp.

LiveRamp is described as an important, historically holding company agnostic piece of technology that connects brand first party data with third party data and platforms in a secure way. It helps advertisers onboard data and target in privacy compliant ways.

Publicis has now acquired LiveRamp, and that creates potential conflicts of interest. Clients of other holding companies who have relied on LiveRamp as a neutral backbone may now feel uncomfortable that their identity infrastructure sits inside a rival group.

The FTC has tried to address this by imposing protocols and protections. The consent order requires Publicis to keep LiveRamp operating as a neutral platform, maintain nondiscriminatory access, and build firewalls that prevent Publicis from accessing LiveRamp customer data. Independent audits will monitor compliance.

Tom and David note that some non Publicis advertisers are already publicly calling for alternatives, asking competitors to show them other identity options. There is a real question about whether the deal price properly factored in a potential exodus of non Publicis clients.

For Publicis, the deal is a big strategic play that deepens its technology offering and could drive competitive advantage for its clients. For other holding companies and independent advertisers, it is a forcing function to review identity stacks and consider alternatives.

The episode closes with a few final reflections. The industry keeps providing material. There is always more to talk about, but Tom and David want to focus less on gossip and more on tangible impact for advertisers.

They invite advertisers who need help making sense of these dynamics to reach out to ID Comms. The firm provides tips, tools, and resources to help brands get good at media, and much of the most valuable work happens quietly behind the scenes.

If you want to go deeper, head to idcomms.com to explore more resources and connect with the team.

To get practical, confidential advice on your own situation, get in touch to discuss your media ‘gameplan’ and the options you have to protect and grow your competitive advantage in media.