A clear-eyed review of media agencies’ year that strips away league tables and hype, focusing instead on structural pressures, strategic mistakes, and the uncomfortable truths rankings are designed to obscure.

A critique of Omnicom’s ambitions that interrogates scale, integration, and investor logic—asking whether what looks like strategic progress may actually deepen the industry’s most persistent structural problems.

A challenge to the industry’s favourite scapegoat, arguing that media inefficiency is driven less by planning failure than by client incentives, procurement pressure, and decision-making structures no planner can override.

An examination of how dominant platforms extract value from media ecosystems, why publishers struggle to resist, and what the next phase of this parasitic relationship is likely to look like as power further concentrates.

A critique of YouTube’s strategic ambiguity, exploring how its refusal to define itself as TV or social creates measurement confusion, regulatory blind spots, and convenient flexibility for a platform that benefits from being both—and neither.

A thought experiment that flips agency ambition on its head, asking what would change if agencies were designed for ordinary businesses—revealing how complexity, ego, and scale quietly undermine effectiveness.