- Creative and media integration is now essential because digital marketing requires both disciplines to work together in real time.
- The separation of creative and media was driven largely by commercial incentives, allowing holding groups to monetise both disciplines independently.
- Major holding groups are trying to reintegrate creative and media, but restructuring alone will not solve the deeper organisational and commercial conflicts.
- Brands should demand shared outcomes rather than separate agency KPIs, with creative and media teams exchanging performance data continuously.
- The 10/95 rule reinforces the value of creative effectiveness: roughly 10% of creative work generates about 95% of marketing value, making quality, quantity and continuity critical. *
Creative and media were separated for billing reasons, not strategic ones. The holding groups know it. They’re trying to fix it. And they’re going to fail unless they change the one thing they’re not willing to change.
A quick recap
In part one of this series, we established something the industry doesn’t like to say out loud. Roughly 10% of creative work drives approximately 95% of marketing value. You cannot predict which 10% in advance.
And the entire apparatus of modern marketing efficiency, from hyper-targeted media to focus-grouped creative, is specifically designed to eliminate the conditions that allow breakthrough work to exist.
We also introduced the only formula that actually matters in modern marketing: (Creative x Media) x (Quality x Quantity x Continuity)
Each element multiplies the other ones. Weaken any one of them and the whole system underperforms. Zero out any one of them and the whole system collapses.
To understand why the industry finds this formula so hard to execute, you have to understand how it deliberately separated the two most important variables in that equation, put them in different buildings, and charged clients twice for the privilege.
This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one, ‘The 10/95 rule: Why your marketing budget is funding the search, not the solution’ here.
How the divorce happened
It didn’t start as sabotage. It started as a billing decision.
For most of advertising’s history, creative and media lived under the same roof. Full-service agencies handled both. They developed the idea and they placed the work. The relationship between the two disciplines was imperfect, occasionally dysfunctional, but fundamentally intact.
The people making the ads knew where they were going. The people buying the media knew what they were buying.
Then, in the 1990s, the holding groups spotted an opportunity.
Media buying was becoming increasingly complex. The proliferation of channels, the rise of satellite television and the early rumblings of digital created a genuine case for specialisation. Media agencies could aggregate buying power across multiple clients, negotiate better rates and offer clients something that looked like scale and sophistication.
Spinning media into separate entitities
So WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, Interpublic, Dentsu and Havas began spinning their media operations out into separate entities. GroupM. Publicis Media. Omnicom Media Group. Initiative. Carat. The names became familiar. The structure became standard. And the separation became permanent.
What nobody said out loud at the time was that the real motivation had less to do with strategic logic and more to do with margin. Media buying generated revenue through volume and rebates.
Separating it from creative allowed the holding groups to monetise both disciplines independently, build two sets of client relationships, and in many cases charge the same client twice for work that used to be done by one integrated team.
The client got a creative agency and a media agency. The holding group got two retainers.
For a while, nobody complained too loudly. The model worked well enough in a world where media was relatively simple and creative cycles were slow. You made the TV ad. You bought the airtime. You waited.
Then the internet arrived, and the separation stopped making any sense at all.
What the divorce actually cost
In a digital world, creative and media are not separate decisions. They are the same decision, made in real time, continuously.
The format of the creative determines where it can run. The platform it runs on shapes how it needs to be made. The audience signal from the media informs what the next piece of creative should say. The performance of one execution tells you something about how to brief the next one.
The feedback loop between making and placing is so tight that treating them as separate disciplines, managed by separate teams, briefed by separate client stakeholders, invoiced on separate contracts, is not just inefficient. It is structurally guaranteed to produce worse work.
Think about what happens in practice. A brand briefs its creative agency. The creative agency develops a campaign. The campaign goes into production. Weeks later, it lands with the media agency, who then figures out where to put it.
The media agency has had no input into the creative. The creative agency has had no visibility of the media strategy. The two teams may never have met.
The creative is then served into placements it was never designed for, at a frequency the creative team never intended, to audiences the creative team never considered. Performance data flows back to the media agency.
Some of it trickles across to the creative agency, usually too late and too filtered to be genuinely useful. The next campaign brief starts from scratch.
This is not a process designed to find the 10%. It is a process designed to produce the inoffensive middle, consistently, at scale, across two billing relationships.
The client pays for the inefficiency and calls it a structure.
The holding groups are waking up. Slowly
To their credit, the big six are not blind to this. They can read the room, and the room has been telling them for several years that the model is broken.
WPP has been the most vocal about it. Mark Read has spoken repeatedly about the need to integrate creative and media capabilities, and the acquisition and restructuring strategy of recent years reflects a genuine, if imperfect, attempt to move in that direction.
VML, the merger of VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, is partly about building entities large enough to hold both capabilities credibly.
Publicis has taken a different approach, building Publicis Sapient as a technology and transformation layer that sits across its creative and media operations, attempting to create integration through data and technology rather than organisational structure.
Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic, announced in late 2024 and still working through regulatory approval at the time of writing, is the biggest structural bet in the industry’s recent history. The stated rationale involves data, technology, and AI capability.
Unstated rationale
The unstated rationale almost certainly involves the recognition that scale and integration are now the same competitive advantage, and that neither holding group had enough of either on its own.
Dentsu has been restructuring its creative and media operations in various markets for several years, attempting to build what it calls an integrated growth model. Havas has positioned its ‘village’ structure, agencies clustered together in shared offices, as a form of integration by proximity.
IPG, before the Omnicom deal, had arguably gone further than most in genuinely integrating media and creative data capabilities through Acxiom and Kinesso.
Every one of them is moving. None of them has solved it.
Why they’re going to struggle
Here is the problem, and it is a structural one that no reorganisation chart will fix on its own.
The holding groups separated creative and media because it was more profitable to run them as separate businesses. The incentive that created the separation has not gone away. It has just become more complicated to talk about.
When a holding group attempts to reintegrate creative and media, it immediately runs into a question it doesn’t want to answer: which one leads? Which discipline sets the agenda, controls the client relationship, and ultimately determines how the budget is allocated?
Because here is what every senior person inside these organisations knows. Whoever controls the media budget controls the relationship. Media is where the volume is. Media is where the rebates are. Media is where the holding group’s most significant revenue sits.
Creative is the smaller number on the invoice
Creative, however strategically important, however central to the 10/95 rule, is the smaller number on the invoice.
So when a holding group says it is integrating creative and media, what it often means in practice is that the media agency is hiring some creatives. It is building a production capability. It is adding a creative director to the leadership team.
The media logic still governs the operation. The media metrics still define success. The creative function is being absorbed, not genuinely integrated.
The holding groups are not doing this because they have had a philosophical awakening about the relationship between creative and media effectiveness. They are doing it because clients are starting to ask why they are paying two retainers for a process that produces worse results than a properly integrated team.
And because a new generation of independent agencies and production companies, built from the ground up on integrated models, are starting to eat their lunch.
The threat is real. The response is real. But a restructure that is motivated by client retention rather than genuine strategic conviction tends to produce the appearance of change rather than the substance of it.
What this means for you
If you are a CMO or a brand lead reading this, the structural problems of the holding groups are not your problem to solve. But they are absolutely your problem to navigate.
The agency model you inherited was designed around someone else’s billing logic. The question is whether you are willing to restructure around your own growth logic instead.
That starts with a few uncomfortable conversations.
First, ask your creative and media agencies when they last worked in the same room on the same brief, at the same time, before anything went into production. If the answer is never, or rarely, or “we have a quarterly alignment meeting,” you do not have an integrated model. You have two separate agencies with a shared client.
Second, look at how creative performance data flows between your agencies. Does your media agency’s real-time performance data inform your next creative brief? Does your creative agency understand how their work is being placed and at what frequency? If those feedback loops don’t exist, you are running your marketing on incomplete information by design.
Third, question the volume of creative you are producing relative to the media budget you are spending. If you are spending significantly more on placing creative than on making it, you are almost certainly not producing enough executions to give the algorithm the signals it needs or to give the 10/95 rule room to work in your favour.
Fourth, and most directly: consider whether the two-agency model is still the right structure for the way marketing actually works today.
That doesn’t necessarily mean firing anyone. It might mean restructuring contracts so that creative and media performance are measured against shared outcomes rather than separate KPIs. It might mean bringing one or both capabilities in-house. It might mean finding an agency partner that has genuinely, not nominally, built integration into how it operates.
The holding groups will tell you they have done this. Ask them to prove it. Ask to meet the creative and media teams in the same room. Ask to see how the data flows. Ask who leads when there’s a disagreement about where the budget goes.
The answers will tell you everything you need to know.
Conclusion: the formula was never the problem
The formula is not complicated. Creative multiplied by media, multiplied by quality, quantity and continuity. It is the foundation of every great brand campaign ever built. It is what the industry practised, imperfectly but instinctively, before it decided to reorganise itself around margin optimisation and call it progress.
The separation of creative and media did not happen because someone believed it would produce better marketing. It happened because someone believed it would produce better revenue. For a long time, for the holding groups at least, it did.
The bill is now arriving for the brands that went along with it.
The good news is that the formula still works. The brands proving it right now are not doing something new. They are doing something old, with more creative volume, across broader reach, for longer than their competitors are willing to sustain.
The industry is waking up to what it broke. The question is whether you are willing to fix it on your terms, before someone fixes it for you.
* Summary created by AI.
Pieter Geyser is commercial director at Humanz.
