You Can’t Solve a Problem You Profit From: Why Legacy Media Agencies Can’t Be the Solution

Every legacy media agency and holding company in 2025 is running the same playbook: sell complexity, buy opacity, and rent relevance. The models at WPP, OMG, Dentsu, Publicis, Havas, IPG—pick your acronym—depend on systems that don’t work for clients, or at least not as advertised. Scratch the surface and you’ll find the rot: obscure deals, backroom trading, “principal media” shell games, all wrapped in strategy language that sounds innovative but amounts to little more than smoke and mirrors.

Complexity as a Business Model

The game is built on confusion. That’s not a bug—it’s the business model. Every extra layer between your brand and your audience is margin for them. Every obscure fee, every principal buy, every group trading desk promising scale but delivering diluted accountability, is just another way for holding companies to profit from the inefficiency they claim to be solving.

AI: Fake It ‘Til You Bill It

Right now, the big agencies are all-in on AI—at least in their pitch decks. In reality, most are faking it. Tools built for show, not for flow. Automation that exists to impress procurement and win awards, not to create real value. The AI theater is the new “digital transformation”—lots of noise, very little actual change, and zero threat to the underlying system that keeps the fees rolling.

Ask any holding company C-suite if AI will disrupt their model and watch the performance. You’ll hear about “responsible integration,” “future-ready talent,” and “unlocking data-driven creativity.” Translation: as long as it doesn’t cut into this quarter’s revenue, they’ll play along. If it ever actually threatens the margins, it’ll quietly get put in the “innovation lab” drawer—where good ideas go to die.

Why? Because real AI would bring radical transparency, efficiency, and automation—things that would cannibalize the profit centers these companies have spent decades protecting. As I keep saying: you can’t solve a problem you profit from creating. And they know it.

Principal Media, Obscure Deals, and the Strategy That Isn’t

Take “principal media” buying—the agency group becomes the seller, marking up media they’ve bought on their own books. Suddenly, your media “partner” is playing both sides. The game is stacked. Principal deals hide actual costs, obscure rebates, and blur incentives. The client gets a shiny dashboard, but no clarity. “We’re getting you better value,” they say. What they mean is, “We’re extracting more from the process before it ever reaches your audience.”

Same story with group trading desks and network “inventory solutions.” Designed for scale? Maybe. Designed for control, margin, and opacity? Absolutely. In these setups, agency and client incentives are never aligned. You see this in the endless parade of audits, investigations, and “transparency pledges”—they’re always too late and always toothless, because no one wants to kill the golden goose.

No Honesty in Strategy

Strategy itself has become a sales function. Decks full of buzzwords, frameworks for every occasion, recommendations that always (somehow) route more dollars through agency-owned pipes. The difference between strategy and selling has all but vanished in these environments.

Clients know this, but inertia is powerful. The system defends itself with process, jargon, and just enough “innovation” to pass the sniff test. But real innovation? Real clarity? That would break the loop.

Simple as that

The Shortcut: Follow the Opacity

And if you ever want a shortcut to spotting who profits from the problem, just follow the opacity. Look out for the ones fighting hardest for complexity, those who break everything down into tiny KPIs and silos, totally disconnected from each other. Because these are the ones most invested in keeping you from seeing how the machine actually works. The ones who talk endlessly about “accountability” while delivering none. The ones who build layer upon layer of reporting, always just out of reach, always just abstract enough that you never get the full picture.

The more fragmented the view, the more protected the model. The harder it is to see end-to-end, the easier it is for the holding companies to siphon value, pass blame, and keep everyone busy solving for the wrong thing. If it feels like you’re trapped in a maze, that’s because someone designed it that way.

The Way Out? Don’t Play Their Game

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: as long as you buy into the idea that scale equals value, that complexity means intelligence, and that the holding company is on your side, you’re in the loop with them. You are the product.

The agencies will not, and cannot, lead the change because the change would cost them their advantage. The answer won’t come from within. It’ll come from the edges—people willing to design from first principles, to build direct, transparent, accountable systems that make the old games obsolete. That’s where the new leverage is. That’s where momentum is built.

For me, this isn’t just theory—it’s personal. This is the reason I left Starcom Mediavest Group, BCOM3, when it became Publicis. It was no longer independent, and all these practices started all too soon. That was the reason I walked away in 2008 to start my first agency, and I’m still, 18 years later, more fiercely independent than ever. I knew then (and I know now) that the system cannot fix itself, because too many profit from keeping it broken.

If you’re looking for honesty, for actual results, for systems that are designed to help rather than harvest—stop waiting for permission from the incumbents. Start building, start prototyping, start working with those who have no stake in the status quo. As I’ve said elsewhere: if you’re not meeting resistance, you’re probably just decorating the system, not changing it.

Let them play their game. We’ll be over here making different happen.

Alex Lawton — WHY NOT.

Summer 2025._________________________________________________________________________________________________

Happy to discuss more, be challenged, and listen to other opinions that build and improve upon these thoughts.

Thanks for reading: comments/contributions/additions are very welcome!