WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, Dentsu, Havas and Stagwell own most of the agency names you know. Here is who owns what, what each earned in its latest year, and what changed when Omnicom bought Interpublic.
Most of the famous agency names in Britain belong to one of six advertising holding companies: WPP, Omnicom, Publicis Groupe, Dentsu, Havas and Stagwell. Omnicom became the largest when it completed its purchase of Interpublic on 26 November 2025, Publicis is the most profitable and the fastest growing, and WPP, the British one, is in the middle of a painful reset. Below them sit a handful of genuine independents, led by Mother and Wieden+Kennedy, and a longer list of agencies that look independent but are not.
This guide sets out who owns which agency, what each group earned in its latest reported year, and what each is known for. Every figure is taken from the company’s own results announcement and dated. Where a group has just reorganised, and three of the six have, we describe the structure as it stands in September 2026 rather than the one on the brass plate.
Ranking the advertising holding companies is harder than it looks, because they do not all count the same thing. Omnicom and WPP headline “revenue”, while Publicis, Dentsu, Havas and Stagwell headline “net revenue”, which strips out the media and production costs that pass straight through to suppliers. WPP also publishes “revenue less pass-through costs”, which is the nearest thing to a like-for-like number, so that is the one used here.
| Group (home) | Latest annual figure | UK agencies you would know | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Omnicom (New York) | Revenue $17.3bn in 2025, with one month of Interpublic; the combined group has more than $25bn in annual revenue | adam&eveTBWA, AMV BBDO, McCann London, Lucky Generals, OMD, PHD, UM, Initiative | The largest group after the Interpublic deal; three creative networks, BBDO, McCann and TBWA |
| Publicis Groupe (Paris) | Net revenue €14.55bn in 2025, up 5.6 per cent organically | Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi, BBH, Publicis London, Digitas, Zenith, Starcom | The “Power of One” integrated model, Epsilon data, the industry’s best margin at 18.2 per cent |
| WPP (London) | Revenue less pass-through costs £10.18bn in 2025, down 5.4 per cent like-for-like | Ogilvy UK (with New Commercial Arts and Grey), VML, AKQA, Mindshare, Wavemaker, EssenceMediacom | Once the biggest; now cutting £500m of costs under the Elevate28 plan |
| Dentsu (Tokyo) | Net revenue ¥1,197.5bn in 2025, up 0.3 per cent | Carat, iProspect, dentsu X, Dentsu Creative, Merkle | Dominant at home, loss-making abroad after a ¥310bn goodwill write-down |
| Havas (Paris, listed in Amsterdam) | Net revenue €2.78bn in 2025, up 3.1 per cent organically | Havas London, Havas Media, a 51 per cent stake in Uncommon | The oldest name in the business, newly independent of Vivendi |
| Stagwell (New York) | Net revenue $2.43bn in 2025, up 6 per cent | 72andSunny, Anomaly, Forsman & Bodenfors, Assembly (mostly outside the UK) | Mark Penn’s self-styled challenger, built from MDC Partners in 2021 |
Treat the table as a guide to scale rather than a strict league table. On the most comparable measures Omnicom now leads, Publicis is second and WPP third, and the gap between the top three and the rest is enormous. Dentsu, Havas and Stagwell combined would still be smaller than WPP.
WPP is the group Martin Sorrell built from a wire-basket manufacturer in the late 1980s by buying J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather and later Young & Rubicam and Grey. For most of the 2010s it was the largest marketing company in the world. It is not any more. WPP’s 2025 preliminary results, published in February 2026, showed revenue of £13.55 billion and revenue less pass-through costs of £10.18 billion, down 5.4 per cent like-for-like, with a headline operating margin of 13 per cent.
Chief executive Cindy Rose’s answer is Elevate28, a three-year plan that reorganises the group into four units, Media, Creative, Production and Enterprise Solutions, and targets £500 million of annual savings by 2028. The stated aim is to stop being a holding company at all and become “a single integrated company”. Headcount fell 8.7 per cent in 2025, and trade reports listed Mars, Ikea, eBay and Sky among the accounts that walked.
For a UK reader the WPP names that matter are Ogilvy UK, which absorbed New Commercial Arts when WPP bought it in September 2024 and has had Grey reporting into it since May 2025; VML, the 2023 merger of Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R; the design and digital shop AKQA; and WPP Media, the renamed GroupM, which owns Mindshare, Wavemaker and EssenceMediacom. Hogarth handles production and Burson public relations. WPP’s UK creative reputation now rests largely on Ogilvy, and on the New Commercial Arts founders James Murphy and David Golding who run it.
Omnicom was created in 1986 by merging BBDO, Doyle Dane Bernbach and Needham Harper, and has been run by John Wren since 1997. On 26 November 2025 it completed the acquisition of Interpublic, the group behind McCann, FCB and MullenLowe, creating what Omnicom describes as a company with more than $25 billion in annual revenue. Omnicom’s full-year 2025 results showed revenue of $17.3 billion, including just one month of Interpublic, and a small net loss of $54.5 million once $1.1 billion of repositioning charges and other merger costs were booked. The cost synergy target has been doubled to $1.5 billion.
The reorganisation that followed was brutal and quick. In December 2025 Campaign reported that Omnicom Advertising would keep three global creative networks, BBDO, McCann and TBWA, and retire DDB, FCB and MullenLowe during the first half of 2026. FCB folded into BBDO, DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, and around 4,000 jobs went. A dozen or so boutiques, including Goodby Silverstein, The Martin Agency and Lucky Generals in London, kept their names because, as Troy Ruhanen put it to The Drum, some clients want them and not a network.
The UK felt the DDB decision hardest. adam&eveDDB, the agency behind John Lewis’s Christmas run from 2009, merged with TBWALondon under adam&eve chief executive Miranda Hipwell and now trades as adam&eveTBWA. FCB London merged into AMV BBDO, MullenLowe London went into TBWA, and McCann London carried on inside the McCann network. On the media side, Omnicom Media under Florian Adamski runs six networks, among them OMD, PHD, UM and Initiative.
Ruhanen, who had led Omnicom Advertising since the division was formed in January 2025, retired on 9 September 2026 with the integration declared complete. Omnicom’s announcement named Andrew Robertson, chairman of BBDO Worldwide and a group veteran of more than twenty years, as chief executive of Omnicom Advertising with immediate effect. The division now comprises BBDO, McCann, TBWA, Goodby Silverstein & Partners, Deutsch, GSD&M and The Martin Agency. Wren called Robertson “a proven leader with a deep understanding of Omnicom, our clients, and our industry”.
Publicis was founded in Paris in 1926 and has been run by Arthur Sadoun since 2017. It is the group the other five are measured against. Its 2025 results, published on 3 February 2026, showed net revenue of €14.55 billion, organic growth of 5.6 per cent and an operating margin of 18.2 per cent, with guidance of 4 to 5 per cent growth for 2026. No other group comes close on either the growth or the margin.
The reason, on Publicis’s own telling, is the “Power of One”: a single client team drawing on creative, media, production and data rather than separate agency brands competing for the same budget. Epsilon, the data business bought in 2019, and Publicis Sapient, the consultancy, sit underneath. In January 2025 the group merged Leo Burnett and Publicis Worldwide into one network called Leo, with 130 offices and 15,000 people, although the UK, France and Canada kept their existing agency names.
That exception matters here, because the British Publicis agencies are among the strongest in the country. Leo Burnett has held McDonald’s for more than forty years. Saatchi & Saatchi took the John Lewis account from adam&eveDDB and now also handles EE, BT and British Heart Foundation.
BBH, wholly owned by Publicis since 2012, has Tesco, Audi and Burger King, and Publicis London has BT/EE and Renault. Zenith and Starcom buy the media, and Digitas does the digital work.
Dentsu is Japan’s dominant agency and has been since the early twentieth century. It became a global group by buying Aegis, the owner of Carat, in 2013, and that purchase is the root of its current trouble. Dentsu’s 2025 results, announced on 13 February 2026, showed net revenue of ¥1,197.5 billion, up 0.3 per cent, but a statutory net loss of ¥327.6 billion after a ¥310.1 billion goodwill impairment on the international business. Japan grew 6.2 per cent organically and made record profits; the Americas, Europe and the rest of Asia all shrank.
The dividend was suspended for 2025 and 2026, chief executive Hiroshi Igarashi stepped down, and Takeshi Sano, who ran the Japanese business, took over on 27 March 2026. Dentsu spent much of 2025 exploring a sale of some or all of its international arm before pulling back. Japan accounts for roughly 40 per cent of net revenue and more than half of profit, which tells you where the group’s attention now lies.
In the UK the Dentsu names are mostly media names. Carat, iProspect and dentsu X plan and buy; Dentsu Creative is the creative network; Merkle is the data and customer experience arm. Dentsu’s UK reputation rests on buying clout rather than famous work.
Havas traces itself to the news agency Charles-Louis Havas founded in Paris in 1835, which makes it the oldest name in the industry. For two decades it sat inside Vivendi, the Bolloré family’s media conglomerate. On 16 December 2024 Vivendi split itself into four listed companies and Havas began trading on Euronext Amsterdam, chaired and run by Yannick Bolloré.
Havas’s 2025 results, published on 17 February 2026, showed net revenue of €2,783 million, organic growth of 3.1 per cent and an adjusted operating margin of 12.9 per cent. The group is split roughly 40 per cent creative, 38 per cent media and 22 per cent health. Its most interesting UK holding is not Havas London but Uncommon, the studio founded by Nils Leonard, Natalie Graeme and Lucy Jameson in 2017, in which Havas bought a 51 per cent stake in July 2023, with the founders keeping the rest and the British Airways account staying put.
Stagwell is the youngest of the six. Mark Penn, the pollster and former Microsoft strategist, built it by merging his Stagwell Group with MDC Partners in 2021, and describes it as a challenger to the big four. Stagwell’s 2025 results, published on 10 March 2026, showed revenue of $2,909 million and net revenue of $2,428 million, up 6 per cent.
Its creative names are American and Scandinavian rather than British: 72andSunny, Anomaly, Forsman & Bodenfors, the makers of Volvo Trucks’ Epic Split, and the digital agency Code and Theory, with Assembly on media. Stagwell’s UK footprint is modest and its ambition is mostly about technology and data products.
Two agencies of real scale have stayed out of every group. Mother was founded in 1996 by a group of friends in Clerkenwell to escape network ownership, employs about 250 people in London, has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Shanghai and Singapore, and holds KFC, Ikea, Uber and Meta. Wieden+Kennedy, founded in Portland, Oregon, describes its nine offices as an independent network; the London office made Honda’s Cog and still works for Nike, Ford and TK Maxx. Both are privately owned by their partners, and both use that fact as a sales pitch.
Then there are the agencies that are not in a holding company but are not independent either. VCCP belongs to Chime Communications, which Providence Equity Partners and WPP bought for £374 million in 2015 and which Providence has controlled outright since WPP sold its stake in 2019. Droga5 has been part of Accenture since 2019 and now fronts the consultancy’s whole creative offer in London. M&C Saatchi is a listed company in its own right, with net revenue of £204.7 million in 2025, down 7.3 per cent like-for-like, and Uncommon, Lucky Generals and New Commercial Arts have all sold to groups since 2017 while keeping their names on the door.
Ownership decides three things a client cannot see in a pitch. It decides whether the agency can be merged out of existence, as DDB, FCB and MullenLowe were this year; it decides who else the agency is being encouraged to work with, since every group now sells integration; and it decides where the pressure on fees comes from when the parent misses a quarter. The Cadbury Gorilla was made at Fallon, a Publicis agency, and the John Lewis Christmas run at adam&eve, an Omnicom one, so group ownership plainly does not stop great work. It just makes it nobody’s permanent home.
Omnicom, since it completed the purchase of Interpublic on 26 November 2025, with combined annual revenue Omnicom puts above $25 billion. Publicis Groupe is second on net revenue and first on profitability, and WPP, the leader for most of the 2010s, is now third.
Ogilvy is owned by WPP, and Saatchi & Saatchi and BBH by Publicis Groupe, which has owned BBH outright since 2012. M&C Saatchi, founded by the Saatchi brothers after they left the agency bearing their name, is a separate listed company.
Omnicom retired all three brands in the first half of 2026 after buying Interpublic, folding FCB into BBDO and DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA. In London adam&eveDDB merged with TBWALondon to become adam&eveTBWA and FCB London merged into AMV BBDO.
Mother and Wieden+Kennedy are the two large creative independents with London offices, and the7stars is the largest independent media agency in the UK. Many smaller shops are independent, but the well-known “independents” VCCP, Uncommon, Lucky Generals and Droga5 all have a private equity firm, a holding company or a consultancy behind them.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
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