IPG Mediabrands 2025: What the Strategy Signals for Everyone Else

IPG Mediabrands’ strategic priorities for 2025 centre on three interconnected bets: deeper AI integration across planning and buying, a sharper focus on commerce media, and a structural push to make first-party data the backbone of client campaigns. These are not new ideas in isolation, but the way IPG is sequencing and resourcing them tells you something useful about where the industry is heading and what it expects from agency partners in the next 18 months.

For senior marketers, the more interesting question is not what IPG is doing. It is what the strategy reveals about the pressures every holding group is responding to, and whether the solutions being offered actually match the problems clients have.

Why Holding Group Strategy Announcements Are Worth Reading Carefully

I have sat through enough agency strategy presentations to know that the gap between what is announced and what is operationalised is usually significant. When I was running the European hub of a global performance network, the parent company would publish strategic priorities each year with genuine conviction. Some of those priorities became real capability. Others were positioning for the client pitch room, and the teams doing the actual work barely felt the change.

That is not cynicism. It is just how large organisations work. Strategy at holding group level has to serve multiple audiences simultaneously: investors, clients, talent, and the trade press. The version that reaches the market is inevitably a compressed, optimistic summary of something much messier underneath.

Which is exactly why it is worth reading carefully. The priorities a holding group chooses to surface publicly tell you what they believe clients will pay for, what they are being asked about in competitive pitches, and where they see margin opportunity. All three of those signals are commercially useful if you know how to decode them.

If you are working through your own brand strategy or positioning questions, the broader context around brand strategy and positioning is worth grounding yourself in before drawing conclusions from what any one holding group is prioritising.

The AI Integration Priority: Planning Tool or Business Model Shift?

IPG Mediabrands has been public about embedding AI across its planning and buying infrastructure through its Kinesso data and technology unit. The stated ambition is to use AI to improve audience targeting precision, reduce waste in media allocation, and accelerate the speed of insight generation for clients.

On the surface, this is straightforward. AI-assisted planning tools can process more variables faster than human planners working with spreadsheets. That is a real capability improvement, not marketing theatre.

But there is a structural tension worth naming. Media agencies have historically made money from the complexity of media buying. The more opaque the process, the more indispensable the intermediary. If AI genuinely makes planning more efficient and transparent, it compresses the labour component of the service. That is good for clients. It creates a margin challenge for agencies unless they can shift value to adjacent services, which is exactly what the commerce media and first-party data priorities are designed to do.

There are real risks when AI is applied to brand-sensitive decisions without sufficient oversight. Moz has written thoughtfully about the risks AI poses to brand equity when efficiency is prioritised over context. The same logic applies to media planning: optimising for algorithmic signals without understanding what the brand actually stands for can produce efficient spend that undermines brand coherence over time.

The question for any marketer evaluating this priority is not whether AI in planning is a good idea. It clearly is, used well. The question is whether your agency’s AI layer is being applied to better decisions or to faster production of the same decisions they were already making.

Commerce Media: The Channel Shift That Is Actually a Behaviour Shift

The commerce media push is the most commercially grounded of IPG’s three priorities, and the one most likely to have real budget implications for clients in 2025.

Commerce media, broadly defined, covers advertising that appears within or adjacent to purchase environments: retail media networks, shoppable formats, in-app commerce, and the growing infrastructure that sits between product discovery and transaction. Amazon’s advertising business is the most obvious example, but the category now includes networks operated by Walmart, Target, Kroger, Boots, Tesco, and dozens of others globally.

What makes this strategically significant rather than just another channel is the data it generates. Retail media networks can close the loop between ad exposure and purchase in ways that most digital channels cannot. For brands that have spent years arguing about attribution, that is genuinely valuable. For agencies that can sit between the brand and the retail network, it is a new revenue stream with meaningful margin potential.

I managed significant retail client budgets across multiple European markets during the period when Amazon Advertising was transitioning from a secondary channel to a primary one for certain categories. The speed at which budget shifted was striking, not because anyone made a strategic decision to reallocate, but because the performance data made the case faster than the planning cycle could keep up with. Commerce media in 2025 is at a similar inflection point for categories beyond fast-moving consumer goods.

The brand positioning risk here is real. Commerce media environments are optimised for conversion, not for brand building. Brands that over-rotate into retail media networks without maintaining investment in upper-funnel brand work tend to find themselves competing on price within those environments rather than on brand preference. Wistia has made the case compellingly for why existing brand-building strategies are under pressure in this kind of environment, and the commerce media shift amplifies that pressure considerably.

First-Party Data: The Priority That Requires Brand Work First

The first-party data priority is where IPG’s strategy gets most interesting from a brand positioning perspective, and where the gap between strategic intent and practical execution is widest for most clients.

The logic is sound. With third-party cookies substantially deprecated, with signal loss across mobile platforms, and with regulatory pressure on data collection tightening across major markets, brands that have built genuine first-party data assets are in a structurally stronger position than those that have not. IPG’s push to help clients build and activate those assets is a rational response to a real problem.

But here is what the strategy documents do not say clearly enough: first-party data collection is a brand problem before it is a technology problem. Consumers share their data when they trust a brand and believe the exchange is worth it. The quality and depth of your first-party data is a direct proxy for the strength of your brand relationship with your audience.

I have seen this play out repeatedly. Brands with strong positioning and genuine consumer affinity find first-party data collection relatively straightforward. Their customers sign up for newsletters, create accounts, join loyalty programmes, and engage with preference centres because the brand has given them a reason to. Brands with weak or unclear positioning struggle to generate meaningful first-party data regardless of how sophisticated their consent management platform is.

Consistent brand voice is part of what builds that trust over time. HubSpot’s research on the value of consistent brand voice points to exactly this mechanism: consistency builds recognition, recognition builds trust, and trust is what makes consumers willing to engage more deeply with a brand. First-party data is the downstream output of that process, not a substitute for it.

If you are briefing your media agency on a first-party data strategy without having done the underlying brand work, you are building on unstable ground. The technology can be excellent and the results will still disappoint.

What the Interpublic-Omnicom Merger Context Changes

Any analysis of IPG Mediabrands’ 2025 priorities needs to acknowledge the context in which they are being executed. The proposed merger between Interpublic Group and Omnicom, announced in late 2024, creates significant uncertainty about how IPG’s strategic direction will evolve if the merger completes.

Mergers of this scale in professional services firms almost always produce a period of internal distraction that affects client service quality, regardless of what the combined entity’s leadership says publicly. Talent uncertainty, system integration challenges, and leadership restructuring are not hypothetical risks. They are standard features of large agency mergers.

For clients of IPG Mediabrands agencies, the practical implication is that the strategic priorities being communicated for 2025 may look different in 2026 depending on how the merger proceeds. That is not a reason to dismiss them, but it is a reason to evaluate them with some caution and to ensure your own strategic clarity is strong enough not to depend entirely on your agency’s direction of travel.

I watched a similar dynamic play out when a network I worked within went through a major acquisition. The parent company’s strategic priorities shifted mid-year, the resources that had been promised to certain capability builds were redirected, and the clients who had built their own clear briefs and strategic frameworks were far better positioned to manage the disruption than those who had outsourced their thinking to the agency.

How to Read These Priorities as a Brand Marketer

The most useful thing a senior marketer can do with a holding group’s strategic priorities is treat them as a prompt for internal audit rather than a brief to hand back to the agency.

On AI in planning: ask your current agency partners what decisions their AI tools are actually making versus surfacing for human review. The answer will tell you a great deal about where accountability sits and whether the efficiency gains are being passed through to your budget or absorbed into agency margin.

On commerce media: map your current media investment against the purchase experience your customers actually take. If there is a significant gap between where your spend is concentrated and where purchase decisions are being made, that is worth addressing regardless of what your agency is prioritising. Measuring where brand awareness is actually being built is a useful starting point. SEMrush has a practical breakdown of how to measure brand awareness that is worth working through before reallocating budget toward commerce environments.

On first-party data: audit what you currently have before investing in new collection infrastructure. Most large brands have more first-party data than they are actively using, scattered across CRM systems, email platforms, loyalty programmes, and website analytics. The consolidation and activation problem is often more valuable to solve than the collection problem.

There is a broader set of brand strategy frameworks and tools on The Marketing Juice brand strategy hub that can help you stress-test your positioning before engaging with any of these channel-level priorities. The channel questions are only answerable clearly once the brand foundation is solid.

The Sustainability Question That Is Still Being Avoided

One thing conspicuously absent from most holding group strategic priorities, including IPG’s, is a serious engagement with strategic waste in media investment. The industry has spent considerable energy on carbon measurement frameworks and sustainable ad serving initiatives. These matter, but they address a relatively small component of the actual waste in most media budgets.

The larger waste problem is strategic: campaigns running against poorly defined audiences, briefs that do not articulate a clear business problem, media plans optimised for metrics that do not connect to commercial outcomes. I have reviewed enough media plans across enough categories to say with confidence that a significant proportion of most large media budgets is working harder to generate agency revenue than client results.

Wistia makes a related point about the problem with focusing on brand awareness as a primary metric: awareness without conversion infrastructure or brand preference is often just expensive reach. The same logic applies to the AI, commerce media, and first-party data priorities. They are all capable of generating impressive-looking metrics that do not translate to business outcomes if the strategic foundation is not there.

The holding groups that figure out how to help clients spend less more effectively will be more valuable partners than those that help clients spend more efficiently. That distinction matters more than any individual technology priority.

What Marketers Should Actually Do With This

IPG Mediabrands’ 2025 priorities are a reasonable read of where the industry is heading. AI in planning, commerce media, and first-party data are all legitimate strategic investments. The question is whether you are positioned to benefit from them or just positioned to pay for them.

Three things are worth doing before your next agency planning session. First, get clear on what business problem you are actually trying to solve. Not the media problem, not the channel problem, the business problem. Second, audit your brand positioning honestly. If your brand does not have a clear, defensible position in the market, no amount of AI-optimised targeting will compensate for that. Third, define what good looks like in terms that connect to commercial outcomes, not media metrics. Your agency will optimise for whatever you measure. Make sure you are measuring the right things.

The holding groups are making their bets. The marketers who do well in this environment will be the ones who have done the foundational work clearly enough to evaluate those bets on their merits rather than accepting them as the default.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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