Let’s start with the big picture stuff – creaking, anachronistic agency models and glaring capability gaps in a consumer world of fragmented complexity.

Seven months into his gig as PHD’s new global boss, without any media pedigree, Guy Marks figures PHD’s parent, Omnicom Media Group [OMG], has cracked the code on keeping its three global media agency network brands alive – by delivering an integrated suite of specialist capabilities they can not build independently. To boot, the “Agency as a Platform” [AaaP] model developed in Omnicom’s media arm is seeing “rapid adoption” by the $18bn holding company’s creative, digital and specialist agency networks.

The global win of Uber and retention of HSBC last year are examples of the “operating system for a modern world” working, claims Marks.

In PHD’s global win of Uber across South and North America, Europe Africa and Middle East, sibling network OMD was deemed to have a better suited talent pool for the brief. No problem: “we made a substitution in term of the agency network we put forward”, per Marks.

Another PHD client which reviewed last year was HSBC. Marks says the decision was made, based on what the bank needed, that it was “right for us to start to change up the talent and change up the access to talent that HSBC had”, evolving it from a PHD client to parent OMG.

“PHD still has a role on that but what we're able to do is to get them the access to the right capabilities and the right talents by not being, let's say, fixated on an individual model,” said Marks, who made a flying visit to Australia recently. “I think that’s unique to Omnicom. We want our brands to be differentiated. The key for us is the ability to plug and play different capabilities through a single door for a client's benefit. So they still have that special feeling and emotional connection of working with a particular agency that stands for something – but they're not limited in terms of the capabilities that we can bring.”

Marks reckons the AaaP model beats the approach from rival holding companies. 

“Critically what some of our competitors are doing is coming with a sort of one size fits all approach. And what you tend to hear from clients – and I hear this when we win clients in new businesses – is that a one size fits all approach within the other groups is diminishing the differentiation of the brands inside the holding companies, and that's really damaging. If they all become vanilla, they then struggle to retain their own talent, and they struggle to retain the emotional connection with those brands, with those clients, that they serve”

Vanilla AI arms race

Speaking of vanilla, Marks says AI could also commoditise agencies, period. He accepts the proposition from media ecologist Jack Myers in MI3 two weeks ago who said 80 per cent of all media buying and planning would be delivered entirely by machines by 2030, resulting in a clean out of many traditional job functions 

“It is a big number, it's a very big number,” Marks says of Myer’s forecast. “There are definitely benefits to be had and I'm a technologist at heart, right. I want to use this stuff for all of our benefit. Are we trending in that direction? We're 100 per cent in that direction. We will have greater speed, greater accuracy, hopefully less potential for human error. But there is a danger as we do this huge swing to everything being platform-driven and everything being fully automated ... you risk losing the human influence. This is where I feel very passionately: The future of media and the direction that I want to take my business in is about human and machine.”

Marks says there’s an arms race on technology: Gen AI and agency groups building their own LLMs. 

“Ultimately I think that the technology [AI] to a degree will start to become commoditised over time and so the differentiating factor is going to be the individuals with the hands on keyboards. The human is not going to lose their importance. Quite the opposite. They're going to be elevated – and I think what we're going to see is a continued rise in the importance of the brain power that we have as an organisation. You need the people who are able to interrogate and able to ask the right questions to be able to surface the right answers.”

But there are roles and jobs in agencies that will disappear. “I expect that we will see a number of roles decline or require less of them over time. That's absolutely expected. What I'm excited about is the new roles that it brings.”

It includes new talent and capabilities around influencers and retail media – two growth areas Marks says PHD is hot for. 

“We're at a bit of a tipping point right now where we are bringing technology innovation to that world of influence, which is going to allow us to scale influencers as a channel. The other one is is retail media, Omnicom made this incredible [$800m] acquisition of Flywheel Digital. It is very much a short, medium and long term bet on the importance of retail media and commerce to our clients. Augmenting what agencies typically do with paid and shared media with retail and commerce is terrifically exciting – the accountability you're going to get on your dollars when you can actually see things drop in into people's basket and make the purchase there and then is terrific," says Marks. 

"We're going to have this unrivalled picture of how to drive sales for clients That's going to be an enormous growth area – and while we talk about roles potentially in decline in legacy planning functions, I expect to see real growth in the technology space as regards to retail media and commerce and the activation of those.”

Legacy media decline peaks

Although upbeat about new tech-driven growth streams for PHD, Marks is somewhat contrarian on the outlook for legacy media sectors – based on a deep research project PHD conducted with WARC.  

“What I found most interesting is actually you see media channels, which I think you put in the non-platform bucket, have experienced challenges and have experienced a decline with the growth of the platforms. But actually what the data shows is that many of them have now found their level. Out of home is a good example, which is seeing a bit of a resurgence," says Marks. 

"There’s greater consideration for linear TV right now because it does a different job – and even looking at magazines there were various positive indicators. What that research shows you is that these legacy channels absolutely have a role and our data would suggest they have more of a sustained role than maybe people have given them credit for.

"What I think we see is a greater acknowledgement of the impact, a greater understanding with marketers about their role as part of the mix. There continues to be a strong and important role – even for some of those legacy channels which have seen decline, many of those have stabilised. The interesting part will be how do we see the evolution as regards to what does technology bring to some of those channels?

PHD Australia: Record year ahead?

Finally, Marks’ take on the health and proposition of PHD globally and Australia is refreshingly without hubris. 

The Australian business, he says, “has had both ups and downs in the last year. What I see here and the pleasure I've had for the last couple of days is a very talented and infused team, excited about the road ahead, excited about our global progress, and excited to get into what I think will probably be a record year for new business on a global basis.”

Globally, PHD is unlike most media agency rivals where it was not formed out of the media department of creative agencies before the holding companies started breaking them up in the late 90s. 

“That meant from day one, it felt different, it had a different ethos, a different emphasis,” says Marks. “But the tension in the system is that a boutique agency gives you fantastic culture, it gives you an ‘us against the world mentality’. The flip-side of the coin is it can make you insular. So it can make you unreceptive to the outside world. It can make you a sort of ‘not created here mentality’. And so if you look at my trajectory of moving into PHD, it is about retaining what is special and what we are known for, but it's also about making sure that we're leveraging the scale benefits of the group.”

Thousands of PHD staffers and 24,000 in the broader OMG group are about to find out.