Off Kilter 213: The Wrong War.

tl;dr: Part one of a two part series.

How Marketing Lost Its Advocate While Finance Built an Empire

With rumors that storied advertising agency DDB will cease to exist after the Omnicom/Interpublic merger, I think it’s worth unpacking the circumstances that led to this point and what it means.

In short, this is a story about institutional strategy versus institutional panic. Of long-game thinking versus short-game. Of advocacy versus retreat. And perhaps, of the seeds of future possibility.

But mostly, it’s a story about how the advertising holdcos fought the wrong war and let the accountants outmaneuver them into submission.

To understand why, let’s first take a look back. Over the last 15+ years, it wasn’t the tech platforms or the advertising agencies that truly transformed the role of marketing; it was the Big Four accounting firms, driven by two coordinated bets:

• Bet One: Reposition the CFO from scorekeeper to definer of value and strategist through multimillion-dollar programs, research partnerships, and elite peer councils.

• Bet Two: Simultaneously launch CMO programs to teach marketers to “speak the language of the C-suite,” which meant conforming to finance metrics, proving ROI on finance’s terms, and accepting finance-led transformation.

Why? That was simple. Post-financial crisis, the Big Four faced plateauing audit and tax revenue. This meant their growth path had to be through faster-growing, higher-margin advisory services. And the only way to accelerate that growth was to reposition the CFO as the gateway to the boardroom.

Thus, we had a set of powerful institutions deliberately engineering a C-suite hierarchy to serve their own advisory growth model.

Meanwhile, the advertising holding companies, facing a new world of digital disruption, responded in a state of complete panic. Portfolios full of direct mail and traditional agencies were now liabilities. They spent billions acquiring “digital” capabilities (Publicis: Sapient $3.7 billion, Epsilon $4.4 billion) while juniorizing staff under the rhetoric of “digital natives.” Every move made to preserve quarterly earnings, with the side effect of hollowing out the CMO’s strategic credibility and leaving the gates wide open for the accountants to march in unopposed.

By 2025, the CFO now has deep institutional backing, while the CMO has the same Big Four teaching them subordination. Marketing lost its advocate precisely when finance’s was building an empire. And that—not digital transformation, and not the tech platforms—is what truly disrupted the marketing function.

The Big Four’s Engineered Hierarchy

Phase 1: Elevating the CFO (2009-2015)

Post-financial crisis, the Big Four faced plateauing audit and tax revenue. The solution: reposition the CFO as the gateway to high-margin advisory services by shifting their role from scorekeeper to holder of the definition of value.

Deloitte’s CFO Program launched around 2009 with multiday immersive experiences, research positioning CFOs as transformation orchestrators, and elite peer councils normalizing a strategic mandate. EY, PwC, and KPMG followed with parallel programs—all positioning finance executives as architects of value, governors of tech modernization, and strategic co-pilots to CEOs.

The investment wasn’t trivial. Research partnerships with Harvard and Wharton. Global CFO Forums in scores of cities across nine countries. CFO Signals—quarterly surveys tracking CFO thinking across thousands of companies. CFO Insights—biweekly publications tackling pressing challenges. An exclusive arrangement with the Wall Street Journal, creating CFO-centric content. Transition Labs for newly appointed CFOs. Next Generation CFO Academies for aspiring finance leaders.

The intellectual scaffolding was comprehensive: governance over transformation portfolios, tech modernization, risk orchestration, performance architecture, capital efficiency, and—crucially—the definition of “value creation” itself.

The prize? Advisory revenue grew from roughly 30% to 50% of the Big Four’s mix. The CFO became the gateway to transformation budgets, M&A advisory, operating model redesign—everything.

Today, this is a $100 billion-plus global business.

Phase 2: Subordinating the CMO (2015-present)

Here’s the deviously brilliant part: These same firms elevating the CFO also launched CMO programs. Not to elevate—but to shape a subordinate relationship.

Deloitte’s Next Generation CMO Academy teaches: “speak the language of the C-suite” (translation: finance vocabulary), “position yourself as a strategic partner to the CFO” (translation: accept your subordinate role), “demonstrate marketing’s impact” (translation: prove value using their metrics).

PwC’s CMO Advisory focuses on “driving transparency and accountability” (finance-legible measurement) and “demonstrating return on investment” (ROI as yardstick).

Look at what’s missing. No intellectual scaffolding for marketing as a strategic discipline. No research positioning the CMO as the architect of future value. No board-level advocacy for marketing authority. No peer councils normalizing the CMO’s strategic mandate. No transition labs. No global forums. Nothing.

Instead: CFO defines value → CMO proves value in those terms → Big Four facilitates and plays both sides.

The business model genius is elegant. The CFO becomes the primary client for high-value transformation work. The CMO becomes a secondary client for execution-focused work requiring CFO approval. The engineered hierarchy ensures marketing spend becomes “advisable” only through the measurement systems the Big Four designed.

Result: Advisory grows to over $100 billion globally, with the CFO as the gateway and the CMO positioned as a compliant secondary client.

The Holding Company Panic and Subsequent Strip-Mining

While the Big Four were busy re-engineering power structures, the holding companies, now facing an existential crisis, panicked.

During the period of digital disruption (2010-2015), budgets shifted to digital, but the money flowed around the agencies rather than through them. Worse, their acquisition portfolios—full of direct mail, print, and traditional media buying acquired solely for valuation arbitrage purposes rather than for strategic reasons—became liabilities.

At WPP, Sir Martin Sorrell created “WPP Digital” and scrambled to acquire anything with “digital” in its name. No coherent strategy, just panic buying. When Sorrell left in 2018 amid a scandal, WPP began a brutal downsizing, cutting thousands of employees. The company that once epitomized holding company power became a case study in hollowed-out strategic drift.

Omnicom first attempted a “merger of equals” with Publicis in 2013 that collapsed spectacularly in 2014. Then...absolutely nothing coherent, maintaining a traditional agency structure while the world changed radically around it. Now, in 2025, buying IPG looks less like a strength play and more like a Hail Mary pass.

IPG (Interpublic Group) struggled financially for years. It bought Acxiom’s marketing solutions for $2.3 billion in 2018, trying to match Publicis’s data play, but it didn’t work. By 2024, IPG agreed to be acquired by Omnicom. The holding company model had become so broken that the merger became the exit strategy.

Publicis: The only one with a working strategy. Sort of.

Between 2014 and 2019, it spent $8.1 billion on transformation: Sapient ($3.7 billion, 2015) for digital transformation consulting to compete with Accenture, and Epsilon ($4.4 billion, 2019) for first-party data capabilities in the cookieless future. By 2024, Publicis had topped new business rankings for five consecutive years. Epsilon plus Media grew double digits. It could now successfully compete with Accenture.

But here’s the thing that reveals Publicis’s strategic blindness—it fought the wrong war. Twice.

War One (Against Platforms): Tried and Failed

Publicis spent billions positioning itself as the data/tech alternative to platform dominance. The theory: own first-party data (Epsilon), own digital transformation capabilities (Sapient), become the client’s defense against Google and Meta.

The problem: It’s the platforms that own distribution, identity, and price discovery, not Publicis. This means that no matter how impressive the capabilities it built, Publicis still has to run through the platform infrastructure. It didn’t beat back the platforms. It just became a more sophisticated vendor to platform-dependent clients.

War Two (Against the Accountants): Never Even Showed Up

While spending $8.1 billion on capabilities, Publicis invested precisely zero dollars in elevating the CMO institutionally. Thus, it built consulting capabilities for a market where:

• The Big Four had trained the buyer (CFO) to distrust “ad agencies”

• The advocate (CMO) had no institutional authority to champion transformation budgets

• Marketing spend was controlled by people who saw it as a cost center

The opportunity missed:

For $50 million over ten years—a rounding error compared to $8.1 billion—Publicis could have built a comprehensive CMO institutional program. Transition Labs, Global Forums, Harvard Business Review research, business school partnerships, and CEO-CMO dialogue platforms. The Big Four playbook, but for marketing.

This would have:

• Positioned CMOs as strategic partners (like CFOs became)

• Expanded CMO authority over transformation budgets

• Made the CMO the natural buyer for exactly the services Publicis Sapient was building

Instead, it built an $8 billion solution for a buyer who doesn’t trust it and an advocate who can’t help it—which is why it now competes for transformation work without the authority to secure transformation budgets.

The devastating comparison:

Big Four strategy: Millions invested in CFO programs → CFO becomes gateway → Billions in advisory revenue unlocked

Publicis strategy: Billions invested in capabilities → Compete for small beer in a market the competition has rigged

Publicis is, put simply, the cream of the crap. It may have won the holding-company war; it’s the only one left standing with a coherent business strategy, after all. However, it lost both strategic wars that actually mattered. It couldn’t beat the platforms despite trying. And it never even bothered against the accountants.

Meanwhile, the entire sector strip-mined the CMO:

To preserve margins during chaos, holding companies juniorized staff—larger cohorts in their twenties and early thirties, thinner experience layers, higher utilization targets—the “digital native” rhetoric positioning 38-year-old veterans as liabilities. Title inflation followed: “account planner” became “strategist” at a plus-$50-per-hour, but the counsel remained campaign-level, not enterprise-grade.

Then came the platform dependency trap. After the ANA transparency crisis in 2016, holdcos pivoted to principal media buying—taking inventory onto balance sheets, reselling at margin. But, how do you advise CMOs on platform strategy when your quarterly numbers depend on platform spend? You can’t. Structural conflict became the business model.

Every move made short-term sense. Every move also shifted holdcos downstream (execution, not strategy), increased platform dependency, reduced boardroom credibility, and hollowed out their capability to advocate for CMOs.

The cost to CMOs was considerable: Zero institutional investment in role elevation. No research. No leadership councils. No board-level positioning. They were left high and dry while the Big Four accounting firms were busily elevating the CFO to strategic superpower status.

Publicis, the only would-be advocate amid the chaos, spent billions on itself while leaving its boardroom champion defenseless.

What Finance Governance Actually Produces

Here’s what marketing “gained” by learning to “speak finance:” a governing logic that systematically destroys long-term value.

Large-sample surveys of CFOs reveal a brutal pattern. In the landmark Graham, Harvey, and Rajgopal study covering hundreds of financial executives, 80% admitted they would sacrifice long-term economic value to smooth earnings. More than half said they would reject a positive-NPV project if it meant missing quarterly earnings targets.

This isn’t malice. It’s incentive alignment. CFO compensation ties to hitting numbers. Analyst expectations punish volatility. The career risk of a missed quarter exceeds that of a forgone opportunity. So finance optimizes for predictability, not possibility.

The result? Breakthrough gets sacrificed for smoothing. Long-cycle investments that build pricing power lose to short-cycle tactics that preserve quarterly predictability. Innovation that might create asymmetric upside gets killed because it introduces variance. The future gets traded for the present, quarter after quarter.

And marketing, trying desperately to prove its value on finance’s terms, became complicit. ROI replaced strategic judgment. Attribution models replaced customer understanding. Dashboard optimization failed to create a durable advantage.

But here’s what everyone missed: Finance was never supposed to govern. Finance is a language for keeping score, not for deciding what game to play. Its elevation wasn’t destiny; it was carefully constructed by powerful institutional backers.

The Opening That Still Exists

There are two languages spoken in every boardroom. While marketing may have lost its seat, strategy never left.

Strategy thinks in the future tense: choice under uncertainty, optionality, resource allocation across possibilities. Finance thinks in the past tense: what happened, what we can measure, what we can control. Both are necessary. But they’re not equal.

In theory and practice, finance is subordinate to strategy. Roger Martin, former dean of Rotman and one of the most influential strategy thinkers of the past two decades, has been explicit about this hierarchy. Strategy makes choices about where to play and how to win. Finance measures the results of those choices. Strategy owns the forward-looking questions. Finance owns the backward-looking accounting.

More importantly: strategy’s epistemology—the way it thinks about the world—aligns perfectly with marketing’s actual job. Both deal with customers, competitive advantage, and future possibility. Both make bets under uncertainty. Both create optionality rather than optimizing certainty.

The problem isn’t that marketing can’t speak the language of the boardroom. The problem is that marketing has been brainwashed into speaking the wrong boardroom language.

Marketing doesn’t need to learn how to get along better with finance from a position of servility. Marketing needs to reclaim its natural territory of strategy.

What This Means

This isn’t about rebelling against measurement or dismissing ROI. It’s about understanding what governs what.

When strategy governs, finance follows. Strategic choices—where to compete, what capabilities to build, which customers to serve—come first. Financial measurement tracks whether those choices are creating value. The strategy function owns the bets; the finance function keeps score.

When finance governs, strategy atrophies. Every choice gets evaluated through backward-looking metrics. Investments that build future advantage get rejected because they introduce near-term volatility. Pricing power gets sacrificed for volume. Brand strength gets traded for efficiency. Marketing becomes tactical optimization of yesterday’s model.

The pendulum swung too far toward finance governance because marketing lacked an institutional champion and a strategic doctrine. The Big Four built the intellectual scaffolding for finance supremacy while the holding companies were busy hollowing themselves out.

But the pendulum can swing back.

Not by better ROI presentations. Not by more sophisticated attribution models. Not by learning to speak finance more fluently.

By reclaiming strategy. By thinking in terms of optionality, not optimization. Strategic bets, not incremental tests. Adaptive durability, not quarterly smoothing. Customer value creation as the organizing principle, not cost efficiency.

And, fundamentally, by understanding that the real power in the boardroom isn’t held by the person with the best spreadsheet. It’s held by the person who can best articulate where the company should compete, how it will win, and in which direction it should travel.

This should be marketing. It used to be marketing. Just maybe it can be marketing again.

Next Week, Part II: The strategy focus marketing needs—and why it changes everything.

---

---