When agencies delete themselves

Five years ago, Grey was closed. The name that once covered half of Madison Avenue vanished into a line item on a spreadsheet. No scandal, no rebellion, just a tidy “brand consolidation” memo. Now it’s DDB’s turn: another logo about to be archived, another story deleted for the sake of “simplification”.

There was a time when entering 777 Third Avenue meant entering a myth. The revolving doors sighed as if they knew who you were, or at least who you pretended to be. The marble lobby smelled of ambition and recycled air-conditioning. If you were lucky, you were headed to the private floor of Ed Meyer, emperor of Grey Advertising, a man who ran the place like a controlled explosion.

Meyer didn’t brief creatives in conference rooms; he briefed them over lunch at The Four Seasons, the old one, the real one, where the light hit the brass like a verdict. The “brief” was never on paper. It was theatre, sermon, and threat wrapped in espresso. You left with a sentence scribbled on a napkin and the conviction that advertising could still alter gravity.

That was Grey: loud, paranoid, magnificent. You didn’t just work there; you got baptised into it. And yet, here comes the irony no one wants to measure.

We spend years constructing identities for clients, building their heritage, coherence, and tone, and then we delete our own overnight. The irony would be funny if it weren’t so measurable.

Now Grey exists only as metadata inside WPP. Deleted. Absorbed. Sanitised. What used to be an ecosystem of heretics and geniuses is now a “global integrated offering”. The only ghosts left are the ex-employees posting bittersweet eulogies on LinkedIn between two sponsored thought pieces about AI.

And Grey is only the first domino. JWT is gone. Y&R is gone. Wunderman Thompson folded into VML, which was already a fusion of corpses. Leo Burnett became just Leo. Burson dropped its partners to sound lighter in a pitch deck. Publicis Worldwide dissolved into its twin. 

Deutsch, once a swaggering New York empire, was quietly dismantled in 2024. Even McCann, still breathing, survives more as a signature than a spirit. And DDB, the agency that once told the world to Think Small, now thinks corporate. The initials remain, but the rebellion has been replaced by compliance.

Executives call this “simplification”. It isn’t simplification. It's creative euthanasia dressed in PowerPoint.

These agencies weren’t companies; they were dialects. JWT spoke empire. DDB spoke rebellion with good manners. Grey spoke money in five languages. Burnett spoke sincerity with a Midwestern accent.

McCann spoke psychology, back when psychology still meant risk. Each had its rhythm, its superstition, and its set of sins. And from those dialects came the grammar of modern persuasion.

Now, inside the holding companies, the grammar has been replaced by templates. The goal isn’t expression; it’s alignment. The big idea has been reclassified as a risk factor.

Maybe, one day, the old names will come back. Maybe JWT.ai will launch as an “innovation lab inspired by a legacy.” We’ll applaud because we love the smell of rebranded nostalgia. We always do.

But let’s not lie to ourselves: these agencies didn’t die of irrelevance. They were executed by a business model that no longer tolerates personality. You can’t scale charisma. You can’t automate intuition. You can’t feed quarterly growth with mystery.

The new entities have no smell, no myth, and no capacity for argument. They have slides instead of soles. They’re designed to be frictionless, and frictionless, in creative work, means dead on arrival.

Ask someone today where they work, and they’ll say, “I’m in WPP.” “I’m with Publicis.” “I’m at Omnicom.” As if they live inside a spreadsheet rather than an idea.

No one says “I’m from Grey” or “I’m from DDB” anymore. Because those names don’t exist, not as places, not as voices. They’ve been flattened into a service layer. This isn’t progress. It’s homogenisation with better UX.

We’ve replaced charisma with compliance, instinct with integration, and argument with alignment. We speak in frameworks now, not in sentences.

Meanwhile, brands still pay billions to sound “authentic”, coached by people who’ve forgotten what authenticity feels like. That’s the cosmic joke: the industry that taught the world about purpose has misplaced its own.

Maybe we needed to burn the temples to prove we were modern. But what we’ve built instead isn’t modern; it’s modular. A machine that sells meaning while slowly deleting the meaning of the work itself.

And when a twenty-year-old copywriter opens her laptop in a WeWork somewhere, she’s told she’s entering “the industry”. No one tells her that this job once smelled of cigarette smoke and panic, that it was half-mad and half-divine, that it had names you could believe in.

Because the moment an industry stops believing in the power of its own names, it doesn’t just lose its history; it loses the authority to name anything else. And we, the people who once built worlds out of words, are now branding the silence that follows the delete key.

(Ercole Egizi is a Global Brand Transformation Leader with over 15 years of experience helping international brands and agencies navigate growth, repositioning, and digital reinvention. Connect with him on LinkedIn)