The Reductionist is a shade busy hacking through thorn-riddled complexity underbrush to do a full-on post today. But, as a public service that keeps the flame alive, I can’t resist riffing off a paragraph from a recent Michael Farmer article in Media Village.

If you don’t know the name, Farmer is likely the leading expert in the delicate dance called client/agency financial relations; he has a particular focus on those frissons of joy we call “scopes of work” (www.farmerandco.com/).  If you struggle in, labor over, suffer through, or otherwise have the faintest connection to advertising and haven’t read his book, Madison Avenue Manslaughter, you owe it to your present and future self to remedy the deficit.

That said, here’s what caught the eye in a piece with that began with the “oh economic joy, here comes 2022” headline, “Rough Waters Ahead for Agency Holding Companies.”

“The top four holding companies have evolved enormously in the past four decades, from simple (but growth-obsessed) financial owners of agencies to integrated operating companies. At the integrated extremes today are WPP (a “creative transformation company”) and Publicis Groupe (a “connected age platform company “), while Omnicom (“an interconnected global network of leading marketing communications companies”) and IPG (“we support and invest in our brands”) remain solidly agency centric.”

At a minimum, it’s a puzzlement. After all, these are the multi-national A-teams, unarguably blessed with much of the world’s best strategic and creative marketing talent. In theory, if not in practice, they are highly, highly, highly expert in persuasive communications. How they get to the purest bullchips, I haven’t the faintest.

So, sharing the native-born red-white-and-sing-the-blues cynicism of my fellow 395.5 million US citizens, I googled each of the holding companies, figuring that maybe Farmer was exercising a wee bit o’ the creative license. And, nope, from “transformation company” to “connected age,” the gobbledy blather is an actual thing. Credit where due: at least IPG promises to give clients more than they pay for. Even if the “over delivery for under compensation” is mostly manifested in the salaries of the worker bees.

Anyway, other work calls, and with the hope that omicron was 2021’s last gift with purchase, I wish you and yours a healthy, safe, and happy start to the year ahead. Or, as a holding company might put it, “a synergistic and positive personal interconnected brand platform experience, in the forecast quarters.”