Advertising agencies spent decades refusing to represent competing clients, enforced by “paper walls” between teams. Holding-company consolidation has steadily eroded that norm — and in 2026, WPP Production reportedly instructed staff to steer clients toward filling all three seats in a “competitive” bid with WPP’s own units. When every bid reports to the same Big Six holdco, there’s no independent price check — which is exactly how margin inflation gets built into a deal that looks competitive on paper.
For most of the industry’s modern history, agencies treated conflict of interest as close to sacred. An agency didn’t represent two brands competing in the same category — full stop — and when holding companies began owning multiple networks in the 1980s and ’90s, they built “paper walls” to keep competing accounts apart: separate floors, separate staff, sometimes separate building entrances. One client was reportedly cautious enough to demand two separate entrances into the agency’s building so it would never cross paths with its competitor.[1] As late as 2005, P&G — then the world’s largest advertiser — drew a hard line when Publicis’s Zenith Optimedia network handled both P&G and L’Oréal, even while P&G tolerated WPP running P&G and Unilever through separate networks under one holding company.[3] The distinction mattered: different networks, different walls, different incentives. Same network, same table, same problem.
That wall has been coming down for twenty years, and holdco consolidation is the reason. As holding companies merged agency brands to cut cost — folding creative, media, and production into shared “backroom” functions — clients stopped caring which agency brand sat on the roster and started accepting conflicts managed by internal firewalls instead of separate ownership.[4] Management consultancies buying into the category accelerated it further: when Accenture acquired agencies like Karmarama and The Monkeys, it reportedly asked clients to drop or loosen their conflict-of-interest clauses outright — a request marketers have so far resisted, but one that shows which direction the pressure runs.[1] By early 2026, even independent pitch consultants were publishing arguments that traditional COI rules are “anachronistic” and worth abandoning, on the logic that fragmented rosters and blurred business categories have made strict exclusivity meaningless.[2]
WPP Production’s September 2026 internal guidance is where that twenty-year drift lands. Staff were reportedly instructed to “actively convince” clients to fill a traditional triple-bid competition entirely with WPP’s own production units — the same holdco supplying all three “competing” quotes.[5] That isn’t a paper wall thinning. It’s the wall gone: no external price check, no independent second read on scope, and a bidding process that can’t discover a market rate because every bidder answers to the same margin target. This is the exact mechanism behind the blended-rate drift we’ve written about before — a number that looks competitive at signing can drift in the holdco’s favor with no term ever broken, because nothing outside the holdco is checking it.[6]
None of this requires bad faith on any single account team’s part. It’s what happens by default when the only competitive tension in the room is internal.
Note on Role: We don’t run your bid process or replace your procurement team. What we add is the independent check a same-roster “competition” can’t provide on its own — verifying that a bid is actually being tested against the market, not just against itself.
When a holding company supplies all the bidders in a review — as WPP Production reportedly instructed staff to pursue in 2026 — every quote answers to the same holdco. There’s no independent price check, which removes the market pressure that competitive bidding is supposed to create.
No. For decades, agencies avoided representing competing clients at all, and holding companies used strict “paper wall” separations — different staff, different floors, sometimes different building entrances — to manage the conflicts that did exist. That norm has eroded steadily since holding companies began consolidating agency brands and backroom functions in the 2000s and 2010s.
Sources Cited
- TrinityP3, “Is it time marketers rethink agency conflicts of interest?” — on the history of “paper walls” between competing accounts, the client that demanded two building entrances, and Accenture reportedly asking clients to drop conflict-of-interest clauses after acquiring Karmarama and The Monkeys.
- TrinityP3, “Rethinking Commercial Conflicts of Interest in Agency Selection” (Darren Woolley, Feb 6, 2026) — argument that traditional COI exclusivity rules are increasingly anachronistic given fragmented agency rosters and blurred business categories.
- Marketing Week, “P&G reads the riot act over client conflict” (Aug 4, 2005) — P&G’s differing tolerance for WPP running P&G/Unilever through separate networks versus Publicis’s Zenith Optimedia handling both P&G and L’Oréal.
- Digiday, “As agencies merge, agency brands may wane in importance” (Oct 25, 2023) — on marketers de-prioritizing agency-brand identity as holding companies consolidate backroom functions, and increasing tolerance for conflicts managed by internal firewalls.
- Campaign US, “Adland reacts to ‘a risk work becomes narrower, worse‘: WPP Production insourcing guidance” (Sept 11, 2026) — WPP Production reportedly instructing staff to steer clients toward filling triple-bid competitions with WPP’s own units; IMA’s Dan Veal warning on reduced competition.
- Luzae Advisors, “How “Fixed Price” Projects Cost You More Over Time.”
