The pitch that never happened

On 2 September, without any pitch, Publicis Groupe was appointed PepsiCo's exclusive lead global media partner. 

Publicis then walked out of Coca-Cola's pitch the very next day. The Omnicom-IPG murder left three dominant holding companies in the industry. Gola had just decided to replace Omnicom and is now left negotiating exclusively with WPP. The entire episode shocked the industry also, because it happened without the elaborate, which seems to be an increasing occurrence. LVMH has also chosen Publicis for media duties without a traditional competitive pitch.

The global media pitch is shrinking into a formality, with most of the outcome settled well upstream of the meeting itself.

Media reported figures are around $1.7 billion for the Pepsi account, covering Pepsi, Gatorade and Lay's across more than 200 markets under a model PepsiCo has christened One PepsiCo. Omnicom, the incumbent for roughly three decades, lost it. 

As Publicis withdrew from Coca-Cola's global media review, where  it had been in a two-way contest with WPP, Omnicom's shares fell about 5% in New York, WPP's rose about 4% in London. Coca-Cola then put its North America media account, the one Publicis took from WPP in a closed review in March 2025, back into play. WPP has since declined to compete for it, leaving Omnicom and Dentsu to contest the remainder.

Four decisions of consequence went through in a single week, with a conventional pitch at the centre of none of them. Timing explains part of that. Underneath sits a buying process this industry has treated as permanent, now largely dismantled, with the week's events making the wreckage visible.

The arithmetic of three

Publicis had roughly 24 hours to choose between the two largest beverage media mandates on earth, and the choice was easy. A consolidated global appointment across 200 markets, awarded without a contest, beats a contested share of an international review being run to a procurement timetable by MediaSense. Media reported figures put Coca-Cola's global media spend at about $2.6 billion, with the review itself estimated in the trade press at around $4 billion in billings. North America, which Publicis already held, was characterised by WPP's then chief executive at its 2025 shareholder meeting as roughly 5% of Coca-Cola's global integrated account. Publicis traded a twentieth of one cola for the whole of the other.

Coca-Cola now occupies an odd position. The Omnicom acquisition of IPG, completed late in 2025, took the field from four holding companies to three. Category exclusivity then subtracts further. With Publicis out, Coca-Cola's international media review became a negotiation with a single counterparty, WPP, which happens to be the incumbent it partially displaced eighteen months ago. For North America it is left with Omnicom, fresh from losing PepsiCo media while keeping PepsiCo creative, sports and PR, and with Dentsu, which already holds Japan and Korea.

Conflicts have moved from being a condition of doing business to a mechanism that decides who is allowed to compete at all. 

Consolidation was sold to this industry as a supply-side efficiency, yet its sharpest effect lands on the buy side. A client of Coca-Cola's scale now discovers that its practical choice set runs to one or two names, and that the name it ends up with was settled by a rival's signature on an unrelated contract.

A rule that only one side of the market keeps

The conflict convention deserves more scrutiny than it gets. Al Silk of Harvard called it the Exclusivity Norm, a tradition rather than a legal requirement and it survives largely because clients prefer it. Meanwhile Google and Meta hold Coca-Cola and PepsiCo money simultaneously, optimise both inside the same auction, sit on both sets of audience signals, and nobody treats it as a scandal. Coca-Cola itself already tolerates a non-exclusive supplier in Japan and Korea.

So the agencies observe a monogamy rule while the platforms that have absorbed most of the working media budget operate as polygamists by design. Every time a holding company wins a category leader, it forfeits the rest of that category. When the market held ten credible networks, that cost was survivable. With three, the rule stops functioning as a protection for the client and starts functioning as a rationing mechanism.

Platforms and agencies occupy different positions in the media chain, yet the market has accepted simultaneous participation at the platform layer while demanding exclusivity from the intermediary responsible for planning, buying, data and accountability. The fewer credible intermediaries remain, the more that old norm behaves as a constraint rather than a safeguard.

What is actually being bought

PepsiCo described what happened as a media capabilities review, with no pitch. Publicis won Microsoft's global media the same way earlier this year, and Arthur Sadoun has been explicit that clients increasingly prefer to spend time with a single partner testing capability rather than sitting through a pitch built in PowerPoint.

That shift follows from what is on the shopping list. Media reported figures are about $3 billion spent by Publicis in the first half of 2026 alone on capability acquisitions, including LiveRamp for identity and data, 160over90 for sports and culture, and Adge for measurement. Identity resolution, clean rooms, retail media integrations, commerce plumbing and measurement are all things you can audit. You can inspect a data architecture, run a test, inspect the contracts behind it and verify the partner count. Ideas are different. Ideas have to be performed, which is precisely what the pitch theatre existed to enable.

The question therefore changes shape. The old pitch asked whether an agency could supply the best idea. A capability review asks whether it can supply the best system.

When the priced asset becomes infrastructure, the sales moment stops being episodic and becomes continuous. The business is won across eighteen months of proving a stack, then ratified in a meeting. My guess is that this helps explain how Omnicom could lose thirty years of PepsiCo without being invited to defend them, since the room in which such things were once defended had stopped existing.

The demand-side question nobody asked

Set the agency drama aside and look at the client. PepsiCo's North America volumes declined in every quarter of 2025 on reported numbers. Elliott Investment Management built a stake reported at about $4 billion in September 2025. By December, PepsiCo had agreed a programme involving the removal of roughly 20% of its SKUs, plant closures, affordable price tiers, and a record year of productivity savings, with the savings explicitly pledged back into advertising, marketing and consumer value.

A global media consolidation fits inside that sentence with room to spare. My reading is that this decision travelled through the productivity agenda well before it reached the marketing agenda, and that the winning argument was made in the language of cost per outcome rather than the language of demand.

Efficiency and effectiveness are different problems. A lower cost per impression sits on the input side of the ledger, while willingness to pay sits on the output side. A superior distribution engine lowers the cost of reaching people. PepsiCo's stated difficulty is that fewer people are buying at the price offered, with consumers trading down to store brands. Cheaper impressions rarely repair a willingness-to-pay problem. The efficiency case and the growth case have been allowed to wear the same clothes, and my guess would be that within eighteen months someone at Purchase, New York will have to separate them again.

Why this reaches Ranchi before it reaches Reykjavik

India has a direct stake here. WPP India grew 3.8% like-for-like in 2025 and became one of the group's top four markets by revenue, though revenue less pass-through costs fell 2.9% like-for-like in the first half of 2026. The mechanics travelling through New York and Paris will reach Mumbai and three features of this market make the arrival interesting.

First, conflict rules behave strangely against Indian conglomerate structures. A group that spans salt, steel, airlines, retail, financial services and automobiles sits badly under a category-exclusivity doctrine written for single-category American clients. Indian networks manage this today through walls at agency level. That holds until a global client insists the global norm applies.

Second, Indian pitch culture remains elaborate, lengthy and largely unpaid, which transfers a real cost from marketer to agency. If the global buy side is migrating to capability reviews, Indian agencies have an unusually good moment to argue for the same treatment.

Third, and less comfortably, a capability review rewards whoever owns auditable infrastructure. Most Indian agency P&Ls are built on people, relationships and craft. My estimation is that a serious capability audit conducted in India today would favour the network arms with access to global data stacks and a handful of well-invested independents, leaving a wide middle exposed.

If global advertisers increasingly buy infrastructure, measurement and demonstrable capability ahead of presentation and chemistry, the Indian agency hierarchy will begin to reward different assets. The agencies best positioned for the next cycle will be the ones able to demonstrate something a client can test before it signs in the form of a better data architecture, a stronger commerce engine, a measurable distribution advantage, or a capability that rivals would struggle to reproduce.

When three suppliers keep a rule written for thirty, the client's choice gets made before anyone walks into the room.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com.