The world's largest advertising agency, VML, and the belated call for business development: When creative giants discover the basics of the craft
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Published on: April 22, 2026 / Updated on: April 22, 2026 – Author: Konrad Wolfenstein
VML, the world's largest advertising agency, and the belated call for business development: When creative giants discover the basics of the craft – Image: Xpert.Digital
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At first glance, the news seems like a routine personnel change, but it reveals a profound industry problem: VML Germany, part of the world's largest agency network, is creating the position of "Head of Business Development" for the first time. That a global industry giant with over 30,000 employees is only now establishing proactive structures for strategic new business in 2026 is an unprecedented admission of failure. Against the backdrop of massive revenue declines at its parent company WPP, drastic budget cuts from long-standing clients, and the disruptive force of artificial intelligence, the traditional agency model is on the brink of collapse. With Alexandrea Swanson, who previously held leadership positions at the BDI (Federation of German Industries), an expert from outside the industry is now expected to turn things around. This in-depth analysis illuminates why the belated call for genuine business development is far more than just a sales-oriented restructuring. It is a desperate attempt to ensure survival in a market where more agile models and specialized B2B platforms have long dictated the rules of the game.
VML and the belated call for business development: The introduction of a position that should have existed long ago –
A step that reveals a lot.
The news initially sounds unremarkable: VML Germany, the German branch of what it claims is the world's largest advertising agency, is creating its first-ever Head of Business Development position. Alexandrea Swanson, formerly Managing Director at the BDI – the Federation of German Industries – will take on this newly created role and will be responsible for new business development and the agency's strategic market positioning in Germany. Horizont reported on it, and the industry took note. But what's truly remarkable about this announcement isn't the personnel decision itself – it's the small word "first-time.".
An agency with over 30,000 employees in more than 60 markets worldwide, which describes itself as the world's largest creative company, has not yet established a dedicated function for strategic new client acquisition in its German subsidiary. This analysis examines what this reveals about the self-image of large network agencies, their approach to growth, client relationships, and their own future viability.
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The genesis of a giant and its structural contradictions
To understand VML, one must know its origin story. The agency was formed on October 17, 2023, through the merger of the two WPP networks Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R. VMLY&R itself had already been created in 2018 from the merger of VML and the long-established agency Young & Rubicam (Y&R). Wunderman Thompson, in turn, had emerged in 2018 from the merger of J. Walter Thompson – founded in 1864 – and the direct marketing agency Wunderman. What is known today as VML is therefore the result of several successive waves of mergers, condensing more than six decades of agency history.
The result is impressive in its sheer size: more than 30,000 employees, headquarters in Kansas City, New York, London, São Paulo, Shanghai, Singapore, and Sydney, and clients such as AstraZeneca, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, Ford, Intel, Microsoft, Nestlé, The Coca-Cola Company, and Wendy's. VML positions itself externally as an integrated creative and consulting firm offering brand strategy, customer experience, commerce, and MarTech from a single source. The Forrester Wave Reports list VML as a leader in Commerce Services, Global Digital Experience Services, and Global Marketing Services.
But behind this impressive facade lies a structural tension typical of large network agencies: They grow through mergers and acquisitions, consolidate portfolios, and streamline structures. What often falls by the wayside is the systematic development of new business. When major clients like Ford, Microsoft, or Nestlé have been with the agency for decades and a significant portion of revenue is secured through existing client relationships, there is little operational pressure to build in-house business development structures. New business then arises almost automatically through reputation, network, and size – not through proactive, strategically planned growth.
The business model under pressure: Numbers that don't lie
But the world has changed. The parent company WPP – one of the world's largest advertising holding companies, alongside Publicis, Interpublic and Omnicom – has been facing structurally declining key performance indicators for several years.
For 2024, WPP reported a one percent decline in revenue to £11.4 billion. The situation worsened for 2025: Revenue less pass-through costs fell by 10.4 percent to £10.18 billion, like-for-like revenue declined by 5.4 percent, and by a further 10.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. WPP posted a net loss of £215 million in 2025. The share price plummeted to a 16-year low, halving within a few months in October 2025. In April 2026, following yet another disappointing result, the stock plunged another 16 percent, reaching a four-year low. Media and creative agencies within the WPP group alone lost 5.7 percent of their revenue. Germany was explicitly identified as a "loser" within Western Europe, while Spain was considered an outperformer.
The group's reaction was profound: In February 2026, WPP CEO Cindy Rose – who had only taken over the position from Mark Read in September 2025 – announced the restructuring program Elevate28. Under this umbrella, the creative networks Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA, as well as the PR agency Burson, were consolidated into a new unit called WPP Creative. The goal was to save £500 million in annual gross costs by 2028. The group reorganized into four operating divisions: WPP Creative, WPP Media (the renamed GroupM), WPP Production, and WPP Enterprise Solutions. Phase 1 of the plan for 2026 was simply titled: "Stabilize" – stabilizing before growing.
These figures are not a temporary dip. They are a symptom of a structural change that has gripped the entire communications industry and is undermining the seemingly unshakable business models of the large network agencies.
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The dilemma of existing customer dependency
A key problem that accurately describes the situation of VML and similar network agencies is their structural dependence on existing clients. Large agencies build their revenue models over decades on long-term agency relationships. When a corporation like Ford or Nestlé has been working with the same agency group for twenty years, institutional inertia develops on both sides: The agency invests little in new business because existing clients fill its coffers – and the client, in turn, rarely switches agencies because changing them involves effort and risk.
This logic works as long as existing clients' budgets remain stable or grow. Since 2022, this has no longer been the case. Economic pressure from inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, recession fears, and the strategic reassessment of marketing budgets has led to significant reductions in project budgets by existing clients. Digital agencies report from their own experience that many clients are currently prioritizing optimizations and awaiting further global developments, thus postponing investments in major projects. Valtech – one of Germany's largest digital agencies – reported a 12.9 percent decline in revenue, citing "increasing economic pressure on existing clients in the automotive segment" as the primary cause.
The mechanism is simple and brutal: when existing clients cut their budgets, revenue collapses, which cannot be structurally compensated for by new business – because new business was never systematically pursued. Agencies like Achtung! – which, by their own account, were suddenly confronted with "shrinking budgets" after more than twenty years of continuous growth – had to restructure before they could acquire new clients again from Q4 2024 onwards.
What Business Development really means – and why it was ignored for so long
Business development is often confused with pitch management in the agency sector. This is a fundamental misconception. Pitches are reactive instruments: A potential client issues a tender for agency services, and several agencies compete for the contract. Pitches are expensive, risky, and inefficient. The GWA (German Association of Communication Agencies) determined that agencies spend an average of between €18,000 and over €71,000 per pitch, and up to €180,000 for large pitches. Given an average agency return of just under nine percent, participating in a pitch only becomes worthwhile with a contract volume of at least €300,000. Every pitch won subsidizes a number of lost pitches, which were equally costly.
Strategic business development is something different. It means proactively identifying market opportunities, building partnerships in a structured way, aligning your service portfolio with future customer needs, and systematically developing new growth areas. It combines market analysis, sales, strategic positioning, and network building into a holistic function. For companies in the B2B sector, which also includes agencies in their relationship with their corporate clients, this forms the backbone of any sustainable growth strategy.
The fact that an agency of VML Germany's size and reputation is only now institutionalizing this function for the first time in 2026 reveals a structural deficiency in the network agency model. For years, the logic was this: large agencies win new clients through reputation, the global footprint of their network, awards, and personal relationships at the management level. A dedicated business development function seemed superfluous because new business – at least during boom times – practically flowed in on its own. What Xpert.Digital and similarly structured platforms and service providers have been consistently practicing for years – namely, business development as a strategic core, not as a subordinate sales task – is now being discovered by the large network agencies under the pressure of the crisis.
A look at the profile: What Alexandrea Swanson brings to the table
The choice of person for this role is revealing. Alexandrea Swanson doesn't come from the traditional agency world. She studied economics, political science, and philosophy, came to Germany on a Fulbright scholarship, and most recently spent three and a half years as Managing Director at #SheTransformIT, part of the Federation of German Industries (BDI). There, she was nominated as one of Germany's "Top 40 Under 40." Her previous positions include stints at the American Chamber of Commerce Germany, Scholz & Friends, the US Department of State, and NTT Security.
This profile was deliberately chosen. Swanson doesn't bring an insider's agency perspective, but rather an external view of industry structures, political and economic contexts, and strategic partnerships. She describes her role at VML as driving growth initiatives that combine strategy, innovation, and partnerships. VML Germany thus implicitly signals that traditional pitch handling by an experienced agency manager is insufficient. What's needed is persuasive power at the decision-making level, a strategic understanding of companies' transformation agendas, and the ability to generate growth not through reaction, but through proactive shaping.
That Swanson previously worked at the BDI – at the heart of the German industrial network – is no coincidence. VML Germany has thus built a direct bridge into the German industrial network, to those decision-making levels in corporations and medium-sized companies that are relevant as new clients for agencies.
🎯🎯🎯 Data-driven B2B industry hub as a quasi-in-house solution
The quasi-in-house solution: How Xpert.Digital closes operational gaps in B2B marketing and sales – Smart Content-Driven Business - Image: Xpert.Digital
Xpert.Digital is a data-driven B2B industry hub led by Konrad Wolfenstein . The company acts as an external, quasi-in-house solution for industrial partners, closing operational gaps in marketing, content, and sales – without requiring additional resources on the client side.
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How AI is reinventing the advertising agency: Why business development is now a core task
AI disruption as a structural accelerant
The crisis facing advertising agencies would be incomplete without considering the central disruptive factor: artificial intelligence. A 2025 study by BCG found that CMOs expect the proportion of work currently performed by agencies to decline by up to 14 percentage points in the next two to three years – primarily in favor of technology. AI-powered systems are taking over increasing portions of the creative and media workflow. According to BCG, so-called agentic AIs – autonomous AI systems – could handle more than a fifth of marketing work in the near future.
For Friedrich Tromm, an experienced agency consultant, the consequence is clear: by 2028, traditional advertising agencies as we know them will no longer exist. He cites Sam Altman of OpenAI, who sees up to 95 percent of today's agency tasks being replaced by AI, as well as Forrester, which predicts the disappearance of 30,000 agency jobs in the US alone. Even if such predictions may seem exaggerated in their absoluteness, they nevertheless indicate the direction of change.
WPP itself has recognized the AI dimension and placed it at the heart of its Elevate28 strategy: The WPP Open program, described as an "agentic marketing platform," is intended to secure the company's future together with open intelligence data capabilities and expanded technology partnerships. The message is clear: Those who want to remain relevant in the future must move beyond simply providing creative services and become technologically savvy partners to their clients.
WPP shareholders did not react positively to this message. The stock fell to a four-year low in April 2026 after organic revenue fell one percent short of analysts' estimates and the company projected, at best, stagnation for 2026. For the first half of 2026, WPP expects a like-for-like decline in the mid- to high single digits, with an operating profit margin between 12 and 13 percent.
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The structural paradox: cost savings and business development at the same time
It is economically remarkable that VML Germany, in an environment of massive cost-cutting, is creating a new position – specifically for business development. This is not a contradiction, but rather the expression of a sober strategic calculation: cost savings alone do not guarantee growth. They improve margins, but do not generate new revenue. If existing customer revenues decline structurally, cost efficiency will not compensate for the decline in the medium term. New customers are needed.
That's precisely why the introduction of a Head of Business Development position in the context of Elevate28 makes sense. WPP has explicitly stated that the immediate priority of Phase 1 in 2026 is stabilizing net new business performance. This is an admission that new business momentum has been insufficient in the past. The £500 million cost savings are to be partially reinvested in high-growth areas.
The paradox is revealed nonetheless: In a market environment where agencies are shrinking, budgets are declining, and AI is increasingly substituting for creative services, business development becomes more important—but also more difficult. Winning new clients takes time, resources, and persuasion. Pitches are expensive, and success rates are low. And companies that cut budgets for their existing agencies are rarely willing to simultaneously take on new, substantial agency engagements. The pie is shrinking—and more agencies are fighting for smaller slices.
Structural change in the agency market: Winners and losers
Not all agencies are suffering equally. The ranking of German full-service digital agencies paints a nuanced picture: The combined fee revenue of the major German digital agencies amounted to €2.355 billion in 2025. However, within this market, the balance of power is shifting considerably. Specialized providers in growing segments – particularly in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors – are bucking the general trend. Healthcare & Pharma was the only client segment at WPP to record a revenue increase of 6.7 percent in the third quarter of 2025.
The losers are primarily those agencies heavily reliant on cyclical industries like automotive, those that haven't developed their own technology offerings, and those that have relied too long on the inertia of long-term client relationships. The winners are compact, specialized units with a clearly defined value proposition that can win over clients not so much with awards and creative prizes, but with measurable business impact.
Michael Farmer, one of the world's most renowned agency consultants, has precisely identified the core problem: No agency develops reasonable scopes of work. Agencies negotiate fees without paying attention to their output. And they often don't know exactly how much work they are doing for a particular client. This structural lack of transparency has allowed agencies to conduct fee negotiations in their favor for decades – now the tables are turning, and clients are increasingly using this lack of transparency as an argument for budget cuts.
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The Xpert.Digital model: Business development as a core element, not an add-on
At this point, it's worth taking a look at alternative models. What Xpert.Digital has been consistently pursuing for years follows a different logic than the classic agency model: Business development is not a secondary sales function, but an integral core of their service offering. The combination of in-depth industry know-how, their own infrastructure for digital visibility, influencer and recommendation marketing, and the systematic building of partnerships and networks allows them to acquire new clients not through expensive pitches, but through demonstrated competence and a strong digital presence.
This approach stands in direct contrast to the logic of network agencies: Where VML focuses on size, global reach, and brand reputation, a provider like Xpert.Digital relies on focused expertise, content authority in clearly defined B2B segments, and demonstrable results. The key difference lies in the fact that new customer acquisition is not seen as an exception or a crisis measure, but as a continuous process integrated into daily operations.
The fact that VML Germany – the world's largest advertising agency according to its own statement – is now attempting to replicate this model, in a phase of declining sales and under the pressure of a profound restructuring, is a signal: The industry recognizes that creative competence alone is no longer a viable business model.
The question of credibility: Can a network agency conduct genuine business development?
The really interesting question is whether VML Germany is truly changing its structural direction with the introduction of a Head of Business Development position, or whether it is simply a signal to the market that will not result in any profound operational changes.
Genuine business development requires that the agency has clear answers to the following questions: Which clients does it truly want to win, and why? What is the differentiated value proposition that makes VML Germany more attractive to potential new clients than a specialized provider, a management consultancy with creative services, or a pure technology agency? Which specific industries, segments, and decision-making levels should be addressed? And how will success be measured – in revenue, in new client relationships, in strategic partnerships?
The danger is real that the new position will primarily serve to correct the agency's internal and external image: "We take new business seriously." However, if the organizational structures, incentive systems, and processes of a large network agency are not adapted accordingly, the Head of Business Development function will remain isolated. Large agencies tend to equip new business managers with insufficient budget, inadequate support, and excessively high expectations—and then wonder why the hoped-for growth impetus fails to materialize.
Alexandrea Swanson's profile gives cause for cautious hope: Her background in economics and political structures, her networking experience from BDI and AmCham Germany, and her explicit self-conception as a transformation driver suggest that VML Germany does not want to build a classic sales function, but rather a truly strategically anchored growth responsibility.
The broader economic significance: What the industry transformation means for the advertising market
The decisions made by VML Germany and WPP's Elevate28 strategy are not isolated corporate actions. They are symptoms of a fundamental shift in the advertising market that has implications far beyond the agency sector.
First, the relationship between brand and agency is undergoing a fundamental transformation. BCG describes how existing contractual relationships are reaching their limits and that new cooperation models must emerge, based on shared results, data access, and shared value creation. Agencies that continue to work based on hourly rates and briefings are losing out to providers who can measure and share value creation.
Secondly, consolidation at the holding company level continues. The merger of Ogilvy, VML, and AKQA under WPP Creative is not an isolated case. Other holding companies, such as Publicis Groupe and Interpublic, have also streamlined operations intensively in recent years. The result is fewer, but larger units – which, however, if they are not structurally reorganized, will reproduce the old problems of network agencies on a larger scale.
Thirdly, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are proving more stable than expected. While large corporate clients are cutting budgets, a 2025 survey showed that 29 percent of SMEs in Germany plan to invest more in advertising than in the previous year, while 44 percent intend to keep their budgets constant. This market has historically been unattractive to large network agencies – but it is precisely the market served by specialized, agile providers. Business development targeting SMEs could be a significant strategic lever for VML Germany.
The belated realization and its consequences
VML Germany's decision to create its first-ever Head of Business Development position is more than just a personnel announcement. It's an admission that the traditional model of the large network agency – growth through reputation, client retention, and pitches – is no longer sufficient. It's also a symptom of the structural crisis gripping the entire WPP Group: declining revenues, merger after merger, a corporate restructuring of historic proportions, and the pressure from AI, which is challenging the very foundations of the creative business.
The industry is facing a fundamental redefinition of its value proposition. Agencies unable to articulate the measurable contribution they make to their clients' value creation will be replaced—by AI-powered systems, in-house creative teams, or focused specialists with a clear value proposition. Business development is not merely a sales function. It is the organizational expression of the ability to clearly define one's own value, communicate it credibly, and proactively develop new markets.
What Xpert.Digital and similarly structured B2B platforms have been demonstrating for years – strategically integrated business development as the core of the business model, not as a subordinate crisis measure – is proving to be what it has always been: not the special path of a niche provider, but the logical answer to a market in which competence and impact count more than size and price.
VML Germany has taken the right step. But, with all due respect, it's a step that comes five years too late.
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