Ad agencies love to talk about pitching like it’s sport: winners, losers, league tables. Last week’s PepsiCo/Coca-Cola global media account scramble proves it isn’t.
Markets are crazy.
Don’t take my word for it. Ninety years ago, in John Maynard Keynes’ highly influential General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, the great man made the unsettling (but nevertheless accurate) judgment that markets are irrational, flawed, and strange.
Keynes thought markets used to be more honest. In the early 20th century, when a handful of people owned most of a company’s shares, they knew roughly what it was worth. But as ownership spread out, that knowledge thinned with it. By 1936, Keynes concluded the whole system had gone mad: short-term, meaningless fluctuations were having, in his words, “an altogether excessive, and even an absurd, influence on the market.”
His explanation was the beauty contest: professional investors, he said, weren’t picking the stocks they thought were “good”. They were picking the stocks they thought everyone else would pick by guessing what average opinion expected average opinion to be.
Remember this every time you read a business news story in which “Company X’s share price rose/fell Y% after Z thing happened”. Journalists, including myself, point to instant share-price fluctuations as some sort of evidence that “the market” is making a collective judgment about a company’s fortunes.
That’s exactly what happened last week, when news broke that PepsiCo was moving its global media-buying account out of Omnicom after 30 years and into Publicis Groupe. Publicis was pitching for Pepsi’s great rival, Coca-Cola – a bigger client with a bigger budget – but appeared willing to walk away from Coke to cash in Pepsi.
This makes Pepsi an intriguing story: not because ‘it’s a big account’, but because nobody can immediately explain the logic behind Publicis’ decision.
First: what actually happened?
There’s been a lot of trade-press coverage on this story – here are the essential details of what happened:
- June: Coca-Cola puts global media, data science and technology into review, run by pitch consultancy MediaSense. It excludes North America (Publicis won that in 2025) and Japan/Korea (with Dentsu). Invited to pitch are WPP (incumbent, via Open X) and Publicis. The review coincides with the five-year renewal cycle on the WPP Open X partnership that began in 2021, and Coca-Cola framed it as a shift away from traditional media planning toward technology including agentic tools. Global creative and PR stay with Open X and are not part of the review.
- Late August: pitch meetings happen; decision expected late 2026.
- Wednesday 2 September: PepsiCo names Publicis lead global media partneracross 200-plus markets under a “One PepsiCo” model. No pitch. Publicis was appointed after a media capabilities review. Omnicom keeps creative, sports and PR.
- Same day: Publicis exits the Coca-Cola process. Publicis, WPP and Coca-Cola declined to comment; MediaSense did not respond.
- Market reaction: Omnicom down 5%, closing at $81.76, recovering nearly 2% on Thursday. Publicis up 4.4%. WPP up 5.6%. Barclays put the Omnicom fee-income hit at around $100m annually; Wells Fargo said higher.
Numberwang
The reporting on this story isn’t even consistent on how big the prize was.
Campaign, Adweek and Adotat each cited a different figure for the Coke business under review, ranging from $1.44bn to $7.5bn – sourced, mostly, to nobody in particular. Add PepsiCo’s $1.7bn account moving the other way, and you’ve got several outlets confidently reporting numbers that don’t describe the same thing, cited by everyone, sourced by no one.
It’s not because these publications are failing. It’s their job to report facts as news. But what separates real life from sport is this uncomfortable truth: the “facts” of sport lead to clear, objective results – scores, winners, losers. The “facts” of business, like most of the real world, require interpretation. In other words: explaining why this story happened.
In fairness to Adotat, it has tried to present something of an exposé on “what really happened.” But its reporting leans on unverified background briefing (in addition to some specific claims that WPP refuted). The use of “people familiar with the matter” isn’t wrong in an industry where too few people are prepared to tell the truth for fear of reprisal, but the repeated use of blind quotes and anonymous briefing does mean you have to be extremely careful when handling verbal grenades.
Such as these bombshells relayed by Adotat:
- WPP’s pitch went badly and this was obvious to both sides.
- PepsiCo made the appointment conditional on Publicis surrendering Coca-Cola North America. This is the piece’s biggest scoop. Both companies declined to answer. The Drum, working the same story, treats the fate of the $700m-plus North America business as one of various “unanswered questions”.
- Coca-Cola’s contracts are vague, its agencies can’t buy media on their own account, and any solution they propose gets declined, then built in-house anyway. All of that reporting is taken from unnamed people with “direct experience.” WPP is on the record disputing that the account loses money.
But more broadly, Adotat‘s entire thesis rests on “Publicis chose the smaller prize.” Use the low end of its own range – the $1.44bn – and Publicis actually chose the bigger prize. Hmm.
The one (unverified) explanation
So look at what’s genuinely strange about this event, whatever the interpretation: a company walked away from a $1.44-7.5bn opportunity within hours of winning a $1.7bn one. Whatever the reason, that’s strange by any normal commercial rationale, and it happened in public, fast, with total silence from everyone involved.
Which invites the question: why would a holding company treat a smaller, harder-won account as worth more than a bigger, currently uncontested one?
There are only a few possible answers:
- Publicis never believed it would win Coke. WPP had momentum, an incumbent’s advantage, a CEO publicly confident days before the pitch. If Publicis rated its odds low, this isn’t a sacrifice at all – it’s just picking the sure thing over the long shot. This is the boring, unprovocative answer.
- Some accounts are worth less than their billings suggest. The industry’s whole self-image runs on billings numbers because they’re the only figures anyone releases publicly. Nobody outside a handful of CFOs actually knows which giant accounts make money, and the trade press has no route to that information except via leaks – which arrive with an agenda attached. That means the number the entire industry uses to keep score is the one number that tells you least about whether the business underneath it works.
- PepsiCo bought something categorically different – an operating model built from nothing, rather than inheriting someone else’s five-year-old architecture. Whether or not the North America condition is real, this distinction – installing your own system versus running someone else’s – is a real, structural difference.
Any of the three could be true. All three might be, in different proportions. But that kind of nuance doesn’t fit the narrative of “X wins, Y loses”.
The narrative that pitching is a simple contest.
Why this isn’t sport
Sport works as an analogy for agency pitching because it’s easy to understand.
One company wins something, another loses something, and some proxy measure gets reported as “the score”: the size of the account won or lost, or the movement of a share price.
And because agencies have talked themselves into believing it – they really do see themselves as sports teams, not services businesses. I’ve talked to so many CEOs, MDs, heads of new business, and PRs who really do believe it. For years I used to put together Campaign‘s “new business league table”, which was as fierce a point of pride and embarrassment as any agency’s comparator of performance.
But the PepsiCo story last week only serves to underline how fictitious this idea is – and, more than that, it shows what’s actually happening underneath it instead.
Sport requires a level playing field, a legible scoring system, and known constraints. None of those exist here: nobody knows what the account is worth, nobody knows what makes it profitable, and nobody can explain why “losing” Pepsi is supposed to be a blow to Omnicom if Coke was meant to be the bigger prize all along – or why “winning” Pepsi is supposed to be such a coup for Publicis if Coke really was worth more.
Coca-Cola’s own position undermines the sport framing further. If it can’t generate a genuine competitive process – if it’s now left with WPP in a pitch it started specifically to find alternatives – that’s a serious issue. That’s a client that may simply be stuck; and it’s stuck for the same reason the rest of us can’t call this story: none of us, Coca-Cola included, has enough information to know what a fair contest for this business would even look like.
There’s no scoreboard here. There’s only a story that reads like a scoreboard.
Who benefits
So why has nobody ever bothered to build a real one?
It isn’t hard to imagine what one would look like: account margin; revenue retained per client, not billings won; headcount required to service a piece of business against fee income. These are numbers holding companies calculate internally every quarter, but none of them are published.
What is published, in press releases and league tables and quarterly new-business roundups, is the one figure that tends to mislead most of all: the size of the account.
And plenty of people benefit from this arrangement:
- It suits holding companies, whose share prices respond to wins and losses rather than to the profitability of what they’ve won.
- It suits agency leaders, whose standing rests on league-table positions built from billings, not margin.
- And it suits the trade press, because “$1.7bn account moves” is a story we can file by deadline, and “nobody can establish whether this is good news” is not.
Every party with the power to make account economics visible has a reason to leave them foggy. That is not a conspiracy; it’s something much more dull: an established way of working that nobody has any incentive to break.
The ugly contest
Which brings us back to Keynes, and to something much uglier than even he described nearly a century ago.
Keynes’s professional investors were meant to be guessing what average opinion expected average opinion to be — already a strange, self-referential game, but one built on real information about real companies. What happened to Omnicom’s share price last week is that same game, played on top of a story nobody can actually verify. Investors weren’t reacting to what losing PepsiCo meant; they were reacting to what they expected other investors to do about a story they couldn’t check.
You couldn’t look at the 5% drop as any kind of meaningful judgment on Omnicom’s business. The Barclays and Wells Fargo estimates behind it are informed guesses, not facts, and the price partly reversed within a day. What actually happened was nothing more complicated than “I don’t know why this happened, but I’m afraid other people will sell, so I’d better sell first.”
It’s a beauty contest judging a beauty contest – Keynes’s guessing game, running one level deeper than the great man imagined.
But where Keynes was describing a flaw, pitch theatre is closer to a design. He described investors guessing at each other because the information genuinely wasn’t available. Ours are guessing because the information is deliberately not published.
So no: pitch theatre isn’t sport. There’s no scoreboard, no final whistle, no honest league table underneath it.
There’s just an industry that lives with this fog because it suits almost everyone in it better than a true verdict would.