M&W SATURDAY SUMMARY: Why Same-Country Broadcaster Consolidation Won’t Prevent Decline, Vista’s Bid for Criteo, Indie Agency Growth Trends and More

Podcasts:

On this week’s M&W Podcast we review our work of the week!

Weekly Work:

The Death of TV is Exaggerated, But Same-Country Consolidation Won’t Help

Sky and ITV Combine as U.K. Television Consolidation Accelerates

Vista’s Criteo Bid Highlights The Next Phase of Ad Tech Consolidation

Top 30 Independent Agencies Grew 2.3% in 2Q26 as Larger Groups Continued to Lead

Agencies: Canadian Growth Forecast at 3% in 2026

Large Marketer CEO and CFO Commentary: Constellation Brands, General Mills, Nike, PepsiCo and More

More Context:

The global television landscape is being structurally reconfigured. Legacy media companies are trying to protect themselves from linear decline, streaming fragmentation, and the growing share of consumer attention captured by global technology platforms. The result is one of the most active periods of corporate reshuffling the industry has seen in years.

Efforts to consolidate are centered around two different strategic paths. The first is domestic consolidation, which can protect margins and extend the life of national TV businesses. The second is cross-border expansion, which can create the infrastructure, data, sales, and technology scale broadcasters need to compete more directly with global platforms.

Domestic consolidation may be necessary in some markets. But it is not enough. If broadcasters want a future with growth rather than just a slower decline, they need to think less like national incumbents and more like international video platforms.

The problem is that domestic consolidation mostly improves the economics of the existing model. It does not fundamentally change the model itself. More generally, domestic consolidation can push broadcasters into an inward-looking posture. Management energy is spent on antitrust approvals, public-interest commitments, content obligations, local advertising concentration, and debates over platform regulation. Those issues are important, but they are not a substitute for building competitive technology and advertising platforms. Domestic consolidation buys time. It does not, by itself, buy a future.

Cross-border consolidation offers a different kind of strategic logic. It does not produce the same easy cost savings as domestic consolidation. It instead forces broadcasters to find efficiencies in the places that matter most for the future: technology, streaming infrastructure, data, measurement, audience analysis, ad products, programmatic sales, and campaign execution.

The death of TV is still exaggerated. People continue to watch professionally produced video, live sports, entertainment, news, and local content. The issue is whether traditional broadcasters can organize that value in a way that matches how consumers watch and how advertisers spend. Domestic consolidation can slow the decline. Cross-border scale gives broadcasters a better chance to build something durable.