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From Budapest, former Publicis COO Justin Billingsley talks layoffs, WPP’s fuse, synthetic “Symbians” and where agency talent should really place its bets before 2026.
When we speak it’s late afternoon in the Central European powerhouse built on engineering talent, historic architecture and a fast-growing tech corridor along the Danube. London is home, but much of Justin Billingsley’s work now happens here, in a city he chose not for the skyline but for the density of PhDs. He is, as he puts it, at the end of his advertising agency career and the very start of something else. That in-between place gives him an unusually clear view of what is happening to the industry that made his name, and what may remain of it by 2026.
He didn't respond to Steve Walls’ viral LinkedIn post because he wanted to join the chorus. He answered because he was worried.
“I am lucky because I am at the end of my advertising agency career,” he says. “I cannot imagine being in my twenties and thirties in that business now and the anxiety people must be feeling.”
He describes a sector where the basic instinct in a crisis, fight or flight, is playing out in real time. “The good people are flighting,” he says. “The people left behind do not have the capabilities to fight.” Around that sits a rolling series of shocks. 25,000 jobs gone across the top five holding companies in the last year. Another 25,000 likely to follow, in his view. Mega-mergers. Constant pressure from platforms and procurement.
“The industry attracts a certain kind of person,” he says. “They do well by innovating, by acting together. They are often social animals. They draw significance from external factors rather than internally. I just feel for them.”
Billingsley has spent three decades at the sharp end of marketing. He started client-side at Unilever in Australia before a long stretch at Coca-Cola across New Zealand, Indonesia and global brand roles, then moved into senior posts at Nokia and Orange. In 2009 he crossed into agency life as CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Greater China, later becoming COO for EMEA and then worldwide COO.
At Publicis Groupe he served as global COO of Publicis Communications, then CEO for DACH and Brazil, and finally group CMO while chairing large global client assignments. After a recent stint as global chief growth officer at Monks, he is now co-founder and CMO of Simbioniq, a fractional CMO and transformation adviser, and the author of Brandflow: The Marketing Orchestration Playbook.
Billingsley has three children in their twenties. None work in advertising, but all orbit creativity in some way: film, philosophy and music, robotics. He is clear that he does not regret his own time in agencies.
“It is still an extraordinary place for commercial creativity if you feel you have a creative flair and want to be paid for solving problems creatively,” he says. The problem is what is now demanded of people at the start. “We are expecting a level of resilience from people long before they should normally have to use that resilience.”
In the old model, juniors could focus on clients and work, trusting that leadership would worry about the long term. “Right now I would lack confidence in the leadership I would be looking at in most of the major holding companies,” he says.
His advice to the imaginary 28-year-old strategist is not a neat HR soundbite. “An individual with a laptop is an agency for those agencies,” he says. “If you are good, form a client relationship, form a creative partnership, and there has never been a better time to do something small and meaningful.”
It is not the safety net some might want to hear. It is, however, honest.
He does not see advertising talent flocking to specific category. He expects more people to move in-house, but with a crucial twist. Platforms are working hard to disintermediate agencies entirely and deal directly with brands. “Those clients will need talent in order to manage those relationships,” he says. New versions of in-housing will emerge.
And, for all the noise about AI, he sees clear fault lines in what is genuinely at risk. “AI is eating certain parts of the agency value chain,” he says. “Production, adaptation, analytics, media buying and planning.” Anywhere functional scale matters more than leap-of-faith thinking. Strategy and creativity, in his view, sit on firmer ground. “LLMs are not much smarter than a house cat when it comes to finding a new idea,” he says. “They can rehash existing stuff, but they cannot make that leap.”
The company he is now building is not an agency. It sits in the space where AI and insight meet. Much of his current energy is focused on synthetic audiences, or, as he prefers to frame it, simulated people.
“A lot of the synthetic audience tools today are not good,” he says. “What they have done is basically digital averages. They are not individuals.” It fits a pattern he has seen across categories. “AI has been very good at making things faster and cheaper, but there are very few examples of making things better.”
The distinction matters. “A synthetic audience is very different from a simulated person,” he says. His team has been working on populations of simulated people where each one is a psychologically stable individual, rather than a statistical blur.
Why does that matter for a CMO? Because most research today still over-represents the people who can, and will, participate. “We are not replacing people that brands are currently speaking to,” he says. “What we are bringing is the people that brands cannot otherwise access because real people will not do the work.”
He offers a recent example. A private bank wanted to speak to founders in three US states who had exited in the last month with 15 to 20 million dollars. “Those people are never, ever going to do research,” he says. “Why would they stop and do research?” The team built simulated versions of those people so the bank could test propositions and language against them.
Another project involved a consumer healthcare company trying to develop over-the-counter solutions for people earning less than 25,000 dollars a year. Two jobs. Childcare to juggle. “Again, not people who are going to take time out to do research,” he says. They simulated those people too, so their needs could be considered in product design. The same is true for a client in hearing care. “Doing research with deaf or near-deaf people is a challenge,” he says. Simulations can process the questions, hear the prompts, and respond in ways that are more usable for product teams.
There is an almost science fiction quality to parts of it, particularly when he talks about working with agencies directly. His team calls their simulated people “Symbians”. Panels of Symbians can be dropped into a digital room and kept there over time. “The great thing about them is you can pause them in time,” he says. “They have nowhere else to be. You can go and develop the work based on their feedback, come back to the room and they will think it is the next minute.”
In theory, it is better than another late-night online panel of disengaged respondents. In practice, it raises obvious questions about guardrails. He is calm on that front. These simulated people are not being unleashed on the open web. They are not pretending to be real people in real systems. “We are not trying to do average person faster and cheaper,” he says. “We are trying to bring humanity to the table where humanity does not currently go.”
There is one topic where his tone hardens. When we talk about WPP, and the open season of advice being thrown at it, he is unequivocal.
“WPP, I regret to say, is likely to fail as a company,” he says. “It is likely to completely unbundle.” The reason, in his view, is not a missed acquisition or a particular restructure. It is time.
“They have a cultural problem that takes years to fix and they do not have enough time,” he says. The industry, as he sees it, is bifurcating into two viable ends. On one end, the one-stop shops that can credibly solve everything with a barrage of tools: Publicis, Accenture. On the other, the true specialists who are the best at one or two things. “If you are in the middle, not big enough to do everything and not good enough to compete, that is where all the job loss is happening,” he says. “That is what is happening to Dentsu and Havas and WPP.”
He draws a sharp contrast with his former employer. “Publicis used to be a holding company,” he says. “Back in 2017, 2018, we transformed from a holding company to a company where everyone works for Publicis.” Identity followed. If you ask someone who they work for, they say Publicis, not just Saatchi or Leo.
“If you ask someone at WPP who they work for, they will say Ogilvy or VML,” he says. “They do not work for WPP. It is not a culture that will win together. You cannot fix that tribalism in time.”
He is not gleeful about this. “I feel bad because I think the new CEO came too late and is already making a few unfortunate own goals,” he says. But he believes the fuse is lit.
For someone who has lived in eight countries and visited seventy through work, Billingsley’s current life is intentionally narrow. London to Budapest and back again. No Web Summit. No constant long-haul rotation.
“We are only six months old as a company,” he says. “We are doing really well. We have some fantastic clients. We get to say no to things already, which is a lovely place to be. I am just really enjoying building something.”
He spent almost twenty years client-side, then fifteen years in agency leadership roles. Now he is in founder mode. “I like my world being a little bit smaller at the moment,” he says. Travel is not the treat. Work is.
Outside that, the pleasures are simple. Cooking at home. Reading. “Always non-fiction,” he says. “Always the history of a company or other.” Time with his children. One is an assistant director on Apple TV productions in London. Another is studying philosophy and music. The third is a mechanical engineer working in robotics. “They are in creative-adjacent areas which, thankfully, I think will be relatively better protected than a lot of other areas,” he says.
Somewhere in that compressed orbit he has also published a book. Brandflow lands the day before this piece goes live. “We’re finalising which blurbs make the jacket,” he says with a small smile. The timing feels apt: an industry veteran stepping back from the machinery of holding companies to write, in long form, how marketing might actually work again.
“I watched this AI wave come through everything and wanted to be a part of it,” he says. “But I waited until I could find something that was making something better. I believe that what we are doing is actually making things better. That is what makes it stimulating.”
We leave the conversation with two parallel pictures of 2026. In one, the holding groups that defined the last thirty years of marketing are still trying to sew their own seams back together as jobs disappear and tribalism holds. In the other, smaller teams are building sharper tools, closer client relationships and companies that do not pretend to be all things to all people.
Some of that shift will be brutal; some of it overdue. Straddling London and Budapest, Billingsley offers neither hype nor gloom but something in short supply in a noisy industry: a clear view of what is worth preserving, and where the next generation should place its bets.
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