Michael Kassan, one of the media and marketing industry’s most influential dealmakers and the head of advisory firm 3C Ventures, anticipates another agency holdco mega-merger on the near horizon. 

“I don’t think they can continue without some consolidation,” Kassan speculated of the holdcos in an interview with ADWEEK at Kassan’s 3CV Plage at Cannes. “If your question is, Michael, ‘If we’re sitting here next year, think there’ll be another one?’…I think so.”

The prediction comes as Omnicom’s planned acquisition of IPG—a $13.25 billion deal set to close in the second half of this year—faces increasing scrutiny. The U.K.’s competition watchdog has launched a probe into the transaction, while the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has issued a second request for information. 

Kassan, for his part, believes that the Omnicom-IPG deal will go through. “It’s a deal that should close. There’s not an antitrust issue here,” he said. “Hopefully it doesn’t get political.”

Outside of Omnicom and IPG, the biggest agency holding companies and networks include Publicis, WPP, Dentsu, S4, Havas, and Stagwell.

Kassan’s high-level diagnosis: all the holdcos are feeling the pressure. 

Part of that is due to pressure to deliver good margins, he said. While agencies have evolved their revenue models, moving beyond a basic fee structure and embracing streams like principal-based media buying (where the agency buys media and sells it to the client at a higher rate), they’re combatting margin pressures. 

“Consolidation is going to make sense,” he said. “Back office, the industrial logic of consolidation is more appropriate now than it’s been in a long time, because marginal pressure is real.”

And while internal consolidation at the holdcos has accelerated—WPP, for instance, brought together VML and Y&R with Wunderman Thomson under the VML brand, while IPG married FCB Health and McCann Health into the unified IPG Health brand—this kind of trimming won’t be enough, Kassan said. 

“It’s going to get tough,” he said. “There’s more to come there.”