At a time when most holding company execs were calling for a more modest Cannes—some skipping the Croisette altogether—Mark Penn was hosting a beach party. Not a metaphorical one. A real, fire-marshal-monitored crowd gathered at Sport Beach, Stagwell’s branded mini-campus on the sand.
“It’s packed,” waves Penn, perched comfortably above the melee in his signature deadpan. “We even had a pickleball tournament this morning,” he tells me as we sit down for an interview at the Sport Beach during the festival.
There’s something unbothered, almost defiant, about Penn’s approach to business, spectacle, and the often-contradictory state of the marketing industry. Where others see caution, he sees opportunity. Where legacy networks are busy consolidating and rationalising headcount, Penn is promising growth, tech transformation, and a shot at toppling the giants.
WATCH: Mark Penn's interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific on Stagwell's brand-building playbook, bet on sport, stay lean-ish, and throw just enough shade at the competition to make your point.
Sport Beach and the challenger strategy
Now in its third year, Sport Beach returned to Cannes as the “official sports partner” of the festival – no breezy Cannes sideshow, very much the main character. I queued for a sweaty 40 minutes in full sun just to collect our wristbands, alongside agency types, former athletes and at least one influencer who broadcasted the whole ordeal on TikTok. That kind of demand suits Mark Penn’s preferred narrative just fine: Stagwell, the scrappy challenger, outmuscling legacy giants not with scale, but cultural heat.
“Today we’re a challenger company with 14,000 people in 51 countries and have grown very fast, but not everyone knows us,” Penn admits. “Sport Beach helped change that.”
In other words: if you didn’t know who Stagwell was before the beach volleyball match, you probably do now.
The logic behind the showmanship of the sun-soaked activation is not just brand awareness. It’s part internal bonding exercise, part client hunting ground, and crucially part live case study. “It’s a proof of concept. If the advertising company you’ve never heard of can pull this off, imagine what we could do for a known brand,” Penn says.
Stagwell creative agencies, 72andSunny and others, were initially tasked to create something that could turn heads. What they landed on is a multi-day sports‑meets‑marketing festival by the sea, commanding queue‑worthy attention—and star‑studded attendance from the likes of Basketball Hall of Famer Carmelo Anthony, 23-time Grand Slam champion Serena Williams, retired professional soccer player and Olympic gold medalist Megan Rapinoe, four-time WNBA champion Sue Bird, World Series champ Alex Rodriguez and three-time NBA champion Dwyane Wade, to name a few.
But what about the ROI of an event of this stature? Without giving out names, Penn shares they won a major tech and auto client in the middle of the session and a “notable surge” in net new business following the debut Sport Beach which Penn insists “wasn’t a coincidence.”
If this holding group can build the most talked-about beach together, imagine what it can do for your brand. For a lesser‑known company in a crowded landscape of 50‑year‑old networks, that’s smart theatre.
Scale, without bloat
There’s a moment in our conversation when Penn drops the line: “I put out a plan, what I call five by five. I want to be a $5 billion company in five years.” It’s delivered with the kind of offhand certainty that makes you wonder whether it’s a strategy memo or a prophecy.
Still, Stagwell is halfway there. It took Apple 18 years to reach $3 billion, he points out. “We’ve done it in nine.” Modesty is clearly not a part of the brand.
But Penn doesn’t want to be the biggest. He wants to be big enough. “The sweet spot is scale without bloat,” he says. Stagwell calls itself a “Goldilocks” holding company, not too big, not too small, just right for clients tired of dealing with 17 siloed teams that don’t return emails.
When asked for advice on building a successful challenger business, Penn doesn’t sugarcoat it. “First, you have to hit scale milestones fast—$100 million, then $500 million. Without that, you’re not in the game. But to do that, you need a clear mission, real differentiators, and yes, you have to be a bit nuts.”
He continues: “You’ve got to believe you can do something others haven’t done, and then back it up with real moves. Acquisitions, tech investment, talent—you can’t wait around for organic growth to get you there.”
But scale, he adds, isn’t just about getting big. “It’s about being big enough to win global pitches, but small enough to stay entrepreneurial. That’s the balance everyone’s trying to strike.”
With $3 billion in revenue, Stagwell isn’t breathing down Publicis’ neck just yet, but it’s well out of the minor leagues. “We can build up from here. The behemoth holding companies have to build down and adapt to new technologies while dealing with so much legacy.”
That edge, Penn argues, lies in how quickly and decisively Stagwell is investing in tech. “We’re investing about $20 million a quarter in AI and tech,” he says. “The big guys are burdened by legacy systems. We’re not. And we won’t do what they were doing, which is just keep adding more companies. We will keep diversifying into interesting and new revenue streams because tech is going to create a wealth of opportunities that people don’t see yet.”
One such investment is called ‘The Machine’ (yes, it sounds like a Bond villain’s pet AI), an internal AI-based content development platform set to roll out later this year that will bring client data, media buying, content, and research under one digital roof.
Of course, all that innovation comes at a cost. These tech bets are hitting margins and chipping away at already wafer-thin net income. So, when does it all start paying off?
Penn doesn’t flinch. “Our investments in tech are going to continue through the middle of next year when it will taper down, probably in half,” he says. “As the challenger, we need to be at the cutting edge of tech adoption.”
Translation: we’ll eat some pain now to be better positioned when the dust settles and when competitors start shedding more weight.
The agency is also spreading its wings geographically with a string of acquisitions, such as the digital communications agency Create in the Middle East and Japan-headquartered ADK Global in Asia. In January, when the agency announced its intent to acquire the Japanese marketing shop, a subsidiary of ADK Holdings Inc., the acquisition was expected to be completed in 60-90 days. It took longer.
I asked Penn on the status, “The deal has finally just closed,” Penn says. “It took time, lots of jurisdictions and offices needed approval,” he shrugs. “But we’re done.”
The official announcement on the ADK Global and Assembly merger is awaited.
In the past year alone, Stagwell has acquired 12 companies, including ADK. So, how is this any different from the global holdcos?
“For us, acquisition isn’t about roll-ups for cost synergies or arbitrage. The goal is to create a modern marketing network from scratch.”
The difference, he argues, is intention and integration. “Every acquisition we’ve made was with the idea of building a new structure—one that’s digital-first, more flexible. We put media and creative together at the core. That’s rare.”
He’s also quick to distance Stagwell from the scale-obsessed legacy players. “We’re not trying to be a scale play like the old model. We don’t need 80,000 employees to compete. We want the best 10,000. Period.”
On mergers, media, and the cockroach DNA
A self-proclaimed “news junkie,” Penn moderated a panel at the Sport Beach on the 'Future of News: Why News Junkies are the Real MVPs', which made the business case for investing in high-quality media environments of news, a topic that is close to him.
The logic, in his view, is simple: advertisers have over-corrected, spooked by vague notions of brand safety, many have blacklisted entire news categories via programmatic filters, without stopping to ask whether context actually hurts their brand.
Stagwell’s research suggests it doesn’t. Across different environments, be it politics, entertainment, or sports, the performance of ads remained steady. But the fear of brand safety has resulted in the mass retreat from news and left quality journalism to wither, starved of ad dollars by brands that should know better.
At the end of our conversation, a full hour in the Sport Beach studio, I sense a curious note of idealism. For all the talk of AI, market share and operating margins, Penn remains animated by something more fundamental.
“Creativity isn’t going anywhere. It’s the spark that drives everything,” he says, almost wistfully.
“I call us the cockroaches of the industry—we survive everything. We survive nuclear winters, we survive new technologies, we survive shifts in consumer attitudes.” It’s not a glamorous metaphor, but that’s the point. In an industry chasing unicorns and moonshots, Penn is betting on something far more durable.
For a man who’s spent four decades in polling, political strategy, market research and advertising—who’s advised presidents, led companies, and written two bestselling books—Penn is oddly romantic about the power of media and the story.
Which, ironically, might be exactly what gives the cockroach a fighting chance in a room full of giants.
