Two years on from one of the most significant mergers in agency history, WPP VML’s Asia-Pacific CEO Yi-Chung Tay has arrived at a conviction that cuts against the industry’s current obsession with tooling: scale without connection is merely complexity, and that the only competitive advantage which cannot be acquired or replicated is the culture that holds everything together.
In the chronicles of agency history, few mergers have carried as much symbolic weight as the one that created VML. When WPP announced in 2023 that it would fold Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R into a single entity, the industry’s reaction was swift and in many quarters, elegiac. Wunderman Thompson carried the lineage of JWT—J. Walter Thompson, founded in 1864, one of the oldest and most storied names in advertising. VMLY&R bore the legacy of Young & Rubicam, itself a titan of the twentieth-century creative industry. To retire those names was for many practitioners, to close chapters that had defined what agencies were for. The new entity VML (named for Vml.com) the digital agency that had anchored the VMLY&R merger before it, felt to some like a diminishment. A surrender of heritage to the logic of consolidation.
Two years on, Yi-Chung Tay, VML’s Chief Executive Officer across Asia-Pacific, is keen to prove that framing is not only outdated, but that the more interesting question is what comes next. “We basically doubled overnight,” Tay says of the integration. “Capabilities, business coverage, we spent a lot of 2024 finding out what we actually had.” That process of discovery, unglamorous as it was, resulted in something more valuable than a rationalised cost structure. It produced a clarity about what a combined VML could be that neither predecessor organisation operating separately, had the scale to deliver.
Tay’s path to leading one of the region’s most consequential creative networks is itself a study in the kind of career that only APAC produces. Having spent more than seven years at PepsiCo China, departing as Vice President of Marketing in 2011, he then co-founded IM2.0, a digital marketing agency that quietly became one of China’s most respected independents before being acquired by WPP in 2013. From there, Tay built VML China from that start-up foundation into a full-service digital powerhouse, before stepping into broader regional leadership at VMLY&R Asia in 2018. When the merger created VML in 2024, Tay took on the co-CEO role for APAC alongside Audrey Kuah; by April 2025, with the integration largely behind them, he assumed charge of the region. It is a career that moves notably from client to founder to agency leader, giving Tay a fluency across the table and a particular credibility when he talks about what chief marketing officers (CMOs) actually need from a partner.
There is little time to dwell on every shift reshaping agency land—consolidation, technological acceleration, leadership changes—but the context surrounding WPP and VML APAC matters. As the broader network continues navigating structural transformation, adjusting to changing market dynamics while deepening its investment in technology and AI, the environment in which Tay has been building is anything but static. Across 2025, WPP recorded a near 6% decline in like-for-like revenue and streamlined parts of its global workforce as it repositioned for a changing industry landscape, while the transition from Mark Read to Microsoft veteran Cindy Rose as CEO signalled an organisation leaning further into a technology-led future. It’s a moment in which agencies are being asked to prove their relevance more urgently than ever and clients, facing their own pressures, are demanding clarity on what partnership actually delivers.
Which is why VML APAC’s creative trajectory under Tay becomes notable within the wider structure. Awards may not be the sole measure of an agency’s value, but they do signal continuity, a throughline of cultural and creative momentum at a time when many networks are still recalibrating. In Campaign Brief’s The Work rankings—one of the region’s most visible measures of creative output—VML climbed from 12th place in 2021 to third in 2024, before claiming the top spot as APAC Network of the Year in 2025 with 148 acceptances and number-one rankings in Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. At Cannes Lions, the network secured 57 Lions in 2024 and 63 in 2025, ranking among the four most awarded agency networks globally in both years. At Spikes Asia, VML took second place in the network rankings in 2024, with VML Australia named Agency of the Year in 2025. Together, these markers suggest less a momentary peak than a sustained thread, evidence that Tay’s connected-agency thesis has translated into creative consistency, even as the ground beneath the industry continues to shift.
Speaking to Beyond the Boardroom in our debut conversation, Tay also describes 2025 as a year that demanded restraint and precision, shaped by an unforgiving global economic climate. Southeast Asia moved to its own rhythm, while China recalibrated with the deliberateness of a market acutely aware of its scale and influence, only beginning to regain momentum toward the close of the year. “It was really towards the end of last year that we started to see growth and traction,” he shares. Now, in early 2026, he feels VML emerges after having done the difficult internal work, not simply repositioning itself, but advancing a broader argument about what agencies must become in this moment, and why much of the industry remains structurally unprepared to deliver on it.
Inside the CMO Pressure Cooker
The argument hinges on a distinction Tay draws with deliberate precision. VML, he is keen to stress, is not a full-service agency, a label so overused it has largely lost meaning. What the network is building instead is what he describes as “full-stack”: an operating model where brand experience, customer experience and commerce are engineered to reinforce one another, not simply sit side by side. The difference is practical as much as philosophical. It marks the shift from an agency that hands over strategy to one that designs, builds, runs and continually refines it across markets and at scale, without sacrificing cohesion.
The merger gave the idea tangible form in a way positioning language alone never could. While the former VMLY&R had developed strong CX strategy capabilities, translating that thinking into sustained, multi-market execution across Asia often required external partners. The integration with Wunderman Thompson changed that equation, bringing in production studios that had spent a decade running Microsoft’s digital output across Asia Pacific—from websites to EDMs—built on systems designed for continuous, high-volume delivery. “You combine that,” Tay says, “and suddenly we can bring this capability to a lot of different markets.”
The real shift was not scale for its own sake, but how that scale could finally be connected. This perspective reframes one of the industry’s most active debates. The Omnicom–IPG merger (the largest consolidation in agency history) has intensified questions around what scale truly delivers for clients, and whether the biggest networks have become too cumbersome to serve them effectively. Tay’s view is measured: scale itself is neither advantage nor liability. Its value depends on connection and whether capabilities can be orchestrated intelligently across markets and disciplines, aligned to what a client requires in a given moment. “When scale isn’t connected, it becomes complexity,” he explains. “You just multiply the same problems tenfold.” Within his regional leadership, that thinking has evolved into a guiding principle: the most connected agency prevails. The objective is not to build everything everywhere, but to concentrate deep expertise where it matters, and ensure every market can access it when needed.
To understand why connection has become Tay’s central argument, it helps to understand the clients he is making it to. The modern APAC CMO operates in one of the most demanding leadership contexts in global business. The region encompasses markets as culturally and economically distinct as Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, China, and Australia, often managed by the same team, under the same budget line, with the expectation of both strategic coherence and deep local relevance simultaneously. A regional CMO is, in effect, running multiple businesses at once. Each requiring different creative instincts, different data infrastructure, and different definitions of what brand trust means to the consumer they are trying to reach. That structural complexity has always been the defining challenge of the role. What has changed is the speed and breadth of what is now expected within it. Marketing leadership today requires simultaneous fluency across AI strategy, data and CRM, commerce architecture, and brand building—disciplines that would previously have been distributed across separate specialists, each managed at a careful remove. Now they are expected to cohere, and the CMO is expected to hold the thread.
The consequences of that expanded remit are increasingly evident, particularly in the more candid conversations that emerge once an agency relationship reaches real depth. Tay observes that many senior marketers are being asked to deliver more outcomes, across more channels and markets, within ever-tightening timelines as the pace of business accelerates. The pressure is not only to lead, but to demonstrate tangible progress quickly, often within windows that traditional brand building was never designed to accommodate. “Everyone comes in with urgency,” he says, “wanting to prove momentum fast. But sometimes that speed works against the very results they’re trying to create.”
Better Tools, Better Habits
For CMOs operating in this environment, Tay argues the answer is not a broader menu of services, but a fundamentally different kind of partnership—one capable of holding a truly integrated view across the C-suite. That means engaging the CFO on efficiency, the CIO on infrastructure, and the CMO on brand, while translating between those priorities rather than approaching each as a siloed brief. It also means remaining accountable beyond the strategy presentation, stepping into the operational reality that follows. “We should be there to run the plan we’ve just proposed, and take responsibility for it,” he says. It is a more exacting promise than the traditional agency proposition, and one that only works when capabilities are genuinely connected, not merely assembled into a credentials slide.
Tay frames WPP Open as a practical expression of how he believes connection can be operationalised inside a modern agency. Developed across WPP and adapted within VML’s APAC workflows, he describes it less as a standalone tool and more as a unified AI workspace, a platform designed to bring data, teams and technology into a single environment where strategy, creative, production and media can move in parallel rather than in sequence. In his telling, the intention is to move beyond fragmented experimentation with AI towards a system embedded directly into daily agency practice. The platform aggregates multiple AI capabilities into one governed space, encoding institutional knowledge and enabling teams to generate insights, develop ideas and scale content without leaving the workflow itself. Rather than relying on generic models, Tay characterises it as a workspace shaped around real briefs and client intelligence, one that reflects how agencies actually operate when they are fully integrated. “We’ve moved beyond just awareness and getting people to use it,” he says, “to how they use it really well.”
What he believes this unlocks is not simply faster production, but a reordering of the creative process itself. Consumer insight can surface before a brief is written; early video can replace static boards in presentations; teams can pressure-test ideas through synthetic audiences while concepts are still forming. He sees this less as a technology story than a workflow shift, one that allows speed, scale and personalisation to happen simultaneously. The harder challenge, Tay admits, is behavioural rather than technical. “Getting teams to use it together, that is the hard part.” In his view, Open asks agency people to rethink individual expertise as part of a connected system, trusting that collective intelligence can elevate, rather than dilute, creative judgement. And while two years of investment have begun to normalise that mindset, he is clear that momentum cannot stall: “If we rest on our laurels and don’t evolve, others will catch up.”
What keeps that technological investment from becoming an end in itself, Tay suggests, is a philosophy he is careful not to present as doctrine. He describes it instead as “a way of thinking”—a human-first lens that asks who the work is truly for before any capability is deployed. Beyond the Boardroom presses him on the obvious counterpoint: in a market where every network is adopting AI, does any of this remain a real differentiator? For now, he believes it does. Not because of the tools themselves, but because of the discipline required to make them function as a connected system. “Eventually everyone will have access,” he says. “But getting agency people to use AI consistently, for strategy, for creative, for production, and then getting teams to use it together so we can share data, methods and insight… that’s the hard part. I’m trying to create desire. I’m trying to change behaviour. I’m trying to make you feel confident about a decision,” he says. In a landscape flooded with AI-generated content, that emphasis becomes less an ideal than a filter—the factor that determines whether any of it cuts through.
Taste, Trust and the Last Real Advantage
He points to broader consumer signals that, in his view, reinforce that stance. VML’s Future100 2026 report highlights rising scepticism toward what audiences encounter online, with many consumers questioning the reliability of what they see and feeling that AI has made it harder to distinguish what is real. In that context, Tay argues that competitive advantage shifts away from sheer output or production polish and toward credibility—the steady accumulation of proof that a brand’s promises align with its actions. Consistency, rather than spectacle, becomes the currency of trust. “Every time I set an expectation, I deliver on it,” he says, framing integrity as an operational discipline rather than a communications line.
The same report also suggests that even as AI adoption accelerates, consumers continue to associate distinctly human strengths—empathy, ethical judgement, intuition—with greater value. Tay reads this as a strategic window rather than a permanent condition: a moment when human discernment still commands a premium, provided organisations can apply it coherently at scale. For him, that reinforces the need for connected teams rather than isolated specialists, capable of exercising judgement across geographies without losing cultural nuance.
That emphasis on connection also shapes how Tay approaches talent. Rather than treating headcount as a short-term adjustment tied to immediate revenue cycles, he’s advocating for a more calibrated view, protecting capability even when the near-term return is uncertain. “I might carry that cost for six months,” he says, “but it pays back when we retain the team and grow across the region.” For him, the connective tissue of an organisation is rarely visible on a spreadsheet, yet once removed is difficult to rebuild at speed. Holding that position, he adds, requires leadership conviction and reflects the three qualities VML wants in its people: brains, heart and courage.
Which brings Tay back to the question that sits beneath everything he has described: what an agency is actually for and whether that purpose holds in a moment defined by technological acceleration. Tay is pragmatic. The model will evolve he says (and it already is), and the mechanics of how agencies operate, structure themselves and create value will look different in five years than they do today. What endures is the need for a partner capable of holding complexity together. “Unless we believe a brand can seamlessly manage a hundred different partners on its own, there’s still a role for an agency,” he says. “What that role looks like will keep changing. It always has. You roll with it.” In an industry prone to either existential panic or blind optimism about AI’s promise, it is a grounded place to land. Not a defence of the status quo, but an acceptance that longevity belongs to organisations willing to adapt without losing coherence—connected enough, culturally aligned enough, to find their footing wherever the next shift arrives.