It has been an unprecedented and brutal week for the advertising industry. The completion of Omnicom Group’s $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) (the largest acquisition in advertising history) will impact tens of thousands of employees – most immediately the 4,000 expected to be laid off by the end of the year.
Both Omnicom and IPG own many different advertising agency brands, all of which will be profoundly affected by the merger. Omnicom will retain only McCann from the IPG roster of agency networks, while combining FCB into BBDO, and both DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, to achieve the position of Omnicom Chairman and CEO. John Wren’s goal of $750 million in synergies.
However, these are more than just a collection of acronyms. They are great agency brands, built over decades and generations, that will now disappear as the parent holding company fights to grow, survive and remain competitive.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the advertising world is an alphabet soup of who’s eating whom. But there is another side to the company that stands out from the listed drama. The number of independent agencies is growing in number, and in the size and scope of the work that major brands entrust to them.
It is a trend that has been bubbling up for years. According to an Ibis World reportthe number of American advertising agencies grew by 2.2% between 2019 and 2024. There is even anecdotal a wave of new creative shops. Island Anyfor example, was launched in January by former Droga5 executives and has already done work for The New York Times, A24, OpenAI and Coinbase.
Part of the indie boom is undoubtedly a cultural corrective to the mess of big advertising companies, as talent flees corporate bureaucracy for greener, more creative pastures. But it’s more than that right now. In recent years, despite (or because of) their size, major brands have shown a greater willingness to work with these small stores.
The independent agency Rethink has been winning industry awards for years and achieving business results for Heinz. Mother, an agency founded in London thirty years ago, has a string of major clients including Buick, Uber, Cheerios and Stella Artois. And of course, the independent agency Wieden+Kennedy is known for its work for Nike, McDonald’s, Ford and Michelob Ultra.
Amid all the chaos in the advertising world, I spoke with indie agency executives at award-winning shops Rethink, Tombras, Joan Creative, Haymaker, and Mother about what the advertising industry landscape looks like right now from their vantage point. Because technology, data and especially AI level the playing field in so many ways, these independent parties see a clear competitive advantage in the combination of original creative and strategic thinking. But the most important thing? They see customers – not investors – as their most important stakeholders.
Holdings drama
The massive consolidation of IPG-owned advertising agencies is the latest in an ongoing trend over the past decade among publicly traded advertising companies to boost profits and efficiency. In 2018, holding company WPP combined Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson (JWT) to form Wunderman Thompson, and VML and Young & Rubicam to form VMLY&R. In 2023 it combined them all into just VML.
How did that go? WPP shares are down more than 60% year to date, hitting a quarter-century low. Last month, reports emerged that France-based holding company Havas was exploring a takeover or stake in WPP. Havas has denied the reportsbut it’s the state of the industry that made it so credible.
Jay Kamath, founder and chief creative officer of Haymakersays there is nothing wrong with mergers if there is a strong vision behind them. “These are not visionary mergers, they are survival mergers. The model is aging, margins are shrinking and they think scale is a life raft,” says Kamath, who believes scale does little to really help customers. In reality, it’s speed, not scale, that brands care about as they compete for customers’ increasingly divided attention. “They need faster teams that bring sharper ideas and are responsible partners,” he says.
Dooley Tombras, President of To diga Knoxville, Tennessee-based agency with additional offices in the U.S. and Buenos Aires, sees holding companies as a model for managed decline. As holding companies continue to consolidate to offset the loss of revenue growth, the winners are likely to be in the independent sector.
“As they consolidate brands, offices and people to realize cost synergies for Wall Street, they will naturally step up to protect their multibillion-dollar clients,” Tombras said. “A lot of big national brands that spend between $50 and $100 million annually are going to get confused and try to make a move. And that will probably go to a large-scale independent venture.”
Advantage: independent
Tombras’ theory seems to have resonated. Geoff Cottrill, former CMO of Coca-Cola, Converse and Topgolf, recently commented on LinkedIn: “If I were still CMO, I would look for creative partners outside of these huge machines.”
That’s why I called him and asked him for more explanation. His answer should be encouraging to any indie agency, and to many of the impending exiles from holding companies looking for a job. “Marketing as an industry has lost its track a bit,” says Cottrill of the industry’s infatuation with data, AI and money.
He notes: “If you’re a mid-sized brand trying to fight for attention and need to get the right creative ideas, get the right service levels and account management, you’re better off with a smaller, nimble creative shop like Wieden+Kennedy or someone like Stubborn” (an independent advertising retailer based in Portland, Oregon, with clients including Adidas, Panda Express and Hinge).
For Lisa Clunie, founder and CEO of the New York-based company Jeannebeing independent is a superpower. “Brands want partners who can prototype, run and produce without waiting for approval chains from multinationals,” she says.
This is not a new concept. In 2021, Domino’s brought its brand to a small indie store with 23 employees called WorkInProgress. The pizza chain’s then CMO, Art D’Elia,told Ad Age“I really feel like the independent agency model gives us more flexibility and less distraction.”
Tombras believes brand and culture are at an inflection point given the proliferation of AI. The value of machines will decline, he argues, while human value is about to skyrocket. “The whole reason brands went to agencies in the first place is to get very unique perspectives on how to solve business problems,” he says. “Independents are in an exponentially better position to attract talent because people are tribal; we want to play for teams.”
For Teri Miller, Mother’s US CEO, the holding company’s business model, and now its consolidation, feels a million miles away from what’s actually happening in creativity. “It’s just a completely different vocabulary, rule set and body language,” she says. “Customers who have hired Independents as an antidote understand why: we know who we are, why we exist, what our strengths are. We don’t try to be everything to everyone.”
Creative advertising versus limited liability company
I’ve been covering brands and advertising agencies in one form or another for almost two decades, and I’ve seen that great creative work isn’t exclusive to independent agencies. Agencies owned by holding companies, including those shuttered by the Omnicom consolidation, have generated an incredible amount of work over the past few decades. McCann, FCB, Martin Agency and TBWA/Worldwide all made the list of Fast Company’s 2025 Most Innovative Companies earlier this year.
Yet holding companies face greater challenges as the media landscape continues to fragment and customer demands have become more complex and direct. In a media age where cost and efficiency are paramount, the great work these agencies produce increasingly feels like it happens despite the fact that they are part of a public holding company, and not because of it.
The global listed conglomerate still has economies of scale, especially in media buying. But there is no discernible benefit when it comes to solving business problems with creative ideas and strategy. Joan’s Clunie says that creativity and public ownership are not enemies, just bad roommates. While public companies optimize for shareholder value, independent agencies optimize for creative value.
“If you need to meet quarterly targets, the easiest steps are cost savings, purchasing agreements and operational adjustments,” says Clunie. “The risky move? Betting on a bold creative idea that might take two years to prove itself. Guess which one gets the green light at 11:59 PM before the win?”
It’s not that public companies can’t do brilliant work, she says. “It’s that their wiring makes the safe choice easier and the interesting choice harder. And in our industry, the interesting usually wins. Independence means we can look at the long term. That’s not romantic, it’s structural.”
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