Agency life after holdcos: Ajaz Ahmed and Tiffany Rolfe in conversation

This conversation brings together two such figures, Tiffany Rolfe and Ajaz Ahmed. Rolfe helped lead the VC-backed management buyout of R/GA, after 23 years of IPG ownership, in March 2025. In a parallel universe, Ahmed may have done something similar with his agency AKQA, which he sold to WPP in 2012 and remained with for the next 12 years. Instead, after his attempts at a management buyout were rebuffed by WPP leadership, he left to start Studio.One, backed by its own suite of private investors.

What they share is first-hand experience of what the old model constrained, what independence unlocks and what now has to change if agencies are to remain culturally and commercially relevant.

What does an agency brand really stand for now?

For both Rolfe and Ahmed, the erosion of agency brands inside holding companies was gradual, shaped by a series of small, defensible decisions that accumulated over time.

Rolfe describes a system in which agency brands became interchangeable, even as those same organizations continued to sell brand thinking to clients.

“That’s the business we’re in,” R/GA’s global chair and global chief creative officer says. “We’re meant to be defining brands and helping companies stand for something distinct.”

She points to the ease with which leadership teams can now be moved between agency brands as evidence of how thin those distinctions had become. “The fact that you can take one leadership team and plug them into a different brand says a lot,” she says. “People are probably more connected to the brands they were in than they might think.”

For Ahmed, an agency brand only exists meaningfully if it shapes decisions. “Any brand is about three things,” he says. “The culture of the organization, the values of the organization and the aspirations of the organization. The agencies that are very clear about the culture they want to create, the values they hold dear and the aspirations they have can set a clear path forward. They can make the right decisions for the work, for their people and for their clients.”

Both describe environments where work was taken on to fill capacity and justified in the name of quarterly performance.

“Over time, you got a lot more operators not really understanding the real value of what we create,” says Rolfe. “It became about hours and time and we just never really valued and priced what we did in the right way.”

Rolfe is candid about how easily that drift takes hold. “You start making micro-decisions that erode your brand,” she says. “You take on work that isn’t right because it’s big or because it keeps things stable. Before you know it, you’ve lost what the core actually is.”

Independence changed that equation. Rolfe discusses deliberately walking away from certain kinds of work to restore clarity. Ahmed describes defining Studio.One as much by what it would refuse as by what it would pursue. “Being clear about what you’re not is just as important as what you are,” he says.

Why independence forces management change

For Rolfe and Ahmed, independence is less about freedom and more about exposure. It removes buffers, safety nets and the ability to defer difficult decisions to structure.

Ahmed is clear that leaving a holding company stripped away insulation as much as it created opportunity. “What I love about what we’re doing in Studio.One is that 100% of my time is now spent on clients and the work,” he says. “That’s why we got into this industry in the first place.”

He describes how the perceived power of holding companies has shifted. “You might expect the all-great and powerful Oz,” he says, “but as soon as you peel back the curtain, you see it’s just someone operating levers and buttons. That facade they once had has finally fallen and clients see right through it and great talent sees right through it.”

Rolfe describes a similar recalibration, particularly around what work gets taken on and why. “Being independent means we can focus on the right problems,” she says. “Not our own problems, but the problems of our clients.” The trade-off is that every decision now carries greater financial and reputational weight.

One of the most significant shifts, she argues, is the removal of internal constraints that once shaped behavior by default. “There were just so many things that you got caught into,” she says. “There are client conflicts, there’s so much worry about losing clients and then you can’t work on anything in the category. Or you can’t build out an offering, because there’s an offering already in the network, even though our approach is entirely different.”

Outside that structure, there is no longer an excuse not to build or not to change. But that also means accepting short-term pain.

Rolfe describes stepping away from certain revenue streams to restore direction. “Sometimes you have to not grow, or even shrink a little, to get back to growth,” she says.

Why a new agency commercial model beckons

For both leaders, the collapse of the billable hour reflects the limits of a model built to serve quarterly reporting rather than client outcomes.

“Does it make sense for advertising agencies to be public companies?” asks Ahmed.

He traces much of the industry’s malaise back to an over-reliance on accounting-led strategies rather than value creation. “For many years, financial engineering has been the strategy of choice for some of the holding companies. But that only gets you so far and it’s a blunt tool now. What remains is the tougher task of creating real value for clients and building a place where talent can grow.”

In practice, that bluntness showed up in how work was sold and valued. Time-based billing rewarded volume and efficiency over judgment or impact and encouraged agencies to undercut one another on cost.

“Some of the holding companies would go to the big brand and say, ‘You currently buy this many billable hours at this rate. What we can do is we can sell you this many billable hours at this lower rate,’” Ahmed says. “And all that was was a race to the bottom and the work was diluted as a result.”

Independence makes it harder to hide behind that logic. Without the scale or predictability of a holding company, agencies have to confront whether their work is genuinely worth paying for. “We’re trying a lot more outcome-based pricing,” Rolfe says. “Part of what our payment is based on is us winning with the client. That means risk, but it also means we’re aligned.”

That alignment increasingly extends beyond campaigns. Rolfe describes a shift toward building systems and reusable foundations that clients can develop over time. “We’re building blueprints that allow us to move faster,” she says. “They’re ours, but they can be customized for clients.”

That approach transfers risk back to the agency. Outcome-based models expose agencies to uneven cash flow and the possibility that work does not pay off as hoped. “You might need to invest more upfront to build this right,” Rolfe says. “But over time, clients aren’t buying one-off campaigns. They’re building something that can evolve.”

For Ahmed, that exposure is unavoidable. “If the work doesn’t create value, the commercial model will eventually expose that,” he says. What remains is a harder, more direct question: whether the work earns its place.

What creative leadership looks like now

If independence removes insulation, it also exposes how much creative leadership has relied on inherited structures that no longer hold.

Both Rolfe and Ahmed argue that the most significant shift is not technological, but human. Long-standing hierarchies, team models and notions of expertise were built for a slower, more predictable environment. That predictability has gone.

Rolfe is explicit about the danger of mistaking experience for certainty. “I actually disagree with the idea of mastery,” she says. “The rate of technology change now means there is no mastery. What matters more is curiosity and the appetite to keep learning.” She argues the industry has defined creativity too narrowly. “We’ve defined ourselves by the thing we make – ads, films – rather than creativity as solving challenges in new ways.”

That shift has practical consequences for how teams are built and led. Smaller, more autonomous groups replace layered hierarchies. Studio.One operates with just three job titles: partner, director or creator. Approval processes shorten. But with that autonomy comes exposure. Leaders can no longer rely on process to guarantee quality. Judgment becomes critical.

Ahmed sees judgment – taste, discernment, the ability to decide what not to pursue – as the creative skill that matters most now. “The toolkit for success is curiosity and endless learning,” he says. “But agencies also need to get much better at creative judgment. Knowing what evokes desire, what inspires, what actually matters.”

Technology accelerates that pressure rather than easing it. AI can remove average execution, but it cannot decide what is worth making. “We’re going from making things to making things that make things,” Rolfe says. “Every choice that goes into those systems has to be highly creative. Otherwise, everything just becomes the same.”

For leaders emerging from holding companies, authority now comes from decisions made under uncertainty, often without cover. What replaces mastery is accountability, for taste, for direction and for the consequences of creative choices.

“Our ‘good’ isn’t just what the advertising industry defines as good,” Rolfe says. “Good is what people respond to and like and enjoy.”