How agencies are finding power in the middle as independent networks reshape the market

And over there, you have ‘independents’ (the very best of which you'll find in our Indie Agency 100 list): shops with no links to those networks, owned by themselves or their founders and calling their own shots.

But over the last decade, the neatness of that distinction has been eroded by an influx of investment into former indies, financial pressures on the industry and the quiet rise of organizational structures – partnerships, affiliations, co-operatives – that don’t fit into the dichotomy.

The result? An agencyland midmarket with a wide array of commercial models but one thing in common: confidence that the marketing world is primed for new ways of doing things.

So, who are these new (or often not-so-new) players? Let’s meet them and the analysts who say the market just might be turning in their favor.

• Indie Agency 100: The world’s hottest independent agencies

The landscape at a glance

The advertising world’s ‘big six’ – Publicis, WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Havas and Dentsu – are all publicly traded holding companies that wholly own sub-brand agencies. Add to that group the likes of S4, Stagwell and Hakuhodo’s Kyu – publicly traded ‘challenger’ networks to the big 6.

Joining them at the top of the industry are the major consultancies, whose work has become so intertwined with the advertising world that they’re impossible to separate: Accenture (whose Accenture Song is by some metrics the biggest agency in the world), McKinsey and PwC.

These groups collectively employ a lot of marketers, but by headcount and logo count, they’re far outstripped by the wide world of independents. A recent report by consulting firm Agency by Agency found that independents account for 99% of agencies in the UK, 88% of the workforce and 76% of the industry’s total turnover.

2025 finds the independent sector of the industry bullish. Recent research from agency ‘curation platform’ SBS found 86% of independents expecting growth in the coming year, but very few expecting to see that growth on their own. 90% reported that they collaborate with other agencies and just over half say they’ve recently sourced new business from partnerships.

Exactly how they’re partnering up is a matter of some variety.

1. The ‘reverse holding company’

John Harris, president and chief executive officer of Worldwide Partners, is happy to call his organization a network – as long as you understand that he’s not likening it to the holding companies. Instead, he says, it’s a “reverse holding company”: rather than the network owning the agencies, the agencies own the network.

Here’s how it works: agencies apply to join the network. If successful (Harris says they’ve turned away 125 applicants in the last year), they pay an annual fee based on their revenue and can become shareholders in the network itself. Members pitch together freely and can share talent and resources, “working together because they want to, not because they have to,” says Harris, who heads up the light three-strong team that manages the organization itself, though it’s a stable for some 95 agencies.

Worldwide Partners was founded way back in 1938, but Harris says that the world has moved in the direction of its model: a world shrunk by technology and connectivity is one where what once may have been a loose affiliation can genuinely claim to have global coverage across disciplines, markets and expertise.

“I don’t think the future belongs to networks,” Harris says. “I think it belongs to more networked agencies that can assemble and unleash the talent within an organization in an orchestrated, collaborative way on behalf of clients. It’s ‘network’ as an adjective versus as a noun.”

Agencies in the network, Harris says, are increasingly pitching and winning global accounts, backed by the adaptive firepower of their sibling organizations. All but the very biggest fish, he says, are in the sights: “The holding companies are clearly building their models to serve the largest advertisers in the world, which are spending a billion in media: big digital delivery platforms, high spend. That group should go to a holding company… But the clients spending a billion in media are the marketing minority. The majority of marketers are spending $100m, $75m, $10m. The holding companies are not engineered to service that group in the way that an independent agency can. So we’ve gotten very clear about where our model and our story work.”

2. The accordion agency

While Worldwide Partners never books work itself (collaborative projects are always filtered through a lead agency), fellow traveler in the partner-owned space BBN has gone a step further by creating a dedicated agency, Agency X, built to marshal its agencies’ talent for major international pitches.

BBN launched close to 40 years ago as an international “knowledge sharing” hub for indies. But Ed Davis, managing director of Agency X, says that now’s the time for a new approach to international collaboration to take hold. “Where things are going,” Davis says, “is that clients are increasingly looking to economize the limited financial resources that they have to engage agencies,” driving down costs and opening opportunities for new models and approaches.

The promise: the global and multidisciplinary coverage of a network, but most cost-effective and more fluid. One client, Davis says, refers to BBN as his “accordion,” having told him: “If I need 100 people for a global launch, I can do that, or if I need one person in my office tomorrow to talk through X, Y or Z, I can do that too.”

It’s a model under which Agency X has no fixed size but can “efficiently and economically answer just about every single brief,” he says. “We all at once are competing with everyone and, in an arrogant sort of way, nobody. The thing we compete with is that clients have this reference point of what an agency should be.”

But he’s confident that demand is rising for this kind of right-sized offering, leading to a purple patch for the midmarket. “We’ll continue to have more opportunities. Holding companies and independents will see less and less.”

3. The minority investment model

IKPN (the Independent Knowledge Partner Network) is a middle ground between the partnerships above and more traditional networks, which buy their agencies outright: it invests in its ‘community’ of agencies in return for a minority stake of 10-15%.

A subsidiary of Canadian entrepreneur Vikram Seth’s (not to be confused with the writer of the same name) Know Company, IKPN positions itself as an alternative route for agency growth that safeguards independence rather than diluting it.

President Lindsay Rutherford says: “We have more influence than anything – influence without authority… It’s more like a community of interesting agencies that can work together and get interesting information from each other. They can pitch together where it makes sense for them to.”

It’s a softer sell, but one that also recognizes the predicament of independence and the drive to collaboration. “It’s hard to be an independent,” Rutherford says. “The agencies that believe that they can do it all on their own are going to struggle. You just can’t be everything to everyone. You can’t have all the information, all the knowledge. It’s incredibly hard to remain in a silo and do exceptionally well”.

4. Private-equity groups

Future historians of the marketing business may well define the industry’s most recent decade by the massive influx of investment from the world of private equity (PE).

Having established an appetite for digital and media agencies with their relatively steady revenue streams (about 40% of top media shops in the US are now backed by PE), we’ve recently seen PE eyeing social and influencer agencies and even traditional creative shops.

While PE activity in the marketing world dipped in 2024, it has rebounded this year. Jay Pattisall, Forrester’s global agency analyst, tells The Drum that PE money’s continued presence in the space represents nothing short of a sea change.

“What we’re witnessing is the beginning of the end of the sole-proprietor independent agency,” Pattisall tells The Drum today. “The dynamics of ownership and resources have really changed the complexion of the marketplace. It used to be very cleanly divided between a handful of publicly held and owned companies, the big six and a few others, and then everybody else that was a partnership or sole proprietor or some version thereof. Private equity has totally changed the game.”

There’s a rich constellation in this group. Some operate as holding companies in their own right – the Brandtech Group, for example, counts S4 and Stagwell as its closest peers and acquires agencies outright, holdco-style, but is owned in part by PE players.

Others find themselves in a putative network within the holdings of a PE firm – not a network in a traditional sense, but multiple agencies with a common owner. Take Carlyle Group, for example, whose holdings include two of marketing’s recent success stories: Incubeta and Dept.

Dept has been on its own journey of networking and collaboration, having operated as 17 different sub-brands until consolidating into a single global agency in 2022. Dimi Albers, chief executive of the Amsterdam-headquartered agency, says that organizational structure should always flow from one thing: what’s best for clients. “It’s about giving the client something unique, which is having one integrated agency at our scale, with one P&L, and bringing all the capabilities together. So, no matter what you need, wherever in the world, we can bring it to you. If you look at the research we do with our clients, it’s one of the key reasons why they choose us… It might also be one of the key reasons why clients don’t choose us.”

5. Network 3.0

Further down the spectrum, there’s a new batch of agency networks that are both closer to the holding companies and committed to keeping a foot in the independent world.

Take North American Meet the People (MTP), a hard-to-categorize mix of holding company, private equity and independence. It’s backed by PE firm Innovatus and builds a portfolio of agencies but rejects what global chief exec Tim Ringel calls the “legacy model of buying companies.”

Like any PE-backed organization, it’s hungry for expansion and growth, which Ringel says it pursues by building “modules” of shops with complementary skillsets in a region. “In the US, we’re nearly done with our set-up,” he says, as the company eyes modular expansion into the UK, Germany and France.

What makes MTP different from traditional networks? The way it acquires, says Ringel. The holding company remains lean with just five staff; it has no ambitions, he says, to absorb its acquisitions. Rather, “we always want the founders to stay.” Agencies thus stay separate but wholly owned and with the opportunity to pitch together. Ringel hopes that puts the organization in the Goldilocks zone of “small enough to be agile but big enough to matter.”

Ringel, too, has his eyes on all but the very biggest enterprise accounts. “We’re winning those clients [from major incumbents] every month. It makes me incredibly bullish… It’s happening and it’s increasing. You simply can’t expect a large corporation with 60,000 employees to be on the cutting edge. The smaller you are, but big enough to have firepower, the stronger you’re going to be.”

Take also the case of Cheil in North America, which recently relaunched its agency roster under the Cheil Agency Network (Can) banner. The launch positions its “independently operated” agencies (big names like Iris, McKinney and Barbarian) in a “consortium.” In a statement heralding the new set-up’s collaborative potential, chief executive Joe Maglio called “the Goldilocks of agency groups.”

Can doesn’t hide either the fact that it wholly owns those agencies or that it is itself part of the Samsung group; what’s interesting about the launch is what it prioritizes: independence and collaboration. “To me, it’s a hybrid,” Maglio tells The Drum, “There’s a great place for a hybrid middle ground: independently operated agencies that can stand alone, that have their own client relationships, and are great in their own right, but are brought together with a support network and internal operational systems where they can partner when the opportunity requires it and you need a certain scale.”

Or consider Serviceplan, the German-headquartered agency group that has taken the world by storm (in this year’s World Creative Rankings, it was the most highly-ranked agency network from outside the big six). Managing partner for Serviceplan International Markus Noder puts that success down to a partner model that prioritizes operational independence for its constituent agencies, the agility that comes from being relatively fresh on the global stage and the ability to rightsize an offering for each client: “On the one side we can be extremely boutiquey, but we also have clients like BMW and Mini where we serve the whole European market.”

Noder also echoes the sentiment that there’s an opening in the midmarket. “The big holding companies have to do a lot of jobs. There are the big mergers; there are a lot of ‘structural topics’ to be done. So I think they have heavy loads at the moment. Maybe they are losing a bit of focus on what they have to do: service their clients. We are totally client-focused.”

An increasingly right-sized industry?

Despite the variety of organizational structures in this current crop of independent networks, they have one thing in common: bullishness that market pressures favor their agility, independence and relative cost-effectiveness.

So, should the ‘traditional’ networks be worried?

Independents and independent coalitions are certainly ready to capitalize on openings they see in the midmarket, says Amar Chohan, founder of independent-specialist marketing intelligence service the DCA. With consolidation among the industry’s biggest players, Chohan says, there’s a growing sense of “there’s the Death Star and there’s the Rebel Alliance and there’s everyone else. Anyone in the middle doesn’t want to be on the side of the Death Star, so there’s a direction of travel towards positioning as independent.”

Independence, then, has become cultural cache, but that doesn’t mean clients prefer it (“95% of clients don’t care if an agency is independent or not”). What has changed, Chohan says, is that success stories in the independent sector have started to “dispel the myth that only holding companies can be full-service.”

Still, don’t hurry to bet on the demise of the dominant holding company model. “They’re going to have to look at the way they’re structured,” says veteran adman and historian of advertising Graham Thomas. “They’re going to have to consolidate internally. And they’re going to have to reduce costs…. [But] the holding companies are not going anywhere.”

Instead, expect consolidation at the very top as massive holding companies nail down the very biggest accounts. Then expect vibrant competition in the midmarket from this rich array of networks, partnerships, co-ops and agencies.

Tina Fegent, a marketing procurement consultant who sees deeper into the pitch lists and negotiations for new and renegotiated accounts than most, says that change is already well underway. “It all depends on the client department,” Fegent says, “but in the last two to three years I’ve seen a lot of movement away from the holdcos.”

While much of that movement has been to now-established competitors like Stagwell or MSQ, this next crop won’t be far behind. “I’m a fan [of the smaller agency networks],” Fegent says. “They’re hungry. They’re leaner, meaner. They’re more willing to be agile and flexible and to partner up with other people to come up with a solution.”