While holdcos build ‘death stars of content,’ indie creative agencies take alternative routes

WPP’s creative agencies have underperformed financially for years, with revenues from VML, Ogilvy and AKQA falling 5.8% in the first half of 2025, according to the parent company’s own financials. From the point of view of WPP’s leadership, there’s a clear argument in favor of this next remodel. Holding companies (or operating companies) are attempting to meet the needs of advertisers that spend in the billions across dozens of channels, requiring generative AI to produce thousands of creative assets and millions of data points. 

It’s why Omnicom’s leadership moved to render down several prestigious creative shops following its acquisition of Interpublic Group last year. It’s why WPP and Dentsu have been tweaking their production units lately. And it’s why Omnicom, Stagwell and WPP have each launched agentic marketing platforms in recent months.

The business of “big ideas” that built companies like Ogilvy or FCB in decades past won’t make the difference between CMOs comparing AI-enabled content machines, or help them convince shareholders that they have a sustainable business model. Jeremy Goldman, eMarketer analyst, recently wrote that such initiatives represent “coordinated retreats dressed up as innovation.”

And while they set up marketing factories designed to sell creativity as a commodity, agency leaders in the independent sector are betting on the opposite point of view. 

Companies like Arts & Letters, Lerma and Mirimar were behind at least 25 of this year’s Super Bowl ads, compared with the 20 made by corporate counterparts such as 72andSunny and BBDO.

They face the same economic pressures, the same concerns over ever-expanding scopes of work and the same skepticism from clients increasingly in the market for assets rather than ideas. But while the giants construct “death stars of content” for the likes of Coca–Cola, Bayer and Mars, indie agencies are holding and gaining ground by offering access and ideas to the rest of the field, said Jon Williams, founder of Liberty Guild.

That offer is hitting home among clients interested in high-growth strategies, or for larger clients that fear they may not have the financial heft to get best-in-class service from a major agency.

“I can see a shift and a sea change in the scale of clients and the international opportunities that are coming our way,” said Katie Mackay-Sinclair, global chief brand officer and partner at Mother, the agency behind Anthropic and Meta’s Super Bowl ads this year.

“Clients are really loving the access that they get to very senior level creatives… there’s not the many, many layers that the larger holding companies and agencies tend to have to go through,” said Jared Kozel, a former VML chief creative officer and, as of last January, co-founder of Atlanta agency Super Nice.

“Clients and brands are getting a little fatigued with the [slowness] and barriers at bigger agencies,” he added. Now operating with a staff of 11, it’s been able to take on larger rivals during its first year in business; Super Nice picked up the account for Norwegian Cruise Line in a competitive pitch that pitted the fledgling company against Digitas and Havas. Other clients include Lenovo and Delta Airlines.

“It was actually probably one of the highlights in my career, to be honest,” said Kozel.

The ad agency sector has long been divided into Davids and Goliaths. Until recently, they had a symbiotic relationship: ambitious creatives honed their craft at scrappy agencies before moving on to bigger things, while seasoned creative directors — burned out or disillusioned by the Publicis or Omnicom machine — often left to found shops that were destined for acquisition by those same holdcos a few years later.

Challenger agencies are still being established, but they’re not just working from scaled-down versions of the network agency playbook. 

Ace of Hearts, for example, was launched last year by former McCann and Adam&Eve/DDB execs Polly McMorrow, Richard Brim and Martin Beverley. The London company operates using output-based pricing rather than the FTE model still used by most network agencies. “We don’t do timesheets,” said Beverley, who told Digiday that clients are looking for “genuine partnership,” rather than an assembly line or the bureaucracy of a network shop.

“They do not want a legacy, traditional model where they’re paying for layers of people on a spreadsheet,” he continued. “They want direct access to experience and talent that can work directly in the heart of their business.”