Media Buying Briefing: New York’s new generation of Mad Men

But there’s another type of New York agency: the small agile shop that specializes and digs deep into a specialty where a holdco or a big indie is a generalist. I consider these agencies, be they media, performance, out-of-home, creative, tech/design or other, to carry on the essence that the TV show Mad Men identified and isolated, just in a new era. It’s a belief that you may work in a crowded field but originality can help you to stand out. 

This briefing focuses on four agencies that embody the new spirit of marketing in a New York revitalized after the trouncing it took in the wake of the pandemic. Some of these agencies started before Covid, but that period changed their outlook and sharpened their focus to grow their companies by double- and sometimes triple-digit percentages. They are: performance and digital shop Markacy, OOH media specialist Quan Media, creative design agency Kingsland and design/tech firm Siberia.  

The agencies sometimes collaborate or at least route business opportunities each other’s way but there’s no formal connection among them. There are a few threads of connective tissue among them. For one, they’re all refugees of either holdcos or major consultancies who walked away from big salaries because they saw close up a cookie-cutter approach that benefited the company more than the client. 

“Those businesses are designed in a way where it’s almost impossible to always do the right thing for the client,” said Chris Mele, managing partner of Brooklyn-based Siberia, and a veteran of Crispin Porter + Bogusky and FCB. “So I can’t imagine a rational human being… thinking, I want to hire this holding company agency because their entire business model is predicated on milking as much money from you as possible. It’s like lunacy and doesn’t make any sense.”

They also share a no-asshole client mandate, meaning that they will turn down work if the client comes off as not worth an overly demanding attitude. They share the belief that they are small but mighty and that there’s power in small size. And they also possess a fervent faith that, even though they could work from anywhere in the world, being a New York-based agency offers a certain je-ne-sais-quoi to their appeal. 

“You do need a little bit of naiveté, especially early on,” said Chris Jones, Markacy’s co-CEO who left PwC with fellow CEO Tucker Matheson to start the digital specialist in 2018. “You kind of have to start with just a small, scrappy capability set of people who just won’t be stopped and want to do an amazing job.”

Markacy is the biggest of the four, with 35 staffers and a compound annual growth rate of 40% in the wake of Covid, said Matheson and Jones. The agency has expanded beyond just digital performance work to make incrementality its calling card and unique selling proposition. But agility is the operating philosophy, said Matheson. 

It helps to cultivate relationships with clients to start your own operation, said Brian Rappaport, founder and CEO of Quan, a six-year-old OOH specialty shop with clients including HubSpot, Skims and Gemini. Quan is made up of just 11 staffers but grew 170% from 2023 through this year. “You need to have the belief from brands that you had kind of influenced and touched,” said Rappaport, who used to run IPG’s Rapport OOH unit, and before that did a lot of OOH work at Publicis. “A lot of [those brands] told me, if you go and start your own thing, people are going to come with you. Brands are going to come with you.” 

They also lean into a contrarian streak that sets them apart from their industrial-sized brethren. Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO of Kingsland, a five-year old brand studio that specializes in brand strategy, argued that the goal is actually to get marketers to spend less, not more — pure apostasy in a holdco’s mind. 

“From my perspective, with brand, you want to actually reduce your marketing spend. A powerful brand shouldn’t have to market too much. People should be talking about it,” said Brundage, who employs five full-timers and a coterie of freelancers based in Brooklyn. Clients include Macy’s and Bombas, but the shop has recently expanded into cybersecurity clients and series A startups. Growth for Kingsland has been steady, expected to hit about 40% for 2025 on top of 30% in 2024, said Brundage. 

Siberia, a design and tech firm with just a handful of full-timers and a liquid workforce of freelancers, works with the James Beard Foundation as well as Ford and Humana insurance. The business has doubled in the two years since Mele and colleagues bought the firm back from then-owner United Talent Agency, and margins sit at a healthy 25%. It’s Mele’s goal to work with customers looking to make “major pivots and big swings, innovation bets, and to do it in an intimate, nimble, boutique way.” 

But why operate out of New York, the market with the most agencies in the world?

“A New York firm is a brand in itself,” said Brundage, born and raised in the city. “I get a lot of inbounds, especially from companies that are based in Europe or the Middle East or Asia — even elsewhere in America — that are specifically saying we want a New York boutique, or a New York agency… There’s like a hustle and a drive and, a just-get-it-done and done fast [attitude], right?”

“I moved on to Boca Raton, Florida, for three months during the pandemic, and felt so far removed from everything,” acknowledged Rappaport. “As soon as I came back, even with New York City still primarily shut down, it just felt right to be back. It’s the out-of-home epicenter of the world, so it only feels right if you’re running an out-of-home shop to be based here.”

Markacy, Kingsland, Siberia and Quan aren’t alone in their New York uniqueness. There are dozens of other top-notch indie agencies operating out of the five boroughs, such as Eden Collective, run by agency veteran Alison Monk, as well as Left Off Madison, co-founded by Rob Douglas and Boris Litvinov, both Dentsu refugees.

But, as Matheson explained, it’s the independence that makes the difference, in speed to market, in devising different solutions and in growing the business in the most crowded marketplace in the world.

“Being out on your own gives you the autonomy to not be bound to holdco rules,” Matheson explained. “I think being nimble as business operators probably applies to all of us and that’s why we’re winning.”

Color by numbers

It’s just one number — and in the scheme of the entire Internet, it’s infinitesimally small — but Amazon Web Services’ outage last Monday knocked more than 1,000 sites and services offline for much of the day. Among the impacted were large social platforms like Reddit and Snapchat, as well as major banking destinations like Lloyds Bank and Venmo. 

Takeoff & landing

• Just weeks away from an expected consummation of its acquisition of Interpublic Group, Omnicom issued its Q3 earnings last week, showing 3.3% total revenue growth over nine months, compared to nine months in 2024. Organic revenue growth was a mild 2.6% but margins remained at a healthy 15.1%, despite drops in operating income and net income for the period. 
• WPP last week launched WPP Open Pro, an extension of its AI marketing platform, WPP Open, that aims to give brands the ability to plan, create and publish campaigns independently and in a self-serve way.
• Personnel moves: Publicis Groupe hired Sean Reardon to be CEO of Epsilon, filling an open position since 2021. Reardon was most recently CEO of Dentsu Media Americas … Speaking of Dentsu, the holdco named Yuichi Toyoda to be CEO of Dentsu APAC, effective Jan. 1, replacing interim APAC lead Yoshiki Ishihara who returns to his role as global chief strategy officer … WPP’s AKQA North American CEO Tesa Aragones and CMO Jabari Hearn are reported to have left the company … Havas Media ANZ tapped Kate O’Ryan-Roeder to be its new CEO, coming over from managing director at Mindshare in the region … London-based Unfinished hired Oli Cooper to be co-CEO alongside founder Chris Bunyan.

Direct quote

“[RFPs and RFIs are] one of the last places I would suggest [agencies] use AI, because if they get it wrong, they just got it wrong from the start.”

—Steve Boehler, founder of agency and marketing consultancy Mercer Island Group, to Sam Bradley in a story about the new business crunch at agencies.

Speed reading

• In a surprising move that also seem destined to happen, Google shut down its Privacy Sandbox last week, and Ronan Shields walked readers through its inglorious history. 
• Speaking of Google, Sam Bradley reported that the tech giant’s AdX has has been offering media agencies post-auction discount deals since January, a big change.
• I wrote about the impact AI is having on media agencies’ ability to improve their marketing mix modeling offerings, as the industry moves closer to evaluating media and creative side by side.