THE HOLDING COMPANIES ARE MERGING.THE INDEPENDENTS ARE RISING.
WPP, Omnicom and IPG are consolidating into fewer, bigger players. We think that's the best thing to happen to independent studios in a decade.
$0bn
Combined revenue
Omnicom/IPG merger filings, 2025
0
Agencies under one roof
Adweek, Dec 2025
0%
Reviewing agencies in 2026
Campaign US, industry survey
$0.00bn
US agency market by 2026
RevenueMemo, 2026
A merger three decades in the making
In November 2025, Omnicom completed its $13.5 billion acquisition of IPG — a deal first announced in December 2024, cleared by US regulators in June, and finally closed after a year of exchange offers and antitrust review. The result is the largest advertising holding company in history: $26 billion in combined revenue, roughly 1,500 agencies under one roof. Three of those agencies — DDB, FCB and MullenLowe — are being folded into other networks entirely, ceasing to exist as standalone names. That's not a footnote. That's what consolidation costs: choice, identity, and the specific culture a client picked an agency for in the first place.
WPP's harder year
WPP's story runs in the opposite direction but points at the same thing. Full-year 2025 revenue fell over 8% to £13.55 billion. The group lost Coca-Cola's North American media account — roughly $700 million in annual spend — to Publicis, and lost Mars' snacking and pet care business too. WPP dropped out of the FTSE 100 after nearly 30 years on the index. New CEO Cindy Rose has responded with Elevate28, an 18-month plan to scrap the holding-company structure entirely and rebuild WPP as a single, AI-enabled operating company — targeting £500 million in savings by 2028, at a restructuring cost of £400 million. Takeover interest has reportedly come in from Havas, Apollo and KKR. Whichever way this settles, it's a company in the middle of rebuilding itself from the inside while still trying to hold onto clients.
What consolidation actually costs a client
None of this happens without friction on the client side. IPG cut 3,200 jobs and vacated 730,000 square feet of office space ahead of the Omnicom merger. Account teams get reshuffled mid-relationship. Approval chains get longer, not shorter, while two agencies' processes get stitched into one.
Brands don't experience a merger as a strategic milestone. They experience it as their point of contact changing.
Scale on one side. Proximity on the other.
The independent's opening
That friction is exactly where independents are finding room to move. 85% of US B2C marketing executives say they plan to review their media agencies in 2026. The independent agency sector isn't just holding steady while this plays out — it's growing: the US marketing agency market is projected to reach $192.45 billion in 2026, up from $182.49 billion in 2025, and independents are taking a growing share of that. This isn't confined to boutique, small-budget work either — Wpromote's 2025 acquisition of Giant Spoon created a PE-backed independent now managing over $3 billion in media spend for clients including Peacock, Vuori and TransUnion. Real budgets are moving to agencies built to operate differently: pivot faster, work the way they actually want to, and push the creative a little further without ten layers of sign-off in between. We're seeing this across categories — social content specialists, SEO and organic content shops, AI-native digital studios, experience-led agencies, and creative production studios like us.
Talent isn't the divide
None of this is a talent argument — there's serious craft still coming out of the big networks, and that's not going anywhere. The divide isn't talent. It's structure. It's whether the people doing the work get to make decisions close to the client, or whether every decision passes through a process built for a $26 billion company rather than the brand actually being served.
Where this leaves us
We think this is an exciting moment to be an independent studio — not because the giants are struggling, but because their scale is now working against the thing clients actually want: speed, ownership, and creative that doesn't get smoothed down by committee. That's the door we're built to knock on.
Want to talk it through?