THE NETWORKS ARE BUYING SOCIAL-FIRST AGENCIES. WE'VE SEEN THIS MOVIE BEFORE.
Captiv8. Whalar. HELO. In under two years, the big holding companies have gone on a social-first buying spree — the same move they made on mobile-first shops a decade ago. Here's what's driving it, and what it says about anyone still treating social like a channel instead of a discipline.
The last time this happened
We've seen this film before. Back in 2012–2014, mobile had already won — smartphones were in every pocket — but most agencies were still building for desktop and buying media like it was 2009. A wave of mobile-first shops emerged to close that gap, got very good very fast, and ended up getting bought by the networks that couldn't build the capability themselves in time. Consumer behaviour moved first. The industry caught up by writing cheques.
We're watching the replay. This time the terrain is social, and the gap closed even faster.
Where the attention actually went
Thanks to those black screens in every pocket, social has pulled the majority of daily attention — and the money followed it there. Global social ad spend is on track to hit $338.75 billion in 2026, up 18.4% year-on-year. That's not a market maturing. That's a market still accelerating.
The attention numbers explain why. The average person spends 2 hours 21 minutes a day on social platforms globally. Among 18–24 year-olds in the US that's over 3 hours. Teens are closer to 4.8 hours. In Brazil, the Philippines and Indonesia, daily usage runs to 3.5–4 hours. For a huge share of any audience worth reaching, social isn't a channel anymore. It's the environment.
Which is exactly why the content has to work harder. Call it "thumb-stopping" if you want the tired shorthand — the point still holds. If it doesn't earn the stop in the first second, the budget behind it never gets spent.
Thumb-stopping was never the whole job
Stopping the scroll gets you the opportunity. It doesn't get you the outcome. The gap between a social-first approach and a TV ad cut down to 15 seconds is everything that happens after the stop: content that feels authentic instead of performed, built for a specific audience instead of a general one, made with the right creators and partners instead of bolted onto a brand deck afterwards, shaped into a story people actually want to watch — and, ideally, want to share. That's a different discipline entirely, and it's not one most legacy agency structures were ever built to deliver at speed.
The buying spree
The bigger players have clocked this, and they're responding the only two ways they know how: build it internally, or buy it. Social and influencer M&A saw over 300 deals close across 2024–2025, and the pace hasn't let up — 29 deals in Q1 2026 alone, with private equity now driving the bulk of that activity.
Publicis has been the most aggressive shopper, picking up Captiv8 (~$175 million), BR Media Group (~$100 million) and reportedly paying $380 million for Influential. In 2026, Accenture Song acquired Whalar — a creator and social agency that's run over $600 million in creator campaigns across 40+ countries and is the most awarded shop in the category. Accenture Song's CEO put it plainly:
“Social is where brands are discovered, where modern commerce is happening and where consumer habits tell us what products will win.”
Her colleague went further:
“What wins won't be the most content — it will be what is most original and most human.”
We Are Social's acquisition of production studio HELO tells the same story from a different angle — folding 20 production staff and clients like Deloitte into its Narrative division so it can own the full pipeline from concept to in-market production, rather than assembling it from vendors under deadline pressure.
It's the mobile-first playbook again, just with a bigger chequebook. Back then, the networks that didn't understand mobile bought their way to fluency. Now it's social-first creative and creator relationships commanding the premium — and it's the agencies with genuinely creator-built cultures, not bolted-on social teams, that are commanding it.
Not an AI story
It would be easy to file all of this under the general AI reshuffle everyone's talking about. It isn't, and that's the more interesting part. This is a market rewarding proximity to real audiences and real creator relationships — the fastest-growing corner of a creator economy already worth an estimated $310 billion globally in 2026, heading toward $1.3 trillion by 2033. Technology is speeding up production and targeting underneath all of it, sure. But what's actually being bought and fought over is authentic connection with an audience — the one thing automation doesn't replace on its own.
Where this leaves us
The lesson from the mobile-first era is worth remembering: the gap between "we understand this channel" and "we were built for this channel" closes fast, and it usually closes via someone else's chequebook. The agencies winning in social right now aren't the ones who added a social team on top. They're the ones built social-first from day one.
That's how we work. Strategy, creative direction, film, motion and social activation sit under one roof here, not in separate departments waiting on each other's sign-off — because the brief for a scroll-stopping piece of social content and the brief for a broadcast film shouldn't need two different agencies to answer it.
Want to talk it through?