The Drum Live 2025 is now in full swing, featuring two days of debate and comment that bring their audience into the live workings of The Drum. What do VCCP, FGS Global and Kantar all have in common? Yes, they’re some of the biggest organisations in the marketing world, but there’s something else too: they’re among the companies that have left the world of marketing’s titanic holding companies and are enjoying their time as independents. So says Ajaz Ahmed, who’s been on his own journey of independence of late. The founder of AKQA led the agency through its acquisition by WPP until the point at which he turned a critic of adland’s holding company model. He left in 2024 and this year has launched Studio.One, which he told The Drum will be a “direct rival” to the “slow, bloated, expensive agency model” at the holdcos. Speaking at The Drum Live today, Ahmed celebrated a “new era for independent agencies,” in which, he says, not only are those former WPP-owned shops such as VCCP thriving, but other indies, including Mother and Mischief, are entering a purple patch. “They’re all thriving,” Ahmed told an audience at The Drum’s HQ in Shoreditch, London. “And the founders or the partners have both the skin in the game and that stakeholder management. It’s definitely an exciting time for independent agencies.” Ahmed was joined on stage by Jon Goulding, the chief executive at independent shop Atomic London since 2012, who racked up 12 years at Omnicom shops Rapp and DDB; and Zoe Eagle, chief exec at Iris (an indie-adjacent shop owned by Cheil), a veteran of Publicis’s BBH and an ad behemoth of another kind, Accenture, as it absorbed Karmarama. The panel was compered by Barry Dudley – no stranger to indie-network dynamics in his role as a partner at M&A advisory practice Green Square. Why are independents finding themselves so bullish? Well, the ad biz isn’t a zero-sum game, but one factor is a battery of high-profile manoeuvrings in the holdco world that our panellists used to call home, which bespeak opportunity for hungry indies: the ongoing Omnicom-IPG merger; WPP welcoming a new leader amid a difficult year; Dentsu reportedly looking to offload its holdings outside Japan; S4 posting shrinking revenues.
Lessons from the mothership
While it’s convenient to treat the ad industry’s holding companies as an interchangeable set, of course, that’s only a convenient fiction: they’re distinct organisations with distinct histories and organisational set-ups. “Not all holding companies are the same and to kind of have this umbrella term as a holding company and imagine they’re all running the same way is completely and utterly inaccurate,” says Ahmed. Still, each of our panellists has entered their current role with lessons of what to bring forward from their former employers and what to leave well behind. Ahmed’s Studio.One, for example, has done away with time sheets and is committed to not having an HR department. Another lesson from former employer WPP, he says, is: “There seem to be more job titles than there are people [at the holding companies]. So many chiefs! Everyone at holding companies seems to be a ‘chief’… What we vowed was that we’re going to have only three job titles.” For her part, Zoe Eagle’s first act when arriving at Iris almost a year ago was getting rid of ‘utilization’ as a metric. “I found it to be a shrink-inducing thing to be focusing on,” Eagle says. “It’s sort of pointless to be looking at when you’re trying to create an environment that is innovation-focused, growth-oriented and about top-line growth.” It’s not just a practical consideration for Eagle – in fact, this issue connects to an existential question for the marketing industry: “Are we compliance-governance-process organizations, or are we innovation-organizations that are going to encourage unexpected, entrepreneurial, out-of-the-box thinking? That’s where disproportionate, explosive growth is going to come from. And tech transformation is really putting that into focus: when you’re trying to drive efficiency within a tech stack, you need a completely different type of person than when you’re trying to create something totally unexpected and never seen before that’s going to cut through.”
From ‘holding company’ to ‘operating company’
Running Atomic now for over 13 years, Jon Goulding says that it all comes down to using the agility of independence to give clients what they want. And what they want is to really get to know their partners and feel the impact of collaboration with them. “Clients need those collisions of really seeing people working on their business and their company’s future,” he says. Being an operator and not just a manager is the route to that collaborative mode. Holdcos and indies alike, Goulding says, need to get closer to operations. “The problem with the name ‘holding company’ is that, by definition, it was built to hold entrepreneurial people… Now, you’ve got to move to being an ‘operating company.’” What does this prototypical ‘operating company’ look like? For Goulding, it comes down to avoiding the pitfalls of moving further away from the work. “There are a lot of CEOs who aren’t actually in control of their businesses or all their clients’ work. That’s why it’s such a rich time for indies, because you’re able to throw yourself into online client work. The opportunity is to get off the fence and become an operating company”. For Eagle, this all smells like opportunity. Both holding companies and independents will continue to exist for as long as any of us can see, but which ones will survive, she says, will come down to agility and entrepreneurialism. “You need environments that can nurture innovative, creative thinking. And I think the question will be, which of these businesses is able to do that effectively? The market demand isn’t going anywhere. “Businesses want to hack growth because resources are tight. You need people who are equipped to be entrepreneurial… There’s an opportunity for businesses like ours to get that talent out and really give them the space to thrive.” Read more
