Why it's a great time to be an indie right now

You don’t need to read WPP’s latest earnings report, or Group M’s latest strategy announcement, to know that the pendulum has firmly swung in independent agencies’ favour.

I built my first agency Fetch in 2010, focused on the app economy and sold it to Dentsu, fully exiting in 2019. At that point, the large agency groups had enjoyed sustained growth and reasonable margins but there were signs that the golden era was coming to an end.

It was the period where one big restructure designed to fix all operating cost issues ended up being a constant slimming of the organisation; death from a thousand cuts.

Fast-forward to 2025, there have been limited growth opportunities in the holding companies, significant redundancies, very little pay inflation, limited innovation and few new ventures. Quite frankly, there’s very little to get excited about. 

The big talking point has obviously been the Omnicom/IPG merger, which, if we’re totally honest, looks like an attempt to increase shareholder value by reducing operational expenditures and increasing margin but not bringing any value to clients. In fact, it’s likely to be a huge distraction for everyone involved, especially when they integrate the two businesses. 

After all, integrating two mammoth whales is going to steal a huge amount of senior leadership attention. They want to be the biggest. Well, we want to be the fastest. 

So, why is big no longer best?

It all boils down to one intrinsic shift in our industry: advertising is a lot fairer now. It is democratised.

This is mainly being driven by the likes of Meta, Google and other scaled digital platforms.

It’s no longer about scale, buying power, Cannes tête-à-têtes and long lunch deals. It’s not about muscle – it’s about manoeuvre. 

Digital advertising, which now represents 80% of total adspend in the UK, is now almost exclusively auction-based. 

Advertisers are bidding for attention, and they’re up against not just their competitors but also the other 10 million advertisers that Meta, Google, and TikTok have. 

So, what wins the auctions? Value per impression for the digital advertising platform or, plainly – ads that customers will interact with. As Pete Buckley rightly said recently in his recent LinkedIn post , the new targeting at Meta is creative and it couldn’t be more true. Get the creative right, the ad structure right, the measurement, and you needn’t worry about scale and trading deals.

Then you have creative. 

No longer reserved for the suits and the creative duos of copy writers and art directors. The best performing creative (on average 30% more effective, according to our COmpass tool) is created not by Ogilvy or AKQA. It is created by the brand's customers, aka user-generated content or an influencer/creator you may never have heard of with 10,000 followers.

Brands are searching for faster, nimble agencies that really understand the nuances of cultural behaviour on social media and streaming platforms because that is where most customers are spending their time. Whether it’s a political campaign, recruitment, a new car launch or a new way to drink beer, independents are in demand.

The global conglomerates (like Unilever, Coca-Cola and Santander) are still favouring large network agencies, but their lunch is being eaten by the disruptive new entrants in their categories. Alcohol is a great example of this. Diageo has been a growth company for decades. In 2024, it posted a 1.4% decline in sales due to a cultural shift in drinking less. Low- or no-alcohol alternatives are thriving, doing brilliant marketing and working with smaller independent agencies. Lucky Saint happened to be one of our first ever clients.

Where the large groups are really getting caught out, in my humble opinion, is the pace of change. This ad market is changing faster now than I’ve ever seen it. AI, full-funnel attribution, creators becoming media owners, CTV and the list goes on and on. To thrive today as an advertiser, one characteristic trumps all; the ability to adapt.

The truth is the large holding companies are full of fantastic talent who know this. Their ability to create change in a sea of cutbacks, restructures and constant pitching, repitching and limited resources is capping them at the knees. And guess what, they’re leaving. Which may, in part, account for the IPA’s reported 1149 open vacancies across its creative and media agency base in 2024, despite redundancies.

This is why the independents are winning. The biggest tankers are the slowest to turn around. The best talent wants to be in growing businesses. Advertising is fully democratised, and advertisers or brands know this, and they’re moving.

James Connelly is the founder of growth marketing agency Charlie Oscar.