The digital advertising landscape is experiencing a shift in power, with independent agencies increasingly capturing the budgets and hearts of major global brands. To explore the structural trends, operational models, and cultural dynamics driving this transformation, New Digital Age recently hosted an exclusive Indie Agency Roundtable at Cannes Lions.
The discussion, which brought together some of the most prominent leaders across the independent ecosystem, revealed a sector that is not merely surviving alongside multinational holding networks, but actively rewriting the rules of client engagement.
The roundtable was chaired by NDA Editor-in-Chief Justin Pearse; Alex Kirk, Managing Director and co-founder at Medialab Group; Anthony Abou-Zeid, Managing Partner at The Kite Factory; Art Zelman, MD, Agency & Programmatic Sales, Permutive; Clive Mishon, Founder/Director of Alliance of Independent Agencies; Jen Smith, co-founder of Craft Media; Jonny Ray, Co-Founder + Partner at Beyond; Kate Fulford-Brown, MD, 2LK; Nick Tong, Mediaplus Managing Partner; Rhys Williams, managing partner, the7stars; Sarah Dawson, EVP, Managing Director, The Team; and Sebastian Schichtel, Crossmedia, Executive Director International.
The drivers of the independent renaissance
The consensus among the panel was immediate, independent agencies are experiencing an unprecedented surge in market interest, largely driven by widespread disillusionment with the rigid structures of the major holding networks. As client demands become more complex and fast-moving, the bureaucratic processes of multinational networks are struggling to keep pace.
Art Zeidman, who has held senior commercial roles at Google, Business Insider and now Permutive, pointed out that the current wave of consolidation within holding companies is inadvertently pushing clients toward independent alternatives.
“I think that this is probably the most exciting time ever for the independent agency sector,” Zelman said, pointing to the structural disconnect within the networks. “Your objective is to deliver success and successful campaigns for your clients, versus success for Wall Street, who really drives the real ownership of the big holding companies.”
This sentiment was reinforced from a transitional perspective by Sarah Dawson, who highlighted the friction global brands experience when dealing with giant structures.
“As you get to such a global scale, it is just the constant grapple between clients saying now we want small, niche, nimble, specialist, all the wonderful things that we all know the clients should have,” Dawson explained.
She added that while global scale is sometimes necessary, middle-market clients are increasingly turning away because they find network structures to be “too big and too complicated.”
An abundance of market choice has become another defining feature of the current landscape. Clive Mishon highlighted how structural shifts in marketing have broken the agency world down into highly specialised sectors.
“The industry’s got very complex, and with technology replacing different parts of the marketing mix, businesses are emerging to address those very specific needs,” Mishon said. He explained that the number of agencies has effectively doubled over the last decade, allowing clients to build bespoke ecosystems of true experts rather than accepting compromised, all-in-one network solutions.
Rebuilding the foundations of trust and relationships
At the core of the independent value proposition is the concept of trust, an element that many participants felt has been structurally eroded within legacy network environments. Without the pressure to satisfy external shareholders or monetise expensive, mandatory internal technology stacks, indies are uniquely positioned to act as objective partners.
Alex Kirk pointed directly to this transparency deficit as a primary reason clients are fleeing the networks. “Trust is eroded, and I am not saying independent agencies do everything perfectly and holding companies are untrustworthy, but I genuinely think independent agencies are geared up to deliver based on better outcomes for a client,” Kirk argued.
He emphasised that independence guarantees agility, allowing leaders “to pick and choose partners based on what is best for a client, as opposed to what we have to fund in the background.”
However, maintaining this trust requires a deep commitment to human relationships, which becomes harder to replicate at scale. Jen Smith suggested that client trust is fundamentally tied to the continuity of senior personnel, something holding companies frequently disrupt.
“The hardest thing as you get bigger is replicating the trust that you have with an individual client,” Smith said, explaining that clients frequently complain about losing individual relationships when scaled across international borders. “They want to feel like your whole business would fall apart without them.”
The instability of network account teams has become a significant pain point for brands seeking consistency. Kate Fulford-Brown, drawing on her experience across both network and independent landscapes, highlighted how structural disruption damages the client experience.
“Growing up in big network agencies, that is what we sold, you had the retainer, you had the consistent team,” Fulford-Brown recalled. “But actually, what we have been seeing in the last two or three years is a lot of those network agencies, as they get scooped up or smashed apart, their clients are just not experiencing that consistency and that trust anymore.”
The pricing debate and the reality of productisation
As independent agencies scale, they inevitably confront questions around commercial efficiency and remuneration models. The traditional reliance on time-based billing is increasingly viewed as an outdated mechanism that penalises efficiency and fails to reflect true value.
Jonny Ray raised the issue of productisation, an operational strategy heavily favored by holding companies but one that requires careful adaptation within the independent sector.
“Productisation is giving us avenues to diversify our businesses, but doing it for the right reasons,” Ray said. He argued that independents must maintain commercial clarity and build their businesses around “the services that your clients need, not what you think may generate the greatest return.”
The push toward value-based or outcome-based pricing models represents a necessary evolution, according to Sebastian Schichtel, who warned against the dangers of sticking to legacy frameworks.
“If we are not productising our work, if we are not moving away from the legacy, hourly-based remuneration model, we basically are going to subsidise the efficiencies from the clients with our margins,” Schichtel said. He challenged agency leaders to be braver in pitch scenarios, advocating for mutual alignment where both agency and client share the upside of business growth.
Ultimately, changing the conversation around pricing requires agencies to deeply understand the unique value they bring to the table, shifting the narrative away from cost and toward commercial impact.
As Clive Mishon observed, “It becomes quite incumbent upon the agency to understand the value that it delivers to its clients in order that it can have that conversation about value, as opposed to just saying ‘this is what we are going to do and this is how much it is going to cost you’.”
The second part of this report will be published later this week.
