By Samppa Vilkuna, CEO, Superson
The agency holding company model was designed for a world that no longer exists. It was built on the premise that to gain consistent access to creative talent, you need to hire them full-time. In doing so, you keep talent in-house and can therefore bill your clients for access to the talent you now own. The retainer was the commercial instrument that made this work. For a long time, the system worked: clients would pay a monthly or quarterly fee for capacity, and, as agencies, we would build our bench accordingly.
For the last 30 years or so, this has been the norm, the industry standard, and it worked too. It didn’t work because it was the best model for clients, but it worked because there was no clear alternative. Times however, have changed, availability is not a skill.
What if the bench is the problem?
To be clear, I don’t think the holding company fails because the people inside are in any way bad at their jobs; there is creative talent in most big agencies that is amazing at what it does. I do, however, think that the old model doesn’t do them justice; the system falls down because of what the model structurally requires of them.
Think of it like a football team: when you have a squad, you do your best to pick the team best suited to your own style of play and best suited to face the opposition that weekend. Even the best squad in the world might look at other players elsewhere, wishing they could use them to play in the upcoming fixture. Of course, contractually, you can’t, so you do the best you can with the bench you have. That might require players to play out of position, or, when things get really busy, to use players who haven’t got the match fitness, play them out of position, or play too many games in a row. You get by, but you don’t show your best on the field.
When you fill briefs, you fill hours, and when you fill hours, you are deploying the talent you have. This is very different to having the exact right talent the brief needs. You end up with a strategist with deep enterprise software experience squeezed onto a fintech rebrand, or a B2B positioning brief handed to a team whose last three accounts were consumer packaged goods. The square talent gap can just about be filled with the round creative director peg. It’s not perfect, but most of the hole is filled, and everyone gets paid.
This is not a failure of intention though; it is the predictable output of a system built around utilisation. The benchmark for a well-run holding company agency is for the bench to stay busy. That is a very different benchmark from being confident that you fielded the right people for the brief and the right team for the match.
The retainer doesn’t commoditise creative talent though, does it? The retainer commoditises creative output. It turns briefs into process, process into deliverables, deliverables into invoices. The cycle repeats until someone on the client side asks whether the relationship is working; at this point it is possibly too late, and the question is being asked because the work has been competent, sure, but not outstanding for longer than anyone can precisely put a finger on.
What else is out there?
We set up Superson without a bench, meaning we have no permanent capacity to justify, no retainers, no monthly commitment from clients to fill hours we’ve already sold them. Instead, over the years we have amassed a network of specialists, activated per brief and per sprint, assembled for the work rather than for the client relationship. Many of our clients have worked with us across multiple years and multiple sprints. The difference is that each engagement is earned, not assumed.
The practical consequence of removing the bench is that the brief becomes the starting point rather than the utilisation plan. The question stops being “who do we have available?” – availability is not a skill after all, the question starts being “who is right for this?” This matters more in B2B than anywhere else too. When a brief requires someone who understands enterprise buying cycles or can craft a real narrative for a trade vertical, the gap between ‘who we have’ and ‘who we need’ is immediately visible in the work. The questions being asked are not the same so they don’t produce the same answers; they don’t produce the same work.
What might feel heavy is that every sprint is evaluated on its own terms without a retainer providing baseline revenue. It takes a mental shift to get your head around the difference, because here the work has to earn the next engagement. This drastically changes what you prioritise, what you field, and what you are willing to say when the brief isn’t strong enough to produce good work.
So why now?
AI is doing to creative production what the internet did to media distribution: remove cost from the equation. The assets that once required weeks of bench time will be produced in hours. The question every creative services business will have to answer is: if production is no longer where the value lies, what are you selling?
The honest answer in the holding company model is simple: you are selling access to a bench; it might be an amazing bench, but you are still selling access to it. When AI compresses the hours that bench was billing, the commercial logic falls apart. Agencies have started to respond with pricing strategies for AI-assisted work. I think that this is the wrong frame and a dangerous path to go on. The question is not how to price the hours. The question is what remains when the hours are gone.
The sprint model’s answer is different because it is built around outcomes per brief, earned on delivery.
That survives AI because it doesn’t depend on hours. It depends on judgment; it depends on knowing what the brief truly needs and finding the person who can deliver it. That is not something AI replaces. It is something the holding company model made harder to do well.
This is not a tomorrow problem
It is happening now. Don’t get me wrong; I am not suggesting agencies dismantle their retainer base overnight. Commercial transitions of that kind are not straightforward, and there are clients for whom committed capacity is genuinely what they need; there will always be a place for this model.
What I am suggesting, however, is that the structural tension between the bench model and the brief model is becoming harder to ignore. The brands that will extract the most value from what AI makes possible are not the ones with the largest agency commitments. They are the ones with the sharpest briefs and the clearest way of evaluating what they’ve got. That describes a B2B brand buyer more than it describes anyone else. They have always needed depth over volume, category expertise over broad creative range and a model that can scale a sprint when a product launch hits and stand down when it doesn’t.
The holding company model was not built for that. It’ll be interesting to see how long before it shows.
