The staffing industry, which has spent decades placing people in jobs, has now decided it would also like to do the jobs itself.
24 Seven, a staffing company that specializes in the creative and marketing fields, has announced the formation of 24 Seven Agencies, a new entity that brings together three previously independent shops: Futureman, which handles brand activations; SketchDeck, which does brand design; and Markacy, which focuses on performance marketing. The combined operation will offer clients the services of all three agencies, which their owners would very much like you to know is not, technically speaking, a holding company.
"Our mantra is 'better not bigger,'" said Tucker Matheson, who co-founded Markacy and spoke to Adweek about the new venture. Mr. Matheson emphasized that each agency remains founder-led and that the three shops possess "very unique disciplines that complement each other."
(One might observe that this is also how executives at actual holding companies describe their arrangements, usually while standing in front of a slide deck, but let us take Mr. Matheson at his word.)
The structure represents an increasingly familiar gambit in the agency world: the promise of integrated services without the bureaucratic overhead that has made the large holding companies a reliable source of client complaints for the better part of two decades. Whether 24 Seven Agencies can deliver on that promise — or whether it will eventually develop the same gravitational pull toward bigness that has swallowed so many "nimble" alternatives — remains to be seen.
For 24 Seven itself, the move marks an interesting evolution. A company that built its business on understanding what creative talent is worth has now bet that it also understands what creative work is worth. These are not, it should be noted, quite the same thing.
Original story published in adweek.com: "‘Better Not Bigger’: 24 Seven Launches New Agency Challenging the Holdco Model"