There is a certain irony in watching independent advertising agencies — shops that have long marketed themselves on the basis of not being part of something larger — decide that perhaps being part of something larger has its advantages after all.
A wave of consolidation is sweeping through the independent sector of the advertising business, as agencies that once positioned themselves as nimble alternatives to the holding company giants are now joining forces with one another to create what some in the industry have taken to calling "super-independents." The term suggests a kind of comic-book heroism, though the motivations appear to be more prosaic: scale, efficiency and the ability to compete for larger pieces of business.
The trend reflects several overlapping pressures that have been building in the market for some time. Clients, particularly those with global ambitions, have grown weary of assembling their own patchwork quilts of agency partners across different disciplines and geographies. They want fewer relationships, not more. And the independents, for all their creative bona fides, have sometimes found themselves outgunned when it comes to media buying clout or data capabilities.
(One might note that the holding companies spent decades acquiring their way to scale, and were roundly criticized for becoming unwieldy as a result. The independents appear to be hoping they can thread a needle that their predecessors could not.)
Whether these newly combined entities will manage to preserve the entrepreneurial culture that made them attractive in the first place remains an open question. The history of agency mergers is littered with combinations that looked elegant on a PowerPoint slide and rather less so in practice.
Still, the independents seem determined to try. In advertising, as in so many other endeavors, independence turns out to be a relative term.
Original story published in adage.com: "Why independent agencies keep merging with each other - Ad Age"