The landscape has changed but agencies have not

15 Apr 2025

The landscape has changed but agencies haven’t

Tech is changing our lives > it’s exciting, scary and full of unknowns/opportunities.

Our world is more polarised, anxious and overwhelmed > people feel misunderstood, spoken down to and lost.

Businesses are battling consistent headwinds > leaner budgets, more channels and generally people have smaller wallets.

Restructures, redundancies and an ongoing deflated job market. Balancing culture and balance sheets. Companies trying to stimulate growth by pulling the big red lever of forcing people back to the office hoping that will help.

This pattern started to emerge towards the end of the COVID years and we’re only now starting to see the impact of this seismic shift.

Being a marketer in this environment is extremely hard. We should really acknowledge that.

The problem is, agencies haven’t caught up.

They continue to promise the world, cost the earth and are slow to react. Pushing a round peg in a square hole.

Agencies wondering why pipelines are smaller, wins fewer and retainers diminishing....

What seems to be happening is that some larger brands are moving from small rosters of large agencies to large rosters of smaller agencies. Creating a platform for a new batch of indies to come through over the next 5 years. As the current ones have already been brought by the holding companies.

The big will continue to get bigger... bigger and better mergers to keep up and retain the larger billing clients... halving operating costs through acquired tech, enabling to reduce head counts and not be tied to as much office space.

The real squeeze will be in the middle. The ones that can’t undercut the market and compete with the speed of indies but can't handle the large service offerings needed for heavily retained global accounts.

Creating a hollowing out of the middle and the gap widening between big and small.

In this it will be interesting to see the ability of freelancers and creators to start competing with the indies as one person shops. Human led, tech enabled. Punching above their weight by strategically using tech to operate at the level of a 10+ person agency. Offering value, speed and quality without the layers of fluff, bureaucracy and expense of headcount.