Take a step back from the constant churn of agency industry news, and a simpler story comes into view. The market’s splitting in two, and the distance between them is widening. 
 
The holding companies aren’t just restructuring. They’re trying to rebuild how they operate, bringing AI and more centralised services into the core, while still managing the reality of large, legacy teams. 
 
This was always going to be hard. It’s harder still because the model they are now unwinding (global reach, centralised procurement and buying at scale) is exactly what clients spent years paying a premium for. AI is now putting that advantage under real pressure, and faster than anyone expected. The inward focus isn’t a management failure, but it is absorbing a significant amount of leadership time and attention. 
 
Accenture Song is a useful reference point. It topped the Ad Age Agency Report 2025, as the world’s biggest agency company. It didn’t get there by slowly reshaping an old holding company structure under pressure, but rather by starting earlier and asking a different question: ‘What do clients need now?’, not, ‘How do we update what we already sell?’  The Networks might challenge the assertion that this is a question they’re posing themselves, but when you’re carrying decades of embedded structures and habits, it becomes the question whether you’re asking it or not.
 
Meanwhile, for those without a legacy model to unpick, the opportunity is more straightforward, and the numbers are starting to show it in really impressive growth. 
PMG, the independent US performance agency, posted 20% revenue growth managing $7bn in media spend, enough to earn it MediaPost’s Independent Agency of the Year. More telling than the growth itself is that its founder reports five times the inbound pitching activity from holdco clients compared to the previous year, attributing it directly to holdco distraction. The sentiment is that clients aren’t leaving because of ideology, they’re leaving because attention is a finite resource, and right now, a lot of holdco attention is pointed at internal transformation rather than client outcomes. 
 
Stagwell tells a similar story from a slightly different vantage point. It reported the strongest newbusiness quarter in its history going into Q1 2026, with Mark Penn explicit on the recent earnings call that the opportunity is coming directly from rivals distracted by restructurings and mergers. Stagwell isn’t an independent, it’s a publicly listed marketing group owning a portfolio of agencies.  It too has its legacy complexity but on an altogether different scale and restricted to certain aspects of its offering, and the difference is showing up in the numbers. 
 
The holdcos will adapt, they always do. But adaptation takes time, and time is moving faster than ever. Right now, it’s the thing their more agile competitors are using well.