HoldCos vs. Indies
It matters where your "pressure to grow"comes from.
When I saw that in a recent Adweek reader survey, 60% of people working at holding company-owned ad agencies reported negative morale—while 58% of those at independently owned agencies reported positive morale—I had one thought:
Don’t be such a pick-me, Adweek.
I only recently picked up the term pick-me from watching the YouTube series Chicken Shop Date. It has a variety of social media connotations I won’t get into, but in this episode, Sabrina Carpenter is making fun of herself for saying something painfully obvious and acting like it was big freaking news.
That’s how I’ve long felt about the HoldCos vs. Indies conversation. I’m bored by it. Anyone who’s worked at both, like I have, knows the drill. You grind at HoldCos to build your portfolio working 60-hour weeks on global brands with big budgets. Then you burn out and switch to an Indie for better work-life balance, camaraderie, and more control over your work and your career.
Indies love to hold up their independent status as a badge of honor—lower fees, faster turnarounds, happier employees. But why does it really matter?
OK, this is where I make up for calling Adweek a pick-me. I listened to their discussion of the survey results on the podcast episode Why Agency Life Feels Broken, and finally realized why it does matter whether or not an agency is independent:
It matters where an agency’s pressure to grow comes from.
For agencies owned by holding companies or private equity firms, that pressure to grow is coming from C-suite folks or PE boards. People someone like me might talk to once a year if ever. They don’t know me, my teams, or my clients. While they are trying to maximize their own EBITDA, we are trying to maximize our clients’ brand love. We’re not just on different teams, we’re playing entirely different sports. In the past, that has been mitigated by the overall health and success of HoldCo’s. But now they’re contracting (all big 5 reported lay offs), and so is the freedom they’re giving their agencies.
On the flip side, the pressure to grow an independent agency comes from one place: the humans that agency interacts with everyday—whether that’s the employees on their payroll or the clients on their roster.
I’m part of the executive leadership team at Proof, a 50-person indie ad agency. In 2024 we won Ad Age’s Best Agency Culture and just this month Inc. Magazine named us one of the Best Workplaces of 2025. But as I write this, I’m realizing these awards aren’t just about agency culture or being a great place to work. They mean we know where our pressure to grow comes from. We want our agency to grow because we want our people (me included!) to grow—their paychecks, their talents, their careers.
We feel the same way about our clients. As a boutique agency, many of them are on the smaller side. They’re people I talk to every week, who want to grow their companies for their people the way Proof wants to grow for ours.
Let’s call it relationship-scaling. Not growth for a New York C-suite,
but for the people—employees and clients—you’re in direct relationships with.
My agency can brag as much as it wants about being an “independent agency,” not beholden to a holding company. But if we’re doing our job right, we are very much beholden to the people around us. And if I’m an employee choosing where to work or a company choosing who to trust with my brand, that is why independence matters very much.