The Independent Agency Advantage in a Consolidating Market

Agency consolidation hit a new high-water mark in 2025. Omnicom completed its merger with Interpublic Group. Folding six more networks into one holding company and leaving marketers with a noticeably shorter list of scaled alternatives. The pitch for deals like this is always the same: more capability, more resources, more coverage under one roof.

What rarely gets mentioned is the bill that comes with all that scale. More sign-offs, overlapping P&Ls, and people who need to nod before a client gets an actual answer. Somewhere between the press release and the client meeting, size quietly becomes slowness.

Kabeer Chaudhary, global CEO of M+C Saatchi Performance, said as much in a recent interview with ExchangeWire’s Charlotte McEleny. His point wasn’t that consolidation is wrong for the networks doing it. It’s that staying independent, in a market moving this fast, isn’t sentiment. It’s a strategy.

Why Does Agency Consolidation Create a Speed Problem for Brands?

Every extra layer of internal alignment is one more thing standing between a client’s problem and an agency’s answer. And in a market moving this fast, that distance has a cost.

“In a market that moves this quickly, friction is expensive.”

Kabeer Chaudhary, Global CEO, M&C Saatchi Performance

An independent agency network can build the response around the client’s problem instead of the agency’s org chart. No legacy silo has to be fed first. The agencies that win from here won’t automatically be the biggest ones. They’ll be the ones who can think clearly and move fast without getting weighed down by their own internal processes.

Why Does a Mobile-First Heritage Still Matter in 2026?

2026 is M+C Saatchi Performance’s 20th anniversary. It launched in 2006 as a mobile marketing agency, back when “mobile-first” wasn’t the default lens for consumer behaviour. And only expanded into digital and then omnichannel later. Most of the industry did this in the opposite order: start in traditional or digital, then scramble to mobile thinking.

Starting on mobile means starting with the device people carry with them all day. It’s also where brands now get discovered, judged, compared, ignored, and occasionally given a second look. That heritage shows up today as a general comfort with speed. It shows up in fragmented attention spans, too.

Why Has the Consumer Journey Become So Hard to Track?

Kabeer describes the modern purchasing path as more fragmented and less forgiving than before. A brand gets:

• Discovered on one app
• Searched for on another
• Compared on a marketplace
• Ignored in a retargeting ad
• Checked against a review
• Mentioned by a friend
• Converted somewhere else entirely

That’s pushed the agency’s own remit to shift from buying media toward solving growth problems across that whole journey. Stronger data, sharper measurement, and more integrated creative thinking now sit at the center. Automation and AI-enabled workflows sit alongside them.

The APAC advantage in global growth marketing

Because a lot of global networks are still experiencing growth through an old map. Kabeer is blunt about it: most agency groups default to a Western lens. While a large share of M&C Saatchi Performance’s leadership operates from APAC, with Singapore as the hub.

That’s less about the address and more about proximity. In that region, mobile-first behavior, super apps, fintech, travel, e-commerce, and platform-led growth aren’t emerging trends. They’re not something to track from a distance. They’re already how people behave day to day. Being based there means the network sees global growth through a young and fast-moving market. This provides insight into future consumer behavior, rather than relying on older, established centers.

What Are the Biggest Marketing Challenges Brands Face in 2026?

The interview lands on three challenges clients are facing right now. All are connected to the same underlying issue: clarity.

The first is measurement. Clients are sitting on more data than they’ve ever had. Many are still stuck on a basic question: what’s actually working? Leaning on one dashboard in a market like this isn’t measurement. It’s optimism with a login. The fix is blending attribution, MMM, and incrementality. Not because any one model is perfect, but because none of them is complete alone.

The second is AI-driven discovery. Brand strategy has largely been built around earning a click-through to a website. But if AI-generated summaries start answering a consumer’s question before that click ever happens, the incentives shift. A brand can still look healthy in classic search rankings. But it’s quietly losing ground elsewhere. That’s where the actual decision is now being shaped. The fix is building the right authority, content structure, and brand signal. It needs to register with the systems now doing a lot of the filtering. Not only with people.

The third is simply focus. Clients are under pressure to grow while spending more carefully. They’re surrounded by more tools, channels, and vendors than they can reasonably evaluate. The job isn’t chasing every new platform. It’s bringing clarity to a system that already has plenty of options and not nearly enough of it.

Consolidated vs Independent Agencies: What Brands Should Choose

Independence, mobile-first heritage, and a bias toward clarity over noise aren’t really three separate arguments. They’re the same argument told three ways. Each one is about how many steps sit between a question and an answer.

Networks that keep adding scale without addressing the friction that comes with it will keep being slower to respond. And these are markets that don’t wait. The ones that stay structurally lean stay close to how consumers actually behave. And staying disciplined about which signals matter will keep making decisions at the speed the market now demands.

This piece draws on Kabeer Chaudhary’s interview with ExchangeWire. Read the full interview: “Friction is Expensive”: Kabeer Chaudhary, M&C Saatchi Performance, on Why Independence Means Speed, by Charlotte McEleny.