As holding companies consolidate, a new breed of indie emerges

Australia's independent agency market is changing shape. This week, three very different businesses have launched within days of each other, each making a bet on where the traditional agency model is falling short.

REALMS wants to fix the disconnect between culture, creative, media, social and creators. Bidbrain.ai wants artificial intelligence to remove much of the manual grind from digital media, while pubX wants independent AI agents to strip layers out of the programmatic supply chain.

Their arrival comes at an intriguing moment for Australia's agency market. Omnicom's acquisition of Interpublic continues to reshape one end of the industry, while the collapse of M+C Saatchi ANZ's proposed management buyout has raised questions over the future of another of Australia's best-known agency operations.

The shake-up is also being felt at Weber Shandwick Australia, where senior leaders have broken away to launch independent earned-first agency Vocal ahead of the end of its affiliate arrangement.

On the surface, there isn't much connecting them. Look a little closer and there is. Each is betting that part of the traditional advertising model needs an overhaul.

Connecting the pieces

REALMS, launched this week by former Clemenger BBDO, Emotive, M+C Saatchi and McCann leaders Rhian Mason and Elly Brand (pictured above), is perhaps the clearest example. The independent agency argues marketing has become increasingly specialised, while culture has moved in the opposite direction, flowing across platforms, communities, creators, media, entertainment, experiences and commerce.

Rather than replace specialist agencies, REALMS is designed to sit across them, connecting brand and agency teams around a common cultural strategy spanning creative, social, earned, creators, media and partnerships.

“Most organisations don’t have a capability problem. They have a connection problem,” Mason said.

“The opportunity isn’t to undo specialisation. It’s to connect it around the same cultural opportunity, rather than producing separate discipline and channel plans.”

It's an interesting proposition in an industry that has spent years adding increasingly specialised agencies, capabilities and internal teams to the marketing ecosystem. REALMS is betting there is now value in being the connective tissue between them.

Let the machines do the grind

Bidbrain.ai is attacking a very different part of the model.

Created by independent media agency 100% Digital, the standalone technology company uses AI to automate much of the digital campaign workflow, from turning a brief into a media plan through to activation, optimisation and reporting.

The platform connects channels including Meta, LinkedIn, The Trade Desk, Google Search, YouTube, Reddit and digital out-of-home, with an AI planner able to turn a brief into a campaign structure, media plan, schedule and pitch deck.

The ambition isn't particularly subtle: take work that traditionally consumes agency hours and let technology do it instead.

“Bidbrain.ai is advertising intelligence that does the heavy lifting, planning, launching, optimising and reporting on multi-channel advertising in one centralised system,” co-founder Calvin Pinnegar said.

“We want to free strategists and planners from manual digital campaign work, so they can spend their time where humans add the most value.”

Bidbrain.ai partner Lex van Netten joins from software and data group JSI where he spent nearly 15 years leading the deployment team across APAC and Southeast Asia.

"This is an opportunity to meaningfully move an entire industry forward, not just improve on what already exists, but taking a substantial leap thanks to what's now possible with AI,” he said.

That proposition arrives as agencies and marketers wrestle with one of the bigger questions created by generative and agentic AI: not simply how the technology makes existing jobs faster, but which pieces of agency work need people doing them at all.

Taking aim at the plumbing

Then there is pubX. The agentic advertising business entered Australia last week under country manager Andrew Gilbert, the former Afterpay, Yahoo and Integral Ad Science executive who has spent recent years examining the economics of automated media buying.

Its pitch goes deeper into the advertising supply chain.

Unlike AI tools sitting within an existing DSP or SSP, pubX uses independent agents to make and execute trading decisions for buyers and sellers. The company argues that model can remove intermediaries and return more of the advertiser dollar to working media.

Gilbert argues Australia risks confusing AI interfaces added to existing adtech platforms with genuinely agentic advertising.

“For the past 15 years, we have added layer after layer to solve problems created within the existing programmatic supply chain,” he said.

“This is the first time an external technology innovation will impact our industry and agentic buying gives us the opportunity to rethink that architecture entirely rather than simply adding another layer.”

PubX claims 78 cents in every advertising dollar spent through campaigns on its platform has reached publishers, compared with an average 43 cents through the traditional open programmatic supply chain, citing Association of National Advertisers data for the latter benchmark.

Smaller and increasingly automated

Taken individually, the launches solve different problems. Together, they offer a glimpse at how the independent market is evolving.

REALMS wants to remove organisational silos. Bidbrain.ai wants to remove manual work. pubX wants to remove layers from adtech.

None of that is evidence that the traditional agency model is disappearing. Large networks retain scale, specialist capability, technology investment and global reach that smaller operators cannot easily replicate. Nor do a handful of launches constitute an independent agency boom. But they do point to where experienced operators believe opportunities are opening as the industry changes.

Technology is making it possible for smaller teams to do work that once required significantly more people. Senior agency talent can build specialist propositions without replicating the infrastructure of the companies they left. And increasingly fragmented client rosters are creating opportunities for businesses that either specialise deeply or help marketers stitch the specialists back together.

As the holding companies get bigger, the businesses emerging around them are betting there is still plenty of value in staying small.