Everything is changing. That's the good news.

If you're a senior marketer at a mid-to-large brand right now, the chances are you're managing more complexity than at any point in the past decade. Budgets are under pressure from tariff-driven cost inflation. Your team is being asked to adopt AI tools that didn't exist 18 months ago. The channels your customers use are fragmenting faster than your media plans can keep pace with. And the agencies and partners you rely on are going through their own version of upheaval.

It's a lot. And the industry commentary is not helping. Open the trade press and the dominant mood is anxiety: holding company restructures, mass redundancies, calls for the 'complete redefinition' of how agencies work. At a recent gathering of some of the industry's leading strategists from around the world, the word used most was chaos.

I'd like to offer a different reading of the same facts. Because if you step back from the noise, what's actually happening in the marketing industry is not decline. It's reconfiguration. And for marketers who are willing to think differently about how they find and work with creative partners, this is one of the most exciting moments in years.

The pressures are real, and they're connected

A few things are happening simultaneously that are worth understanding together, because they reinforce each other.

First, the tariff squeeze. The IAB found that 94% of US advertisers are concerned about the impact of tariffs on their ad budgets, with 60% expecting cuts of between 6% and 10% on specific channels. That anxiety is feeding directly into how brands choose their agency partners: shorter planning cycles, tighter briefs, a gravitational pull toward the familiar. When the outlook is uncertain, procurement reaches for the names it knows.

Second, AI. Gartner reports that 81% of marketing technology leaders are either piloting or have deployed AI agents. This is moving faster than most organisational structures can accommodate, and CMOs are being asked to lead transformations while their teams are still learning the tools. At SXSW this week, where AI was the single most popular topic in session submissions and the Brand and Marketing Track runs all seven days, the conversation among senior marketers from the likes of Microsoft, Diageo and Samsung has centred on the same question: how do you build a human strategy around technology that is arriving faster than your organisation can absorb it?

Third, and perhaps most importantly, the confidence gap. Overall marketing budgets are actually trending upward in 2026, with more than half of senior marketers expecting a rise in spend according to NIQ's CMO Outlook. But confidence in how to deploy that spend is falling. PwC found that 63% of CMOs say they're missing opportunities because they cannot make decisions fast enough. So the problem is not a lack of resource. It is a lack of clarity about where to put it. That is a genuinely difficult position to be in, and it goes some way toward explaining why the mood feels so heavy.

These three forces, budget anxiety, technological disruption and decision-making paralysis, are connected. They feed each other. And if you're a marketer, you could be forgiven for thinking the entire industry is in retreat.

But that feeling is partly borrowed. Much of the anxiety in the air right now originates not from the marketing world but from the agency world, specifically from the holding companies that dominate the trade press. Their struggles are real, but they are not your struggles. And the picture they paint of the landscape is incomplete.

There is more out there than you're being shown

The holding companies - WPP, Publicis, Omnicom, Havas and Dentsu - account for a tiny fraction of the agencies that actually exist. Yet almost all of the industry's commentary, events, awards machinery and trade coverage is oriented around them. When a holding company announces redundancies, the entire sector treats it as a bellwether.

And because the holding companies are under acute pressure right now, from shareholders, from AI disruption, from clients demanding more for less, the picture they paint of the agency landscape is one of contraction and crisis. Some are actively pitching for smaller accounts and projects they would not have pursued two years ago, moving into territory traditionally served by independents as they look for new sources of growth.

That's their story. It is not the whole story.

Because beyond the holding companies, there is a vast, thriving creative landscape that rarely gets the same coverage. Independent agencies, studios, consultancies and collectives that make up the overwhelming majority of the industry. This is where some of the most interesting work, the most experienced talent and the most adaptive business models are to be found.

Over the past decade, a significant migration has taken place. Many of the most commercially astute, creatively ambitious people in the industry have moved from big networks to independents. They did so to build the kind of companies they wanted to work in: leaner, closer to the work, closer to clients, faster to move. That talent base is now substantial, and it's producing work that stands up against anything coming out of the major groups.

Why this matters for marketers right now

If you're a marketer navigating the pressures described above, the independent sector offers practical advantages worth considering seriously.

On budgets: independent agencies have always operated with lower overheads and leaner structures. You are not paying for a global network you do not need. That efficiency has been a feature of the independent model for years, and it becomes particularly valuable when every pound of marketing spend is under scrutiny.

On AI: smaller structures tend to adopt new technology faster because there is less legacy to work around. There are no internal turf wars over which division owns the AI capability, no six-month integration roadmap, no need to protect headcount-based billing models. Independents are integrating AI into their workflows now, at speed, because their structures allow it.

On decision-making: the relationship between a brand and an independent agency is typically closer, with fewer layers and shorter feedback loops. If the confidence gap is partly a navigation problem, as I believe it is, then working with partners who offer direct access to senior thinking, not layers of account management, is part of the answer.

And on range: the independent sector's diversity goes well beyond discipline. Yes, you can find strategists, creatives, media specialists, production companies and technologists. But the variety runs deeper than that. There are three-person collectives that embed in your team and 200-person agencies with global reach. Founder-led shops with deep category expertise and consultancies that build in-house capability. Agencies built around flexible project models and others that work best on long-term retainer. The founding teams behind them come from backgrounds as varied as the work they produce. The independent landscape is not a single alternative to a holding company. It is an entire ecosystem, rich enough to match whatever a brand actually needs, at whatever scale it needs it.

A new creative order

I spend most of my working life talking to people on both sides of this equation: marketers trying to find the right partners, and independent agencies trying to reach the right clients. The pattern I see, consistently, is one of latent demand meeting invisible supply. The brands are looking. The capability is there. The two just struggle to find each other, because the industry's infrastructure was built around a different model.

That is why I started Department of Creative Affairs. And it is why, across more than 40 conversations with marketers, agency leaders and industry figures over the past two months, the same theme keeps surfacing: the old industry map no longer matches the territory. The creative landscape has changed fundamentally, and the way brands find and work with partners needs to change with it.

The industry press has framed 2026 as a year of crisis. I'd argue it's a year of reconfiguration. The forces bearing down on marketers are real and significant. But the responses available to them are broader, richer and more accessible than the prevailing narrative suggests. There is a new creative order out there: brilliant people, brilliant companies, brilliant work, in every shape and size. The task now is simply to make it easier to find.

Looking for a new agency? DCA cuts through the noise to connect brands with agencies that fit

• We cover all types of projects and disciplines, from strategy and creative to performance and tech.
• Our editorial team vets every agency, so you skip the pitch theatre and get straight to capable partners.
• We offer consultancy, pitch management, or a complimentary shortlisting service if that's all you need. Submit a brief today

Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.

‍