Jeremy Barnett is a 3x founder and the CEO and Co-founder of RAD Intel.
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For decades, holding companies have created value in the marketing industry by bringing agencies, consultancies and specialist firms under a shared structure. Scale made coordination possible. The larger the network became, the easier it was to connect talent, deploy resources and serve global clients.
Many of the most successful marketing organizations in the world were built on that model. It still works, but the technologies that shaped it are starting to change.
Across the industry, a new pattern is emerging. The next generation of holding companies looks less like a collection of agencies and more like a platform that coordinates how those agencies operate together.
You can already see the shift in how the largest groups are reorganizing. WPP has invested heavily in WPP Open and Open Pro, AI-enabled systems that tens of thousands of people across the network now use to plan and execute campaigns on shared infrastructure. Omnicom’s Omni platform operates on a unified data and identity layer designed to surface insights and guide decisions across brands, channels and regions.
These initiatives are not just about speed or efficiency. They reflect a deeper change in how coordination happens inside complex organizations. For most of the last century, scale came from aggregation. Holding companies created value by assembling networks of firms and managing the relationships between them.
AI introduces a different layer to that model. Software can now coordinate workflows that once required multiple management layers. Data can move across teams in real time. Capabilities that previously required several firms to stitch together can increasingly be connected through shared platforms.
None of this makes holding companies less important. If anything, it makes the structure more strategic. But it does change how value is created.
You can see similar shifts in other industries. Enterprise software platforms coordinate entire ecosystems of partners through shared data and workflow systems. Technology-enabled healthcare platforms connect physician practices on common operating layers while care remains local. Marketing networks are beginning to move in the same direction.
Instead of simply aggregating companies, the strongest structures are increasingly defined by the systems that allow those companies to operate together. The advantage comes from orchestration.
In conversations with agency and brand leaders, the questions have started to change. It’s less about which capabilities sit inside the network and more about how effectively those capabilities connect. Boards and executive teams are looking not only at scale but at how platforms route work, share data and allocate talent across organizations.
As AI becomes embedded in daily operations, new indicators of strength are emerging. Platform adoption across the network. Data coverage and quality. The depth of AI-assisted workflows in everyday execution.
Over time, these measures will sit alongside traditional metrics of scale as signals of how well a network operates as a system.
I predict that holding companies will remain central to the marketing ecosystem, but they will be valued less for the number of agencies they aggregate and more for the operating systems that help those agencies work as a single, adaptive platform.
In a world where software can coordinate complex workflows at scale, the next generation of holding companies will look increasingly like AI-enabled operating systems. That evolution is already underway.
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