The advertising and media investment industry does not suffer from a lack of intelligence or talent. Some of the sharpest strategists, planners, and buyers have longstanding relationships with their clients and respective agencies.
However, despite the depth of experience and expertise, media strategies across brands, categories, and competitors continue to look increasingly interchangeable. That sameness is not accidental, and it is not driven by the market. It is the predictable outcome of an operating model designed to optimize scale, efficiency, and repeatability at the expense of originality and strategic design.
Holding companies did not wake up one day and decide to kill creativity. They slowly engineered it out of the system. As organizations grew larger and more complex, strategy became less about solving specific business problems and more about fitting those problems into preexisting frameworks. What emerged was a version of media planning that is defensible, standardized, and largely indistinguishable from one brand to the next.
Here, we examine how holding company structures systematically squeeze creativity out of media strategy and why that tradeoff matters for your brand, regardless of scale.
When strategy becomes a template
Sit through enough holding company presentations, and patterns become impossible to ignore. Different brands are presented with nearly identical audience definitions, channel mixes, and performance narratives, with only minor adjustments to budget size or category language.
Upper funnel video is positioned as awareness, digital channels are tasked with consideration, and performance media is expected to close the loop. The logic is clean, the story flows, and the plan is almost always safe, but what’s often missing is a point of view.
These strategies rely heavily on historical averages and category norms, which are useful guardrails, but poor sources of competitive advantage. Over time, standards become proxies for insight, and precedent replaces curiosity.
It is also rarely built to win. This approach creates a false sense of confidence because it leans heavily on industry standards and benchmarks. Historical averages are treated as predictive insight, and what worked before is assumed to work again.
The outcome is not a bad strategy. It is a conservative strategy that is designed to avoid scrutiny rather than outperform competitors.
The missed opportunity in CTV
CTV should be one of the most dynamic and flexible channels in modern media. It combines sight, sound, targeting, and context in ways traditional television never could. And yet, in many holding company plans, CTV is treated as little more than linear TV with better targeting. The same partners appear over and over again. Incremental reach is cited as the primary value, regardless of category or objective.
What’s missing is intent.
CTV is often included because it is expected to be included, not because its role has been explicitly designed around a brand’s competitive position or consumer behavior. This is less about a lack of understanding and more about structural constraints, such as referred partner agreements, global buying commitments, and standardized planning frameworks that limit deviation.
Independent agencies, unbound by those structures, tend to approach CTV with more specificity: environment selection, sequencing with linear and digital, creative variation, and outcome-based experimentation beyond reach alone. The difference isn’t access to inventory. It’s freedom of design.
Programmatic on autopilot
Programmatic buying was meant to introduce precision, flexibility, and accountability into digital media. Instead, in many large holding company environments, it has become one of the most automated and least differentiated parts of the plan.
The same DSPs, third-party audiences, and optimization levers are reused because they are scalable, familiar, and operationally efficient. That efficiency matters at scale, but it also creates inertia. Once a system works “well enough,” the incentive to challenge it diminishes.
Independent agencies do not have the luxury of autopilot. Without global frameworks to lean on, they are forced to build programmatic strategies that are accountable to performance. That often means custom audience logic, more aggressive testing, and faster optimization cycles. When a plan underperforms, there is no process to blame, only decisions to fix.
Creativity wasn’t lost, it was squeezed out
Creativity has not disappeared from the media industry. It has been constrained by systems that prioritize efficiency over effectiveness. Holding companies are filled with talented people operating inside structures that discourage deviation and reward consistency. Over time, that consistency begins to look like complacency.
The true cost of scale is strategic, not financial. When every brand follows the same playbook, differentiation becomes impossible, and when differentiation disappears, growth becomes harder, more expensive, and less predictable. This ties original creativity directly to financial performance.
Standardization and mechanization are not neutral choices. They reduce labor costs, increase output, and improve margins. The more a media strategy can be templated, automated, and repeated, the more efficient and profitable it becomes for the holding company.
That’s fine for the holding company, but this type of process is rarely optimized for the brand/client. An original strategy requires people. To create a media plan that is effective, takes time, judgment, and the freedom to design solutions that do not neatly conform to pre-approved frameworks.
From a holding company economics standpoint, that kind of work is expensive and a threat to the bottom line.
Over time, creativity isn’t so much rejected outright as it is engineered out. Decisions are guided toward what is repeatable, defensible, and operationally efficient, while custom thinking is treated as risk, and strategic ambition is quietly traded for consistency.
This is all to say, what is gained in profitability is often lost in competitive advantage.
Why independence matters
This isn’t an argument against technology, data, or automation. Independent agencies have access to the same platforms, datasets, and tools as holding companies. However, the difference is control rather than capability.
In large-scale environments, models are often designed to dictate strategy. Outputs are trusted because they are efficient, repeatable, and aligned with standardized processes. Over time, the model becomes the decision-maker.
Independent agencies use technology differently. Data informs decisions, but it does not replace them. Models suggest what could work, and people determine what should work based on a brand’s category dynamics, competitive position, and growth objectives.
Independent agencies are not inherently better because they are smaller. They are more impactful to brands because they are designed to make choices, not replicate them. They are built to question assumptions, respond quickly, and construct strategies around the specific realities of each client’s business, not around what scales most easily.
In a media landscape defined by fragmentation and competition, sameness is the riskiest strategy of all. Independence isn’t so much a philosophy as it is a strategic advantage.
To learn how you can take your media strategy to the next level, contact us.