Collapse of the holding company model and the rise of workflow-designed systems

The traditional agency holding company model is unravelling, and CMOs who cling to it will be left running 2020 problems with 2030 pressure.

We can see the cracks everywhere. Collapsing valuations. Forced mergers. Networks downgrading forecasts and quietly cutting muscle as well as fat. This is not a blip in the cycle. It is a structural break in how marketing and communications value is created, delivered and bought.

For decades, holding companies monetised scale, labour and complexity. Fees were built around time, headcount and opaque delivery models. Complexity was good for business. Today’s CEOs and CMOs want the opposite. They want transparency, speed and a clear line between investment, activity and impact. They want orchestration, not layers.

At the same time, the value chain is polarising. On one side, large volumes of execution are being absorbed by AI and in-housing. On the other, there is growing demand for sharper strategy, braver creativity and category-defining ideas. Agencies attempting to sit across every layer, from decks to delivery to data, priced primarily on hours, are the most exposed.

This is where many independent agencies, including my own, have historically sat: the squeezed middle. Too small to compete on scale, and constrained by delivery models built for a different era. What is changing now is not the category as a whole, but a conscious decision by Boldspace to fundamentally redesign how marketing work — and collaboration across teams and agency partners — is structured.

The real innovation is not a new type of agency, but a new way of designing how marketing work flows. Workflow design shifts the question from who does the work to how intelligence, decisions and creativity move through an organisation. When workflows are deliberately designed, rather than inherited from legacy structures, technology can amplify human value instead of fragmenting it. This is where the next generation of marketing models will be won.

CMOs and communications leaders experience this shift as real pressure. They are asked to reduce cost, rebalance dependence on labour-heavy retainers, and present a credible, responsible AI roadmap to the board, all while protecting brand integrity and team health. These are complex, high-stakes decisions, and most leaders are navigating them thoughtfully and deliberately.

That is the gap. Marketing does not need another tool added to an already complex stack. It needs a central intelligence layer that brings strategy, creativity, data and execution into a coherent flow, and then places people back where they add the most value.

This is the model we are building with Boldstream: a brand-first, secure, multi-LLM AI platform created specifically for modern marketing and communications teams. AI is the engine; humans are the drivers. The platform absorbs repeatable work, connects paid, owned, earned and trend data in one place, and gives strategists and creatives the intelligence and space to solve harder problems.

Crucially, it changes ownership by allowing organisations to own their intelligence, rather than fragmenting it across multiple partners and platforms. Brand data, tone, compliance and governance live inside a secure, brand-owned environment. Multi-LLM routing and 150+ specialist agents are there to deepen thinking, stress-test decisions and coach teams as they work – not to replace them.

For a 50-person agency like Boldspace, this is not a side project; it is a complete rewiring. A pure time-and-materials model will increasingly look fragile next to AI-augmented, workflow-designed alternatives. Our new model reframes where human value sits and anchors commercial relationships around outcomes, learning and long-term capability, rather than hours sold.

The cultural and ethical dimension matters just as much. Most AI narratives in our industry swing between fear and hype. Clients are rightly cautious. Any new model has to demonstrate stronger governance, healthier teams and real-world responsibility, not just higher output. That is why principles such as brand-owned intelligence, environmental accountability and a product culture designed to reduce burnout (not simply increase volume) are built in from the start.

Boldspace is not defending the old agency model; we are building what comes next. A model that moves beyond the failing holding company playbook and gives leaders a credible, future-proof way to redesign how marketing actually works. Automation is applied to the work that should disappear, not the work that defines careers.

For CMOs, this is ultimately a decision about operating models, not suppliers. Do you continue patching a structure built for a different era, or invest in a modern system that provides orchestration, guidance, intelligence and control over your own data, while elevating your people into the questions only they can answer?

Marketing has always been about imagination, judgement and courage. That will not change. What is changing, quickly, is the structure those qualities sit inside.

The leaders who move first to brand-owned, AI-native, workflow-designed systems will not just reduce cost or tick an AI box; they will build the blueprint others are trying to follow five years from now.

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