“Another one?”
“Why did they merge?"
“Again?”
That’s the quiet refrain echoing through boardrooms and LinkedIn feeds as headline after headline announces another marketing agency consolidation.
The trend started with a bang at the end of last year when Omnicom announced its agreement to acquire IPG. (That acquisition, if approved, would create the largest agency holding company in history.)
And it hasn’t stopped:
The Trade Desk announced it would acquire data company Sincera in January.
Publicis announced plans to acquire the Brazilian influencer marketing company BR Media Group in February.
Barkley and OKRP merged in March, forming one of the largest independent agencies in the United States.
Genesis Advertising, known for its creative capabilities, and Puretech Digital merged to form the Genesis Group in May.
Zoom out, and the trend gets even more seismic.
These mergers aren’t just about growth. A new ambition is emerging: to become a “full stack” marketing machine where creative, media, data, and operations (all the disciplines of modern marketing) are fused into one system.
But are they really wiring everything together?
Agency consolidation redux
This isn’t the first time agencies have chased integration through consolidation.
Back in the 1980s, large agencies launched an aggressive acquisition spree, bundling creative and media buying into what they called “full-service agencies.” The promise was simplicity: one roof, one budget, one bill. Creative was subsidized by media commissions — a cost center justified by the reach it helped achieve.
That was the birth of the modern holding companies you see today. But that model couldn’t survive the transition to digital.
As channels exploded and complexity surged, the functions separated again. Media buying went one way, creative another.
However, full-service agencies succeeded in making creativity seem cheap, portraying it as mere fodder for the mass television, radio, print, and new online machine. Clients actually paid, they were told, for the smart distribution of that creative across increasingly fragmented channels.
Agencies even gave the approach a name to make it sound smart: working vs. non-working media.
The goal: Max out your working media spend (meaning placements), not non-working media (ideas).
The flex: Spend 80% of the budget on distribution and call it efficient.
The result? Creative became a standalone service, billed separately and stripped of context.
Different agencies and teams started owning various pieces of the journey. Customer experiences became disjointed. Messaging lost coherence.
Instead of brand stewards, agencies became functional specialists fighting over budget lines rather than solving for outcomes.
And now, the same mistake is about to happen again.
In the “full stack marketing” era, though, agencies aren’t separating creative and media. They’re separating creative and operations.
But that rush to rewire everything for AI, automation, and real-time data activation threatens to sever the soul from the system. (Again.)
Risking the creative heart of marketing
In the generative AI era, creative production no longer seems like a bottleneck. Organizations believe ideas can be cloned, spun, reworded, and remixed in seconds. Content is abundant.
But connection and differentiation are the new scarcity.
The competitive edge now lives in the wiring — in how tightly a creative idea is fused to the data it generates as it’s distributed through media and tracked through closed-loop measurement.
That wiring lives in the operations layer. That’s where modern marketing agility is born, compliance is managed, and performance is tracked. It’s where relationships are built at scale.
And that’s what today’s mergers are about — not just combining teams but fusing stacks and rewiring creative into marketing’s value.
At least, that’s what the press releases say. But are they doing it?
The Barkley and OKRP announcement from March says the merger “sets the stage for continued investment to expand and strengthen our capabilities in all business areas, including media, data, analytics, performance marketing, and technology.”
Et voilà! Full stack marketing!
But whether creativity really gets wired in remains to be seen. If not, the industry will end up right back where it was decades ago.
Agencies will start decoupling the creative process, reducing creation to just another production step engineered for operational efficiency.
The likely outcome? Beautiful marketing machines that can’t move hearts.
Internal teams as marketing’s bellwether
I see in-house marketing teams chasing the same full-stack ambition. They’re trying to build end-to-end systems that integrate creative, data, and operations.
But here’s the twist. Unlike agencies that might decouple creativity from the process, in-house teams are actively doing it. Instead of reinforcing their internal creative muscle, many are cutting brand and content roles while doubling or tripling down on ops and tech.
Last week, I heard from marketers at two major companies: a consumer-packaged goods brand and a B2B tech firm. Both shared that their organizations were actively disbanding their in-house content and creative teams, redirecting investment toward digital, AI, and automation.
One said their leaders called the approach an “AI-first initiative.”
That term may sound visionary — until you realize they cut the people who knew how to tell the story.
Why? Because of the dangerous misconception that in a world of infinite production, creativity is cheap and easy, and the only constraint is speed.
That’s like replacing your pit crew with an analytics dashboard and wondering why the car won’t move.
By pulling creativity out of the system, these teams are building marketing engines that look sleek but stall the moment real differentiation is needed.
Instead of crafting meaningful stories, they’re sprinting through dashboards, duct-taping distribution workflows, and reacting to KPIs no one ever had time to align on.
They’re moving fast. They’re breaking things. And yet they’re stuck wondering why they can’t keep up.
That’s the irony: The ability to move fast at scale doesn’t come from skipping creative. It comes from deeply integrating it.
When you slow down at the start (during creative ideation), taking the time to wire the story into the system, you build a foundation that accelerates everything else. Distribution flows smoothly. Measurement gets smarter. Optimization compounds.
Operational sophistication doesn’t replace creativity. It unlocks it. Not content for content’s sake but storytelling that adapts, resonates, and returns insight.
Because when marketing works, it doesn’t just move fast. It moves right.
Marketing is the whole restaurant, not one dish
Imagine modern marketing as a restaurant.
Back in the day, the head chef (the creative director) ruled everything. They invented the signature dish, set the tone, and made sure you felt something with every bite.
They had taste. They had vision. And yes, they often had a complicated relationship with collaboration. But they were the differentiator.
For a long time, that was enough.
But great restaurants these days don’t just have chefs. They have sous-chefs adapting recipes for allergies and formats. They have servers choreographing timing and experience. And they have kitchen operations keeping the ovens hot, the menus current, and the compliance codes intact.
Marketing is no different.
Today’s winners aren’t just coming up with the big idea. They’re adapting it for TikTok, tuning it for SEO, feeding it into SKU feeds, plugging it into CRM, and measuring lift before dessert hits the table.
The genius is no longer in the concept — it’s in how the concept moves and scales.
Here’s the kicker. When your slow-cooked idea is fully wired into your stack — when creative, data, and delivery are in sync — you unlock the freedom to slow down.
Not because you’re behind. But because your team finally knows how fast is too fast.
You can pause, zoom in, and ask, “Is this the right idea, for the right moment, for the right customer?”
That pause isn’t inefficiency. It’s strategy. It’s the moment where real value gets built.
How to spot a real full-stack player
Not every organization is making this mistake. There are agencies, boutiques, and in-house teams that get it.
As you look at new agencies or think about how to restructure your own team, you’ll know you’re on the right track when:
The big idea, the media strategy, the data model, and the measurement plan all sit on the same page and in the same room.
Creative and marketing ops aren’t tossing batons in a relay race; they’re co-creating from the first draft.
The brief doesn’t get passed down the funnel. It gets built by the whole team and infused into the entire process.
The bragging (or complaining) doesn’t mention being faster. It mentions being clearer.
Want to test the wiring? Ask these questions:
Who’s in the room when the brief lands?
How fast can you go from idea to live test?
Where do you slow down and why?”
If the answers are vague, siloed, or delivered in deck-speak, you’re looking at a “Frankenstack.” It's a patchwork, not a full-stack approach.
So the next time someone forwards you another press release — another merger, another stack integration, another “AI-first powered ambition” — ask the only question that matters:
Is their stack full … or just full of it?
It’s easy to wire systems. It’s harder to wire purpose.
But that’s the difference between a full stack and a truly integrated one. Between content that fills space and stories that move people. Because “full stack” without soul isn’t full at all.
It’s your story. Tell it well.
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