You're Building on a System That No Longer Builds You

The independent creative agency model has had a remarkable decade. Mischief, Good People Basically, Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, Akcelo, Droga5 before Accenture acquired it. These names are doing some of the most interesting work in the industry. They are winning the awards that holding companies used to dominate. They are attracting the talent that used to be locked into network structures. They are setting the creative agenda.

There is a story that gets told about this. The story is that independents are the future because the old model is broken, that talent will follow the work, that the indie movement represents a structural correction to decades of holding company dominance.

There is something to that story. But it is missing a piece.

Every founder named above came through a holding company or established agency system before they left to build something independent. Greg Hahn was Creative Vice Chairman of BBDO Worldwide for fifteen years before founding Mischief in 2020. Alvin Lim built his career through agency systems across Asia before launching Good People Basically. David Droga established his reputation as ECD at Saatchi and Saatchi Singapore before founding Droga5. He served as CEO of Accenture Song until September 2025, when he stepped down to become Vice Chair of Accenture. Micah Walker spent five years at Wieden and Kennedy Portland before launching Bear Meets Eagle on Fire. Aden Hepburn was co-CEO of VMLY&R before co-founding Akcelo.

This is not coincidence. It is the structure of the industry as it has worked for the past several decades. Holding companies and large agencies invested systematically in creative training and development. They identified talent, mentored it, paid for it to win Cannes Lions, gave it the credibility and craft that eventually made it possible for that talent to leave and build something independent.

The indie wave of the past decade is not a break from the holding company system. It is a product of it.

That is worth sitting with for a moment, because it has implications for what comes next.

The Pipeline That Built You Has Closed

The systematic training infrastructure that produced this generation of indie founders has contracted significantly. The major holding companies have largely abandoned the kind of investment in creative development that was standard practice through the early twenty-tens. The portfolio schools that fed the system, Miami Ad School, Watford, Creative Circus, have shrunk. The agency-funded training programmes that developed senior creative talent have largely disappeared or contracted into smaller, more targeted alternatives.

Junior creative roles across the industry are at their lowest levels since 2020. Entry-level hiring dropped seven percent year-on-year between 2024 and 2025. The apprentice system that moved creatives from junior to mid-level to senior is no longer functioning at the scale required to produce the next generation of indie founders.

This matters because the indie agency model, as it currently exists, is not a self-replicating ecosystem. It depends on a pipeline being filled elsewhere. Indies hire experienced creatives, build great work, scale with lean operations, and avoid the overhead that made holding company training possible in the first place. The economics of an independent agency do not allow for the kind of systematic junior development that used to be standard practice. This is not a moral failing. It is a structural reality of the model.

But it raises a question that has not yet been seriously addressed in the indie conversation: where will the next generation of indie founders come from?

The answer, currently, is nowhere obvious. The talent pipeline that produced you is contracting. The brands building in-house creative capability are not training systematically either. The technology companies are actively building tools designed to substitute for trained creative judgement rather than develop it.

In ten years, the people with the craft, judgement, and credibility to found agencies like Mischief or Good People Basically may simply not exist in the numbers required.

The Creator Economy Is Where Talent Has Already Moved

Part of the answer is that creative talent development has migrated entirely. The creator economy is now where young creative talent is being developed. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Substack, these are the new portfolio schools. Direct audience feedback has replaced the senior creative mentor. Personal brand building has replaced the apprenticeship at a holding company.

This is not a fashionable observation. It is a structural one. The young creative who would have applied for an internship at an agency a decade ago is now building an audience independently, monetising their work directly, and developing creative judgement through metrics and engagement rather than through the slow accretion of agency experience.

For independent agency founders, this presents a problem that has not yet been fully surfaced. The talent you might want to hire in five years is being trained in a parallel ecosystem with different incentives, different feedback loops, and different expectations. The creator with a million followers on YouTube does not need your indie agency to legitimise their work. They have their own audience. They have their own revenue. They have their own platform.

Your value proposition to them is not obvious.

The Structural Question

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable, because it is not just a question of how indies adapt to a contracting talent pool. It is a question about whether the indie agency model itself, as currently structured, has a sustainable future.

The indie wave was built on talent developed by holding companies. That source is contracting. The creator economy is producing a different kind of talent that does not necessarily need agency structures at all. The technology companies are explicitly building tools designed to commoditise the creative craft that indie agencies sell. The brands that are your clients are increasingly capable of producing creative work in-house.

None of these forces, individually, threatens the indie agency model. Together, they reshape the market in which indies operate, and they raise the question of whether the model that worked for the past decade will work for the next one.

There is an interesting parallel here, though. The creator economy has a structural advantage that advertising creatives never had. Creators have audiences. They have platforms. They have direct revenue relationships with brands. They have leverage that traditional creatives, locked inside holding company structures, never possessed.

Advertising's mistake, across decades, was building creative training inside institutions that could dismantle it whenever cost pressure hit, without any collective protection for the craft itself. There was no union. No guild. No standards body with enforcement power. SAG-AFTRA exists for actors. The Writers Guild exists for screenwriters. Advertising creatives have nothing equivalent.

The creator economy has a chance to do something different. To build collective structures from the ground up. To establish standards, training pathways, and protections before they are absorbed or commoditised. Whether they will is an open question. But the window of opportunity exists in a way it never did for advertising.

For indie agency founders, this raises a strategic question. The talent that built your agencies came from a system that no longer functions. The talent that will replace you, if it exists at all, may emerge from an entirely different economy with entirely different rules. Your relationship to that economy, whether you partner with it, integrate with it, or compete with it, will likely define what the indie agency model looks like in five to ten years.

This is not a problem with a clean solution. But it is a problem that benefits from being named.

Read the full report, The Talent Pipeline Myth: The Unmeasured Cost of Abandoning Creative Training, which examines the infrastructure that has contracted, the data behind the migration, and the structural questions facing the industry over the next decade.