You Should Watch These Four New Entrants To the Ad Agency Holding Company Space

Here is a post about some companies that I’m following these days ever since I left Mozilla. We talk a lot about the largest marketing services players such as WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, and IPG but there is a whole new crop of emerging platforms arriving on the scene.

If you are into advertising and marketing, then this list should be completely relevant. If you are a Wall Street analyst and you’re covering the publicly traded advertising holding companies, this should be relevant as well.

This list is in no particular order.

You & Mr. Jones: Created by the former CEO of Havas, David Jones. Making acquisitions around the marketing and advertising space where technology and advertising are merging.

Lake Capital: The capital behind Engine Group, Deep Focus and Trailer Park amongst others. Doing a roll-up of marketing and advertising services. Run by Terry Graunke.

Stagwell Group: Run by former WPP and Microsoft exec, Mark Penn. Looking to acquire marketing and communications companies into a portfolio of services.

Project Worldwide: Founded in 2010, building a range of wholly owned complementary marketing and advertising services agencies.

This list is not exhaustive of everyone in the marketing landscape but I wanted to highlight the new entrants to the “holding company” arena. I am working on something in this space as well, to be released soon.

I believe that the modern chief marketing officer needs modern thinking and tools serviced from a platform which does not suffer innovators dilemma.