Horizon Media, the OG of indies, in mid-December announced the launch of HorizonOS, what it dubbed an “open operating system” designed to follow a different path than the automation-first strategies which dominate the industry, mainly at the holdcos. It had also built its AI-driven connected marketing platform Blu to be agnostic in the various AI LLMs it uses.
It’s probably the biggest distinction between indies and holdcos that the former tend to remain more “promiscuous” in their adoption of tech — not committing to one provider but leaving their architecture open enough to adapt to changing tech needs. After all, only three years ago it looked as if blockchain and metaverse tech was going to rule the media universe, so much so that Facebook changed its name to Meta.
“When you think about independents, we don’t have a lot of tech debt,” said Scott Shamberg, CEO of Mile Marker, a full-service media shop formed at the outset of 2025. “We haven’t built anything. We’re architecting our solution in a way that is free of walled gardens and very customizable. There’s acceleration in revenue generation there.”
Technology enables independents to deliver the same or similar — sometimes even more agile — results for clients than holdcos, which not only tend to commit deeply to one provider, but also carry a lot of legacy tech baggage from prior tech innovations.
PMG, an independent that now finds itself in competition with holdcos for new business, has emphasized tech innovation as a foundational principle, largely because its founder, George Popstefanov, is kind of a tech nerd himself.
“That’s the way George set this whole organization up to be technology-led, but then empowering humans to do great things and amazing work for our customers,” explained Suraj Gandhi, PMG’s global head of content & studio, who joined in late fall to scale PMG’s content creation capabilities across markets via the agency’s Alli platform. “The core is now technology that’s tying everything together — it’s the connective tissue across our landscape … But having an organization that started technology first, that understands things like data structures, that understands the basics of what modern marketing and technology are, that then allows us to do all this amazing great work.”
Gandhi is one of many holdco refugees (most recently from now-defunct IPG) who went to an indie with the aim of making tech work for the client, rather than making the client use the in-house tech.
“The big accelerator for us has been to where a third of our company was technology five years ago and now, half of every hire we make is an engineer or a product person,” said Popstefanov. “It’ll be even more so as we move forward.”
For independent Crossmedia, the focus on tech is ensuring the entire process works smoothly for clients, from pitching to planning to execution to measurement.
“This industry is still stitched together by Excel, no matter who you talk to. And I think the focus has been on fancy AI point solutions, maybe an audience or content,” explained Kamran Asghar, Crossmedia’s CEO and co-founder. “But I don’t think anybody’s paying enough attention to what it takes to assemble a media plan, to get it out the door, to get your bills paid, to ensure that it’s performing. And so the workflow between planning, buying, campaign, management, reporting needs to be automated, and that’s what we’re putting all our energy towards with, of course, an agentic layer.”
Sometimes tech can even be free, which can help those small independents that maybe can’t even afford to invest in some ad tech. Take, for example, AdsCopilot, which functions as a real-time, AI-powered assistant directly within an agency staffer’s web browser. It’s offered for free by Knower Tech, a company that makes ad-tech for small agencies.
Ultimately the long-tail hope is that adept use of tech will lead to being more competitive with larger shops. So far, it seems to be working for some.
“We’re seeing a 5x [increase in pitching holdco clients] versus last year,” said Popstefanov. “And I’m hoping in Q1 of 2026 there’ll be a lot of conversations announcing some pretty amazing wins, similar to what we’ve done in the past.”
