Bain's analysis of agency consolidation is sharp. Agencies are moving from services to infrastructure, data, workflow, and technology, to evolve beyond hourly and retainer models. The lock-in risks for brands are real.
Their remedy still leans toward a debate between in-house and agency models, evaluated against a more rigorous checklist. Most brands do not want to walk away from their agencies and they do not need to. But choices are unavoidable for those who have not already made them.
The simpler option: brands own orchestration and partner with agencies on strategy, origination, and execution as required. Not a binary choice between building everything in-house or outsourcing everything to a holdco platform. A structural position that preserves agency relationships while removing the dependency that makes those relationships impossible to exit.
Two critical points that the consolidation debate tends to skip. First, if the platform owns the routing logic, the brand does not control how its data works. Ownership is not just the data. It is the orchestration architecture that decides what to do with it and the ability to interpret results from each platform independently.
Second, if agencies are evolving into enterprise infrastructure offerings, brands should expect enterprise commercial terms: transparent pricing, data portability, and genuine interoperability with brand-owned systems. The governance should live in brand systems, not vendor platforms. Agencies bring capability to individual nodes. They should not control the architecture those nodes connect to.
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