Alliances instead of acquisitions.
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The setup
The standard advice given to an independent agency that wants to get bigger has two options in it. Build the missing capability, which takes years and money you don't have. Or sell to someone who already has it, which ends the thing you built.
Kyle O'Brien opened this session by rejecting the frame: "The future of scale isn't acquisition; it's alliance."
That is easy to say from a stage. What made the next 40 minutes useful is that the four people on it were not describing a theory. They were describing signed agreements, split scopes, back-channel texts during client blowups, and pitches they won and lost as coalitions. They also disagreed with each other on the central mechanic, which is where the value is.
The most honest thing said in the first two minutes came from Ashley Walters, who owns a 70-person shop in Cincinnati and spent years believing that needing a partner was evidence of failure.
"In the early days we were afraid to do it. We were afraid it meant we were failing. We were afraid clients wouldn't trust us. Quite honestly, we needed the money, so we would say yes to things that we probably shouldn't have."
Every principal who has ever padded a capabilities deck knows that sentence from the inside. The session is about what replaced it.
Who was on stage, and why they're worth listening to
Part One — Partnership as architecture, not as rescue
The distinction that runs through the whole session is between agencies that partner when they get caught out, and agencies that were built to partner from the first day.
Alison is the clearest case of the second. Eden launched as Eden Collective, and the word was load-bearing.
"What the advertising industry is today is a collection of dozens of micro subdisciplines, and I think people are fooling themselves if they think that a single agency can be the best at every one of those disciplines."
The operating rule she derived from that is a hiring and roadmap constraint, not a positioning line:
"I do not ever want to have a capability at Eden that we cannot deliver at the same level of excellence in which we do our core capability."
Read that as a governance policy and it becomes a real thing you can enforce. It means new-service decisions get evaluated against your best existing service, not against the revenue opportunity. Most agencies have never written that test down, which is why their capabilities pages sprawl.
Kai's route in was different, and less polite about the industry. Valerie's first meaningful revenue came from white labeling, and she is direct about why she was comfortable with it.
"Coming from larger agencies and larger holding companies, that to me was the secret sauce that I always saw happening on the resourcing side, on the project management, production, resourcing side, that no one talked about, but everyone did."
Her point is that the practice is already ubiquitous and the only unusual thing is naming it. That is Valerie's stated differentiator: "We like to talk about things nobody likes to admit out loud. We're open books."
The motive was not strategic elegance. It was payroll, and she said so.
"We got mortgages in the state of New York, and taxes are no joke. So we need to pay bills."
The second motive is the one worth stealing. A three-year-old agency has no way to observe how the current market operates. Partnering with an agency already winning is a way to buy that observation. Kai's framing was that the structure of the industry in 2024 looked nothing like it did when she entered it, and no amount of reading closes that gap.
Shannon supplied the taxonomy that the rest of the conversation used. White labeling is not one thing.
"There's an interesting conversation between true white labeling, where no one ever knows you're working behind the scenes, and having a lead agency own the relationship but you still get the credit for your work. That's an interesting conversation that smaller agencies go through."
That middle position — lead agency owns the client, sub gets public credit — is the one most independents have never negotiated for, because they assume the choice is binary. It is the single most portable idea in the session.
Shannon also named the version of this that costs independents real money, and she is not neutral about it.
"One of the challenges that we have faced working with bigger agencies is when they purport to have the experiential capability and win pitches that our agency might otherwise win, but they don't know how to produce those things without us."
VERB loses the pitch, then gets hired to build the thing the winner promised. That is the alliance economy running in the direction that benefits the large agency, and it is the baseline the whole session is arguing against.
Part Two — House of Melo, and the mechanics nobody publishes
The Valerie–VERB collaboration on House of Melo is the session's worked example, and it is worth the detail because it shows two independents holding a civic-scale project without a holding company underneath them.
Carmelo Anthony was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame and wanted something specific to Baltimore, in partnership with the city and the state of Maryland. Anthony's team came to Valerie. Valerie brought cultural strategy and was candid about its limits — Kai's line was that they are not from the city but can figure out how to make it feel like it is from the city. Production and brand experience went to VERB.
What they built was a takeover of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Artifacts scouted from his mother's house, from Syracuse superfans, from his high school coach's attic and storage units. The draft-night suit. In the periodical section, more than 50 magazine covers he had appeared on. In the media and entertainment section, a soundtrack of his life that he curated himself. A juxtaposition running from basketball to the boardroom.
Shannon's assessment of why it held together is not about the creative:
"That was a really great partnership for us because we had already worked together and had a really great synergy. But being able to bring that experience to life and also being very clear about swim lanes — that communication helped make that program so successful."
Here is the part that does not appear in case studies. Kai's account of how two agencies manage a client relationship they jointly own is the most operationally specific passage in the transcript.
"We show a united front up front, but I'm texting you on the back. Making sure that before we answer any email, present to the client, show up in front of the client, that we are aware of what the energy is, what we're going to do to bring it to a good temperature where everyone feels good, and here are the talking points."
Shannon named the same practice independently and treated it as the answer to friction: "the back-channel side text." Neither of them is describing a workaround. They are describing the actual governance layer of a two-agency team, and the fact that it lives in a text thread rather than a document is why nobody teaches it.
On accountability, the panel converged. When work goes wrong, the lead agency takes the call. On House of Melo, Valerie and VERB went to the client as dual lead agencies, which meant the back channel had to decide whose scope a given problem sat in before anyone replied. Kai's word for what follows: "You become that delivering message agency, the messenger, who sometimes gets shot."
Ashley's version is blunter about money.
"We're the first line of defense. The business leader is usually the one taking that phone call. We've had some partnerships that haven't been successful as well, particularly on the media side. When you're handing over or trusting other companies with large sums of money, mistakes can happen, and it's absolutely on us to make it right."
Alison added the reciprocal obligation, and it is the one that makes the model repeatable rather than extractive.
"When another agency puts their trust in us, they absolutely take the bullet. Rachel from Corner Table took the bullet when it was an integrated thing. However, we feel a level of accountability to our partners that they can feel from us. Even though they're the ones in the room taking the bullet, we are feeling their pain."
On money, there is no single model, and the panel said so. Kai works brief to brief and partner to partner. Her governing principle is a risk-management one:
"I have crazy anxiety, so if things go south, the last thing I want somebody to say is, 'And I'm not even making that much money on this.'"
The rule that follows: scope your partner at what it costs them to do the work well, build that into your number, and stop negotiating. "You get what you deserve. We're putting forward what we deserve, and that's the budget. The budget is the budget."
Eden's arrangement with Curiosity is a subcontractor model, as was its earlier work with Corner Table Creative. But Alison drew a hard line in the other direction: when Eden operates as the collective on media, it never subcontracts underneath itself. Direct client relationships only, because a media strategy agency that disintermediates relationships cannot credibly claim transparency.
Shannon's shop is now moving into government work, where prime and sub roles are defined by procurement rules rather than negotiation. Her point about fixed-budget work applies well beyond government: when the number is set, the conversation stops being "this is what we charge" and becomes an allocation problem between two teams.
The most transferable financial detail came from Ashley, and it is a document most alliances never create.
"Pitching costs a lot of money. It sucks. We do need to do it because that's a big way we're generating new revenue. But we don't want to abuse the relationship either, and just keep bringing them in all the time and using all of their resources. So we have a written understanding of how much time and energy we're going to pour into each other on pitches."
A written cap on unpaid pitch labor between partners. That is the artifact that keeps an alliance from quietly becoming a favor economy, and it is why Curiosity and Eden have been able to run four or five pitches together instead of one.
The reason Eden agreed to an always-on arrangement despite thin downstream revenue is instructive. Alison's account: bringing analytics into a creative pitch upgrades the pitch even when there is no media assignment attached, and Curiosity chose to pay for that rather than take it for free. She called it "a situation of mutual respect, which is unique."
Ashley's before-and-after is the proof it worked.
"Before working with Eden, analytics was the first thing to get cut out of our pitches. We'd get to the end of time and it's like, oh God, guys, hurry up, we're going to totally miss analytics. We're now the reverse. They're one of the first people to talk."
That reordering is the whole argument for alliances in one operational change. A capability Curiosity could not build was not merely acquired. It moved to the front of the pitch and changed how the agency talks to clients about business problems.
And it won them things. Ashley on why a CMO picked a Curiosity–Eden coalition over a holding company with decades of category experience:
"She said to me, 'We hired you because the other agency, they felt like our past. You feel like our future.'"
The uncomfortable truth
The panel does not agree about white labeling, and the disagreement is not a matter of taste.
Kai and Shannon both built revenue on it. Alison refuses it.
Eden's stated reason is structural. The agency is a reverse pyramid — roughly three quarters of the team have 15 or 20-plus years of experience, most of it from top holding companies. Put those people in a client room under someone else's badge and the client looks them up before the meeting ends. Her word for that: "that would be an artifice."
So one model says white labeling is how a new agency buys market intelligence and pays its mortgages. The other says it is structurally unavailable to any agency whose product is named senior people. Both are correct for the agency saying them, and the variable is not ethics. It is whether your value is the work or the people. If it is the people, white labeling is not a strategy you rejected. It is a strategy that cannot function for you.
The second uncomfortable finding is about who breaks these partnerships. It is not holding companies. Alison's failed alliances were with other independents.
"We have had unsuccessful partnerships, frankly, with other media agencies who have us come in to try to win the strategy part and then sort of have axed us out. We're not your strategy-for-hire team."
Her diagnosis of the mechanism is the most useful sentence in the session, and it names something most agencies will recognize in themselves:
"One of the big issues we've had when it has failed is because the other agency has lacked intellectual humility — knowing what you don't know and admitting it out loud. If you are trying to pretend to your own team, to appease them, that you're great at a thing that you just had to bring us in for, that is going to make for a toxic relationship."
The failure point is not the client and not the contract. It is an agency leader who cannot tell their own staff why a partner is in the room. That is an internal-communications failure that destroys external partnerships, and there is no clause you can write that prevents it.
The third is the one nobody in this business says on a stage. Ashley named the trap in vetting new business as a small shop:
"You don't want to get yourself in a situation where they already have an idea of what they want, and you're just kind of the token small new shop because they want to see how you think. That's what you really have to suss out."
Kai did not soften it: "We've been in spaces where we were the token shop. If those are the pants we're wearing today, those are the pants. Just be open about that."
That exchange is the honest floor under the entire alliance conversation. Coalitions make independents competitive on scope. They do not make an independent the safe choice for a client who has already decided to hire safety.
What you can use
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