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Marketing Services Holdco Map

The Marketing Services Holdco Map is a deterministic parent-child tree of the global marketing-services industry — agency holding companies, professional-services firms with marketing practices, and major independents. It's optimized for one job: figure out who owns what across the players that compete for marketing budget.

What's covered

Each entry in the holdco selector carries a category chip so you can see at a glance what kind of entity it is:

Network — multi-brand agency holding companies

The Big-7 ad-agency networks:

  • Omnicom Group — post-IPG merger. BBDO, TBWA, OMD, PHD, FleishmanHillard, Acxiom (via IPG).
  • WPP — Ogilvy, VML, AKQA, WPP Media (formerly GroupM), WPP Production, Burson, Landor.
  • Publicis Groupe — Publicis, Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis Sapient, Epsilon.
  • Dentsu — Dentsu Creative, Dentsu X, Carat, iProspect, Merkle.
  • Havas — Havas Creative, Havas Media, Havas Health, BETC.
  • Stagwell — Constellation Network, Code and Theory, Anomaly, 72andSunny, Forsman & Bodenfors.
  • Interpublic Group (merged into Omnicom Q4 2025) — IPG Mediabrands, Acxiom. Kept in the selector for historical reference.

Consultancy — professional-services firms with marketing practices

The Big-Four consultancies-as-agencies. Their marketing arms are sub-practices inside much larger consulting/audit/tech businesses, but they compete directly with the agency networks for marketing budget on RFPs.

  • Accenture — Accenture Song (rebranded from Accenture Interactive April 2022; 40+ folded sub-agencies; Droga5 retained brand), AgilOne, Acquia.
  • Deloitte — Deloitte Digital, Heat, Acne, Market Gravity.
  • IBM — IBM iX (Bluewolf, Aperto, ecx.io, Resource-Ammirati merged into iX), IBM Watson Advertising.
  • PwC — PwC Digital Services / Experience Center, Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company).

Indie — independent agencies

Marquee independents, regardless of ownership flavor (trust, partner-owned, PE-backed):

  • Wieden+Kennedy — Adweek 2025 Global Agency of the Year. Held in a perpetual trust (forbids sale) since 2015.
  • R/GA — PE-backed independent since March 2025 (Truelink Capital carve-out from IPG). 14 offices.
  • Mother — partner-owned London independent. Adweek 2024 International Agency of the Year. Sister units: Mother Design, Media by Mother.

Subsidiary — marquee brands owned by another entity

Surfaced for selector discoverability — the brand is famous enough that you'd look for it directly even though it has a parent:

  • Droga5 — under Accenture Song (sole brand exception in the 2022 Accenture Interactive → Accenture Song rebrand).

How to use it

Pick a holdco

The selector at the top of the page swaps between holdcos. Each renders the full subsidiary tree starting from that company. The category chip next to each entry tells you what kind of entity it is so you know what scale to expect inside.

Click a node

Selecting any agency in the tree opens its detail card on the right with:

  • Overview tab — summary, headquarters, founding year, industry, employee count, and a link to the full ATDb profile.
  • Sales tab — practice leadership, recent deals, and tech-stack signals.
  • Brand tab — case studies, key clients, and conflict warnings.

Search ⌘K

Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K on Windows/Linux) to open the typeahead search. Match by name across the current holdco's tree — useful for jumping to a specific shop in a 30+ node network like Stagwell or Publicis.

Collapse / expand

Click the + / − toggle on any node with children to collapse or expand its subtree. Useful for focusing on one part of a wide tree.

Zoom and pan

Scroll to zoom in for tier badges and status pills; zoom out to see the whole holdco at a glance. Drag the canvas to pan around.

Share a view

The Share button copies a URL that round-trips your current selection — /explorers/agencies?holdco=wpp&node=ogilvy opens directly to the WPP tree with Ogilvy's detail card open.

Typo-resilient holdco URLs

Common holdco-name variants are auto-redirected to the canonical slug. For example, ?holdco=publicis-groupe, ?holdco=dentsu-group, ?holdco=accenture-song, ?holdco=r-ga, and ?holdco=mother-london all resolve to their canonical holdco (publicis, dentsu, accenture, rga, mother).

If a slug isn't recognized AND isn't a known alias, ATDb shows a dismissible "We couldn't find a holdco called X. Did you mean Y?" banner with up to 3 fuzzy-matched suggestions, each one click-to-load. Pick one from the rail on the left or press ⌘K to search.

Back to the map breadcrumb

When you click "Full profile" on any agency in the map, the destination company page renders a small ← Back to {Holdco} breadcrumb chip at the top — for example, ← Back to WPP, ← Back to Omnicom (+IPG), ← Back to Publicis Groupe. The chip links back to the holdco map with that holdco pre-selected, so you can return to where you were without losing your place. The breadcrumb only shows when you arrived from the explorer (via the ?from=agencies&holdco=… URL parameters); direct-link visitors don't see it.

Exporting the tree

The toolbar's Export button opens a dropdown with four output formats:

  • CSV — flat list: one row per agency with slug, title, parent_slug, depth, tier, operational_status, headquarters. Best for spreadsheet ingestion — sortable, filterable, easy to pivot.
  • Text — indented tree (s250): one line per agency, indented by 2 spaces per depth level, with (tier, status) annotation where present. Best for pasting into Slack / Notion / docs as a readable snapshot of the org structure.
  • SVG — vector: the exact canvas as a vector graphic. Best for design tools or further editing.
  • PNG — 2× snapshot: rasterized at 2× resolution with a provenance footer (Marketing Services Holdco Map — {Holdco} — exported {date} via ATDb). Best for slide decks.

All four formats share the same filename stem (atdb-{holdco-slug}-{YYYY-MM-DD}) so they sort together in your downloads folder.

Reading the badges

  • Tier badge (S, A, B, C, D) — ATDb's editorial significance ranking. S = industry-defining, D = niche.
  • Category chip — Network, Consultancy, Indie, or Subsidiary — describes what kind of entity each holdco entry is so you know what to expect inside.
  • Status pill — Active is omitted to reduce noise. Merged, Acquired, Rebranded, and Defunct are surfaced because they affect "who do I sell to right now?"

Live data

The map updates automatically as ATDb's underlying data changes — no manual publish step. Admin edits surface within ~1 second; everyone else sees changes within 5 minutes.

What's not yet here (Phase 2+)

  • Filters by discipline (creative / media / digital / data), region, and category — Phase 2.
  • Cross-holdco overlay ("compare creative networks across all networks") — Phase 2.
  • Sales / Brand persona tabs — Phase 3.
  • PDF export — Phase 4.
  • Phase 1b regional cluster (Hakuhodo DY, Cheil Worldwide, BlueFocus) — in flight.