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It’s been an unprecedented and brutal week for the advertising industry. The finalization of Omnicom Groups $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) (the biggest takeover in advertising history) is affecting tens of thousands of workersmost immediately the 4,000 expected to be laid off by the end of the year. Both Omnicom and IPG own many different ad agency brands, all of which will be profoundly impacted by the merger. Omnicom is retaining only McCann from the IPG roster of agency networks, while folding FCB into BBDO, and both DDB and MullenLowe into TBWA, in order to achieve Omnicom Chairman and CEO John Wren’s goal of $750 million in synergies. These are more than just a collection of acronyms, though. They are major agency brands, built over decades and generations, that will now disappear as their parent holding company fights to grow, survive, and remain competitive. You’d be forgiven if you think the ad world is an alphabet soup of who’s eating who. But there is another side to the business that’s steering clear from the publicly traded drama. Independent agencies are growing in number, and in the scale and scope of work theyre being assigned by major brands. It’s a trend that has been bubbling up for years. According to an Ibis World report, the number of U.S. ad agencies grew 2.2% from 2019 to 2024. Even anecdotally, there has been a surge in new creative shops. Isle of Any, for example, was launched in January by former Droga5 execs, and has already done work for The New York Times, A24, OpenAI, and Coinbase. Part of the indie boom is undoubtedly a cultural correction to the mess that is major ad holding companies, as talent flees corporate bureaucracy for greener, more creative pastures. But it’s more than that at this point. In recent years, major brands have shown an increased willingness to work with these small shops despite (or because of) their size. For years, independent agency Rethink has been winning industry awards and getting business results for Heinz. Mother, an agency founded in London 30 years ago, has a range of big clients, including Buick, Uber, Cheerios, and Stella Artois. And, of course, independent agency Wieden+Kennedy is known for its work for Nike, McDonald’s, Ford, and Michelob Ultra. Amid all the ad world chaos, I spoke to indie agency execs at award-winning shops Rethink, Tombras, Joan Creative, Haymaker, and Mother about what the ad industry landscape looks like from their vantage point at this moment. As technology, data, and, in particular AI, levels the playing field in so many ways, these independents see a distinct competitive advantage in the combination of original creative and strategic thinking. Most crucially, though? They see clientsnot investorsas their primary stakeholders. Holding company drama The massive consolidation of IPG-owned ad agencies is the latest in an ongoing trend among publicly traded advertising companies over the past decade to boost profits and efficiency. In 2018, holding company WPP combined Wunderman and J. Walter Thompson (JWT) into Wunderman Thompson, and VML and Young & Rubicam into VMLY&R. Then in 2023, it combined them all into just VML. How did that work out? WPP shares are down more than 60% year to date, and have hit a quarter-century low. Reports emerged last month that France-based holding company Havas was exploring an acquisition or stake in WPP. Havas has denied the reports, but it’s the state of the industry that made it so believable. Jay Kamath, founder and chief creative officer of Haymaker, says there’s nothing wrong with mergers if there is a strong vision behind it. These arent visionary mergers, theyre survival mergers. The model is aging, margins are shrinking, and they think scale is a life raft, says Kamath, who believes scale does little to really help clients. In reality, it’s speed, not scale that brands care about as they vie for customers’ increasingly divided attention. They need faster teams who bring sharper ideas and are accountable partners, he says. Dooley Tombras, president of Tombras, a Knoxville, Tennessee-based agency with additional offices across the U.S. and in Buenos Aires, sees holding companies as a model in managed decline. As holding companies continue to consolidate to compensate for a loss of top-line growth, the winners will likely be in the independent space. As they consolidate brands, offices, and people to deliver cost synergies to Wall Street, they will naturally shore up to protect the billion-dollar-plus clients, Tombras says. Many major national brands spending in the $50 million to $100 million annual budget level will get lost in the shuffle and look to make a move. And it will likely be to a scaled independent. Advantage: independent Tombras’s theory seems to be resonating. Geoff Cottrill, former CMO of Coca-Cola, Converse, and Topgolf, recently commented on LinkedIn: If I were still a CMO, Id be looking for creative partners outside these massive machines. So I called him up and asked him to elaborate. His answer should be encouraging to any indie agency, and to many of the impending holding company exiles looking to be hired. Marketing, as an industry, has kind of lost the plot, says Cottrill of the industry’s infatuation with data, AI, and money. He notes, If you’re a midsized brand trying to fight for attention, needing to get the right creative ideas, get the right service levels, account management, you’re better off with a smaller, more nimble creative shop like Wieden+Kennedy or someone like Opinionated (an independent ad shop out of Portland, Oregon, whose clients include Adidas, Panda Express, and Hinge). For Lisa Clunie, founder and CEO of New York-based Joan, being independent is a superpower. Brands want partners who can prototype, pivot, and produce without waiting for multinational approval chains, she says. This is not a new concept. Back in 2021, Domino’s took its brand to a small, 23-person indie shop called WorkInProgress. At the time, the pizza chain’s then-CMO, Art DElia, told Ad Age, I really feel that the independent agency model gives us more flexibility and less distractions. Tombras believes that brand and culture are at an inflection point given the proliferation of AI. Machine value will decrease, he argues, while human value is poised to skyrocket. The whole reason brands have gone to agencies in the first place is to get highly unique perspectives on how to solve business problems, he says. Independents are in an exponentially better position to attract talent because people are tribal; we want to play for teams. For Teri Miller, U.S. CEO of Mother, the holding company business model, and now consolidation, feels a million miles away from what is actually happening on the ground in the business of creativity. Its just a totally different vocabulary, rule set, body language, she says. Clients who have hired Independents as an antidote understand why: We know who we are, why we exist, what our strengths are. We arent trying to be everything to everyone. Creative advertising versus Public Company I’ve been covering brands and ad agencies in one way or another for almost 20 years, and I’ve seen that great creative work is not exclusive to independent agencies. Agencies owned by holding companies, including those being shuttered through the Omnicom consolidation, have produced incredible work over decades. In fact, McCann, FCB, the Martin Agency, and TBWA/Worldwide were all on Fast Companys 2025 Most Innovative Companies list earlier this year. Still, holding company agencies are facing bigger challenges, as the media landscape continues to fragment and the demands of clients have become more complex and immediate. In a media era that prioritizes cost and efficiency, the great work these agencies are making increasingly feels like it’s despite being part of a public holding company, not because of it. The global publicly traded conglomerate still has advantages in scale, particularly in media buying. But there is no discernible advantage in terms of solving business problems with creative ideas and strategy. Joan’s Clunie says creativity and public ownership aren’t enemies, they’re just bad roommates. While public companies optimize for shareholder value, independent agencies optimize for creative value. “When you need to hit quarterly targets, the easy moves are cost cuts, procurement deals, and operational tweaks,” Clunie says. “The risky move? Betting on a bold creative idea that might take two years to prove itself. Guess which one gets the green light at 11:59 p.m. before earnings? It’s not that public companies can’t do brilliant work, she says. It’s that their wiring makes the safe choice easier and the interesting choice harder. And in our business, interesting usually wins. Independence means we can take the long view. That’s not romanticit’s structural.
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Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Back in his 1996 letter to shareholders, Warren Buffett famously wrote: If you arent willing to own a stock for 10 years, dont even think about owning it for 10 minutes. That statement only makes the recent homebuilder stock purchases and sales by Berkshire Hathawayled by Buffett, who will step down as CEO at the end of 2025even more eyebrow-raising. Heres the timeline. August 2023: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that in Q2 2023, the company made a bet on U.S. homebuilders and bought 5,969,714 shares of D.R. Horton, 152,572 shares of Lennar, and 11,112 shares of NVR. February 2024: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that in Q4 2023, the company had sold off 5,969,714 shares of D.R. Hortonthe vast majority of Buffetts big homebuilder bet he made early in 2023. August 2025: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that during Q2 2025 (the three months ending June 30), the company made a bet on U.S. homebuilders by purchasing around 1.5 million shares of D.R. Horton (valued at around $191.5 million). In the first half of 2025, Berkshire Hathaway acquired just over 7 million shares of Lennar, valued at nearly $800 million. November 2025: Berkshire Hathaway disclosed that it has sold its D.R. Horton stake of around 1.5 million shares. While Berkshire Hathaway has sold off its shares of D.R. Horton (No. 123 on the Fortune 500), it still owns around 7.2 million shares of Lennar (No. 129 on the Fortune 500) and around 11,112 shares of NVR (No. 396 on the Fortune 500), according to ResiClubs review of Berkshire Hathaways latest SEC filings. Given Buffetts own adviceIf you arent willing to own a stock for 10 years, dont even think about owning it for 10 minutesits probably fair to avoid drawing sweeping long-term housing market conclusions from Berkshire Hathaways homebuilder stock trades over the past two years. After all, the firm bought them, sold them, bought them again, and sold them four times in just over a two-year window. That said, if you forced me to speculate, Id guess Berkshire Hathaway initially eyed homebuilder stocks in the first half of 2023, after their sharp pullback in 2022, as builders adjusted to the rate shock. But heading into 2024, Berkshire Hathaway may have gotten cold feet on homebuilders as a long hold, as it became clear that the housing markets early-2023 firming was a bit of a head fakeand that a bigger power shift toward buyers, further housing-market softening, and additional homebuilder margin compression were still ahead. After that played out, earlier this year, Berkshire Hathaway may have concluded that most of that margin compression had already been priced in and that it wanted back in on homebuilders. That speculation does leave one remaining question: Why would Berkshire Hathaway now sell off D.R. Horton while still holding onto Lennar and NVR? First, D.R. Hortons stock has had a stronger bounce-back over the past few months, while Lennar and NVR have not. (Perhaps Berkshire Hathaway believes that bounce-back still awaits.) So it might not be that D.R. Horton has fallen out of favor with Berkshire Hathaway, but instead simply that D.R. Hortons stock has already priced in much of its short-term upside. Secondand this is me reading deep between the linesperhaps Berkshire Hathaway likes that Lennar has been more aggressive during this soft window in taking market share. While all the public homebuilders that ResiClub tracks have compressed profit margins over the past three years to offer larger incentives and affordability adjustments in an attempt to avoid a sharper pullback in housing starts, Lennar has been the most aggressive on that front. In fact, Lennar has compressed its margins all the way back to 2009 levels, and is spending the equivalent of roughly 14.3% percent of final sales on incentives (compared with the typical 5% to 6% in normal times) in order to grow home sales and capture market share. In September 2025, Lennar executives acknowledged that its finally time to pause [that strategy] and let the market catch up a little bit. That doesnt mean theyre completely reversing course or losing the market share theyve recently gained while using the strategy. Instead, it means they cant be as aggressive in early 2026 in pursuing additional market share, given how much margin compression theyve already absorbed. Some investors, including Berkshire Hathaway, might like that Lennar has pursued a bigger market share through this choppy stretch and is now starting to defend margins. Here’s what Stuart Miller, co-CEO of Lennar, said during the company’s September 19, 2025, earnings call: For Lennar, this is n opportune time to pause and let the market catch up a little bit. Even though mortgage rates began to trend downward toward the end of the quarter, stronger sales have not yet followed. We have certainly begun to see early signs of greater customer interest and stronger traffic entering the market. With lower mortgage rates, purchasers are showing greater interest in considering their home purchase. And this is generally an early signal of stronger sales activity to follow, assuming rates remain lower. And if interest rates continue to fall, we’re quite optimistic that this all will happen soon. The extended period of higher interest rates for longer than expected forced us, however, to adjust construction costs [lower average sales price] in order to enable sales in difficult market conditions. Our lower construction cost structure, together with reduced margin [bigger incentives], enabled us to meet affordability and support the supply-and-demand balance. We drove sales pace to match production pace, and we fortified our market share and position in each of our strategic markets. We are now situated with a lower cost structure, efficient product offerings, and strong market positions to accommodate pent-up demand as rates moderate and confidence ultimately returns. As I said before, this is the right time. This is just the right time for us to pull back just a little bit. We believe that we’ve gotten ahead of the current market realities, and we have built what we believe is a stronger long-term margin-driving platform. We know that this has taken some time as the market has remained weaker for longer, but we also know that our strategy has helped build a healthier housing market and has positioned Lennar for strong cash flow and bottom-line growth in the future. While our deliveries were just below our goal for the quarter, and while we sold more homes than expected during the quarter, these accomplishments came at the expense of further deterioration of margin, which came down to 17.5%. Accordingly, we’re going to begin to ease back our delivery expectations for the fourth quarter and full year in order to relieve the pressure on sales and deliveries and help establish a floor on margin. We will reduce our delivery expectations for the fourth quarter to 22,000 to 23,000 homes, and we will reduce our full-year expectation to 81,500 to 82,500. In addition to the Lennar and NVR homebuilder shares that Berkshire Hathaway still owns, the firm also fully owns Clayton Homesthe largest U.S. builder of manufactured and modular homesand HomeServices of America, a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate (under Berkshire Hathaway Energy) that offers a wide range of real estate services including brokerage, mortgage origination, and title and escrow.
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For years, philosophers and psychologists have debated whether empathy helps or hinders the ways people decide how to help others. Critics of empathy argue that it makes people care too narrowlyfocusing on individual stories rather than the broader needs of societywhile careful reasoning enables more impartial, evidence-based choices. Our new research, forthcoming in the academic journal PNAS Nexus, a flagship peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests this heart versus head argument is too simple. Empathy and reasoning arent rivalsthey work together. Each one on its own predicts more generous, far-reaching acts of assistance. And when they operate side by side, people tend to help in the fairest waysnot favoring some over othersand in ways that touch the most lives. We studied two groups that regularly help others at personal cost. One consisted of living organ donors who gave kidneys to strangers. The other included effective altruists, who use evidence and logic to direct substantial portions of their income or careers toward causes that save the most lives per dollar, such as fighting extreme poverty or preventable illness. All participants completed survey measures of empathyessentially, how much they care about and are moved by others suffering. They also completed survey measures of reasoning. These assess how often people slow down, reflect, and think through things before deciding what to do. We also examined how these abilities related to a range of altruistic judgments and behaviors, from hypothetical choicessuch as deciding whether to help a close friend or a distant strangerto real-world donations. On average, organ donors scored higher on empathy, and effective altruists scored higher on reflective reasoningslowing down and thinking things through. But across all participants, both traits were linked to broader, more outward-looking helping. People with either an elevated heart or head, and especially those with both, when compared with average adults, tended to support distant others and focus on helping as many people as possible. Even among organ donors, whose empathic ability is far above that of average adults, empathy did not make them biased toward those who were close or familiar. When we measured their altruistic judgments and real-world donations, they were just as likely as average adults, and sometimes even more likely, to favor causes that saved the greatest number of lives. These patterns challenge the assumption that empathy can narrow moral concern. In practice, we found, empathy can broaden it. Why it matters Relying on reason alone isnt enough to inspire people to help strangers. [Photo: Julia M. Cameron/Pexels] Many of todays most urgent problemspoverty, climate change, global healthdepend on motivating people to care about strangers and to use limited resources effectively. Appeals to empathy alone may inspire giving, but not necessarily the most effective giving. Appeals to reason alone can leave people unmoved, as often facts and numbers dont stir anyone to care. Our findings suggest that the most powerful approach may be to pair empathys motivation with reasonings direction. Empathy provides the emotional sparka reminder that others suffering matters. Reasoning helps steer that motivation toward where help will have the greatest impact. Together, they encourage helping that is both compassionate and consequential. Whats next Future research needs to determine how empathy and reasoning can be strengthened in everyday decision-making. Could emotional stories paired with clear evidence about what works best help people choose actions that do the most good? We also dont yet know whether people who focus their giving beyond the boundaries of their immediate social circles, like effective altruists, pay any social cost for doing soperhaps by inadvertently signaling less investment in close others. Promisingly, early evidence from organ donors shows that those who help strangers often maintain strong, stable relationships with their closest friends and family members. Perhaps most importantly, researchers need to rethink how altruism is understood. Psychology lacks a clear framework for explaining how empathy and reasoning work together, for whom they work best, and the situations where they come apart. Developing that kind of model would reshape how we think about helpingwhen helping expands, when it stalls, and why. While such core questions remain, the present findings offer reason for optimism. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Kyle Fiore Law is a postdoctoral research scholar in sustainability at Arizona State University. Brendan Bo O’Connor is an associate professor of psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Stylianos Syropoulos is an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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