By Mike Hauptman, Founder and CEO, AdLib Media Group
After a rocky 2025 for ad tech, the signals are hard to ignore. Layoffs, executive turnover, and shifting market share across DSPs (including Amazon, The Trade Desk, and Yahoo) have underscored the sector’s volatility. For agencies, particularly independents, this moment isn’t just about which platforms will emerge stronger. It’s about what the last year revealed: growing concentration risk, rising switching costs, and operating models that no longer match the reality of modern media buying.
The volatility among independent DSPs, paired with the continued rise of walled gardens, has pushed many agencies into a defensive posture. In a “do more with the same” environment, consolidation can feel like the safest move: fewer partners, fewer platforms, simpler workflows. But 2025 showed that simplification without flexibility often shifts risk from platforms onto agencies themselves.
For indie agencies focused on long-term profitability, the question now isn’t how to chase growth at all costs. It’s how to design organizations that can operate efficiently through volatility.
Platform dependence is becoming an organizational problem
Historically, agencies structured teams around platforms: dedicated traders, specialists and workflows aligned to specific DSPs. That model worked when platforms were stable and differentiation was clear. Today, it creates friction. When a DSP retrenches, changes policy or loses favor with clients, agencies face costly retraining, workflow disruption and margin pressure.
This is particularly acute in regulated categories like pharma, political advertising and real-money gaming, where platform eligibility and policy enforcement can change quickly. Agencies serving these clients can’t afford to rebuild teams every time a platform’s fortunes shift.
The agencies navigating this best are moving away from platform-centric org charts and toward outcome-centric ones. Instead of structuring teams around tools, they’re organizing around functions: planning, activation, optimization and measurement, supported by technology that allows those teams to operate across multiple buying environments.
AI should flatten orgs, not inflate them
AI is often framed as a productivity unlock, but only if agencies let it change how work gets done. Too often, AI is layered on top of existing processes, creating more dashboards and more complexity rather than fewer touchpoints.
Profitable indie agencies are using AI to collapse roles, not multiply them. Automation handles tasks like pacing, performance analysis and cross-platform comparison, allowing fewer people to manage broader scopes. This reduces headcount pressure without sacrificing sophistication, a critical shift in a margin-constrained market.
The result is smaller, more senior teams empowered by technology, rather than large execution layers tied to specific platforms. This model also makes it easier to absorb client churn or budget fluctuations without destabilizing the business.
Flexibility is a profitability strategy
Switching costs rarely show up as a line item, but they erode profitability quietly over time. Agencies pay them in retraining, tech migration, lost leverage and missed opportunity when they can’t move budgets quickly.
Building flexibility into both technology and organization design changes that equation. When agencies can route spend across platforms without reorganizing teams, they regain control over margins and timelines. They can follow performance signals rather than contractual obligations or legacy workflows.
This doesn’t mean abandoning partnerships or chasing every new tool. It means choosing infrastructure that assumes volatility, in platforms, regulation and client demand, as the baseline.
The post-2025 agency looks different
As the ad market stabilizes and evolves, indie agencies that prioritize profitability over pure scale are taking a hard look inward. They’re restructuring teams to be leaner, investing in AI to reduce operational drag and demanding flexibility from the platforms they rely on.
The lesson from 2025 isn’t that consolidation is inevitable. It’s that dependence is expensive. Agencies that emerge stronger will be the ones that treat flexibility (organizationally and technologically) as a core business strategy, not a contingency plan.
