Indie Agency News Webinar Key Takeaways: Scale Media Execution Without Losing Your Edge
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Pathlabs Marketing |
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October 3, 2025 |
Independent agencies are consistently winning pitches on the strength of their creative work. But as client demands grow and campaigns become more complex, many find themselves at a crossroads: how do you scale media execution to match your creative ambitions without compromising what makes you special?
The pressure is real. Marketing budgets accounted for 7.7% of company revenue this year, unchanged from the previous year. In response, 39% of CMOs are planning reductions to their agency budgets to save money and boost efficiency.
That challenge is what Curiosity's Ashley Neel and Pathlabs' JC Clarke explored in a recent Indie Agency News webinar. Their conversation provided a roadmap for how independents can enhance their execution capabilities while scaling capacity through a Media Execution Partner (MEP) model, where specialists collaborate with agencies to provide hands-on media activation support, while the agency retains strategy and creative control.
Pathlabs’ JC Clarke and Curiosity’s Ashley Neel discuss the value of supporting in-house agency staff through a Media Execution Partnership.
1. Creative And Media Integration Determines Campaign Performance
Great creative needs the right media plan to work. Without that connection, there is no creative effectiveness. Agencies that keep these disciplines separate risk mismatched placements, wasted spend, and disappointed clients.
“You can’t have good creative without good media. There is no creative effectiveness if you don’t have media effectiveness.”
Integration means bringing both disciplines into the conversation early so ideas are designed with context, audience, and channel in mind. A video concept built for long-form storytelling needs adjustments when the budget only covers six-second pre-roll. A display campaign optimized for awareness gets judged on conversion metrics because media and creative never aligned on goals.
Treat creative and media as one system from the start. That's what makes campaigns perform.
“Is it the right creative that goes to the right audience and the right environment? There needs to be synergy. Those two sides of the coin need to speak with each other.”
2. Protect Your Core, Partner For Execution
The best independent shops focus on what they can do better than anyone else. That focus is what differentiates them from holding companies that do everything but excel in no particular category.
“We are borderline obsessive in the type of work we do.”
Holding companies make acquisitions to grow capabilities, but indies need a different approach because expanding their internal media department can stretch existing resources and keep staff from focusing on what they do best.
A more sustainable path is to keep ideas and strategy in-house while partnering to expand in-house execution capacity. That's how Curiosity works with Pathlabs: Ashley's team sets the vision, while Pathlabs provides additional hands-on keyboard capacity to activate across channels. The model delivers expanded capability and agility while allowing the agency to stay focused on its creative DNA.
“Keeping my staff tight and strategic and knowing I can flip on an extra ten hands-on-keyboard on a dime? It’s gold.”
3. Agility Is The New Competitive Advantage
Agencies rarely lose business because of weak ideas. They face challenges when they can't match the speed, integration, or scalability that larger shops offer.
Traditional workflows can create bottlenecks: in-house teams may reach capacity constraints, while some vendor relationships can add coordination complexity.
The MEP model offers a different approach. By working directly alongside agencies, partners like Pathlabs make it possible to launch faster, optimize in real time, and scale campaigns without adding overhead.
“Creative agencies have a soul. Align it with that culture and ethos so it perpetuates into the media.”
In today's environment, that agility is more than operational efficiency. It's what allows independents to test, pivot, and deliver results at the pace clients expect.
The Bottom Line For Independent Agencies
Independent agencies don't need to replicate holding-company scale to compete. What they need is a model that keeps their creative core strong while providing flexible media execution capacity as demand shifts.
Agencies that embrace this approach can turn their focused structure into a genuine advantage. They'll move faster than holding companies, stay closer to their creative vision than traditional agency-vendor relationships allow, and scale up or down based on what each client actually needs while keeping their talented in-house teams focused on what they do best.
Media execution should amplify your ideas and extend your team's capabilities, not create resource constraints.
