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

The holdco selector groups entries into sections, and each entry has a category-tinted dot so you can see at a glance what kind of entity it is:

Big Holdcos — the global agency networks: Omnicom Group (shown as Omnicom (+IPG) since the merger), WPP, Publicis Groupe, Dentsu, and Havas. Interpublic Group merged into Omnicom, so it no longer has its own entry.
Challenger Networks — mid-tier networks and roll-ups, such as Stagwell and Plus Company.
Consultancies — professional-services firms with marketing practices that compete with the agency networks on RFPs: Accenture (Accenture Song), Deloitte (Deloitte Digital), IBM (IBM iX), and PwC.
Regional Networks — networks dominant in their home region, such as Hakuhodo DY, Cheil Worldwide, and BlueFocus.
Independents — marquee independent agencies, such as Wieden+Kennedy, R/GA, Mother, and M&C Saatchi, plus famous brands owned by another entity (Droga5, under Accenture Song).

How to use it

Pick a holdco

The selector swaps between holdcos (a rail on the left on desktop, a drawer on phones). Each renders the full subsidiary tree starting from that company. The dot next to each entry tells you what kind of entity it is so you know what scale to expect inside.

Click an agency

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. It searches every agency in every holdco — useful for jumping to a specific shop in a large network like Stagwell or Publicis.

Collapse / expand

Click the + / − toggle on any agency with children to collapse or expand its branch. 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, or use the zoom controls on the canvas to zoom or fit the whole tree.

Filters

The filter strip narrows the tree by Region, Tier, Category, recent changes (30, 90, or 365 days), Headcount, CEO known, and Operating only. Counts on each chip show how many agencies match.

Time scrubber

The slider rewinds the org structure to an earlier year. It reads Today until you move it; reset it to return to the present. The year is saved in the URL as ?as_of=YYYY.

Recent activity

The activity panel lists recent meaningful changes in the tree — acquisitions, status changes, and new profiles — over the last 30, 90, or 365 days. Click an entry to focus that agency on the map.

Compare holdcos

Select more than one holdco (up to four) to see their trees side by side. Filters and the time scrubber apply to every tree.

Account-conflict overlay

The Account-conflict overlay button in the toolbar lets you enter a brand you're pitching. Agencies that already serve a competitor of that brand are tinted red, with a tooltip explaining the conflict. Client data is curated for a limited set of agencies, so a missing tint means we don't have data, not that there is no conflict.

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 right holdco. For example, ?holdco=publicis-groupe, ?holdco=dentsu, ?holdco=accenture-song, ?holdco=r-ga, and ?holdco=mother-london all resolve to their canonical holdco (publicis, dentsu-group-inc, 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.

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: 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 dot — in the holdco selector, the color of the dot shows what kind of entity each 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. Changes typically show up within about 5 minutes.

What's not yet here

Cross-holdco overlay ("compare creative networks across all networks")
Discipline filter (creative / media / digital / data)
PDF export