In short
- Clients are building their own capability and using AI for the volume. What they still pay an outside partner for is depth.
- An agency that does everything is now squeezed from both sides. So we stopped being one.
- Four specialties, each deep in its own discipline, connected by one way of thinking. Work with one, or with all four when the problem needs it.
Sit through almost any agency pitch in this region and you will hear the same sentence. "We do it all." Strategy, creative, social, events, production, digital, technology. One roof, one contract, one invoice.
For five years, we said it too.
And it worked. Forward Media grew to a team of around 25 people and more than 100 clients across brands, institutions and businesses. A client arrived with a brief, and we answered it with whatever the brief needed. So why change something that works?
Because the briefs changed first.
The brief changed before the agency did
Fewer clients asked us for a campaign. More of them asked how their marketing should work now. What to stop doing. What to build. What to hand to AI and what never to. How to prove any of it to a leadership team that questions every line of the budget.
Those are not campaign questions. They need people who go deep in one discipline, and they need those disciplines to meet without pretending to be one.
The middle is being squeezed
Look at what is happening on both sides of a generalist agency.
On one side, clients are building their own capability. The ANA reports that 82% of its members had an in-house agency by 2023. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that 39% of CMOs plan to cut back on agency budgets, and 22% say generative AI has already reduced their reliance on external agencies for creativity and strategy. The volume work, the resizing, the first drafts, the routine content, is moving inside or moving to machines. And generic thinking is following it.
On the other side, the biggest groups are consolidating. Omnicom completed its acquisition of IPG on 26 November 2025, and within a week retired three of the most famous names in advertising, DDB, FCB and MullenLowe, folding them into its remaining networks. When the largest players in the world cut brands to stay relevant, a 25-person agency that says it does everything should ask itself a hard question.
What does a client still pay an outside partner for, when AI can draft and the in-house team can execute?
The answer we kept arriving at was depth. Not generic strategy, which a good prompt can now imitate, but people who have done one specific thing many times, across many categories and markets, and who can see what an in-house team is too close to see.
Breadth was costing depth
A full-service agency is built to say yes to everything. The cost is quiet. The strategist becomes a generalist. The creative team works to the format instead of the idea. The events team waits at the end of the process. And nobody owns the technology that would make the work measurable. Every discipline is present. None of them is the best version of itself.
We would rather be excellent at four things, and honest about when a problem needs only one of them.
Four specialties, one way of thinking
So we split.
- Exceed does strategy, intelligence and marketing excellence: the questions that come before the work, and the marketing departments that have to deliver it.
- Sard does creative, content and social: ideas made for the way people actually watch, scroll and share.
- Backstage does experiences, events and production: the rooms where brands are believed, not just seen.
- Vrio Labs does martech, platforms and products: the tools we build when something is too slow, too complicated or in the wrong place.
Each has its own team, its own depth and its own name. What connects them is not a shared invoice. It is Forward Thinking: a point of view on where marketing and communications are going, written by the people doing the work.
What this means if you work with us
You can work with one specialty and never meet the others. Most problems belong to one place.
When a problem moves, we connect them. A market entry might start with Exceed reading the market, move to Sard for the launch idea, into a room with Backstage on launch night, and end with a tool from Vrio Labs that shows what worked. We connect them when it makes the answer better, not to look bigger.
No packages. No forced integration. Specialists who do the work, and a practice that thinks out loud about where it is going.
Bottom line
Splitting one agency into four was not a branding exercise. It was a bet that clients will keep paying for depth long after they stop paying for breadth. Forward should keep earning its name.
So, what are you trying to move?
Sources 4
- ANA, In-House Agency Report, 2023.
- Gartner, 2025 CMO Spend Survey, press release, 12 May 2025.
- Axios, Omnicom becomes biggest advertising company, 26 November 2025.
- exchange4media, Omnicom retires DDB, FCB, MullenLowe, 1 December 2025.
Talk to us
Not sure which specialty you need?
Tell us what you are trying to move. We will bring the right one to the table, or more than one if the problem needs it.
