“We always act like we’re on the first date”: how agencies can stay agile at scale

Another week, another agency acquisition - that's how it feels at the moment.

The events industry has become increasingly crowded with mergers, partnerships and roll-ups as agencies search for scale, international reach and broader service offerings. Clients want more integrated solutions. Procurement teams want efficiency. Multinational brands increasingly expect agencies to handle everything from internal communications to global experiential campaigns under one roof.

At the same time, the very qualities clients often value most - agility, creativity, founder energy and cultural identity - are typically associated with smaller, boutique agencies.

That tension sits at the centre of Brands at Work Group’s acquisition of creative experiential agency Chorus.

The deal itself makes strategic sense. Brands at Work brings deep expertise in B2B and employee engagement, while Chorus has built its reputation creating consumer-facing experiential work for luxury and drinks brands including Johnnie Walker, The Macallan and Montblanc.

And an equally interesting story is what the acquisition reveals about the state of the industry itself.

Because increasingly, agencies are trying to solve the same problem: how do you grow without becoming corporate?

“We always act like we’re on the first date,” says Karen Kadin, co-founder of Brands at Work.

It is a revealing line.

Despite now employing more than 50 people and operating internationally, Kadin says the agency still tries to maintain the mentality of a challenger business - responsive, entrepreneurial and slightly restless.

“Think big, but act small,” she says. “Act with agility, be entrepreneurial, never take anything for granted.”

That philosophy has shaped the acquisition itself.

Rather than absorbing Chorus into a larger corporate structure, the agency will retain its name, leadership and creative identity. Founder Cassidy Knowles remains as managing director, while both agencies are approaching the integration cautiously.

Or, as Knowles prefers to frame it, “collaboration rather than integration”.

“I’ve been using the word collaboration rather than integration, actually,” she says. “And I think that that is an important differentiation.”

The distinction matters because agency acquisitions often come with familiar industry anxieties. Creative agencies are bought for their culture, energy and specialist expertise - only to gradually lose those qualities inside larger structures, particularly when systems, reporting lines and commercial pressures begin to standardise the business.

Both founders acknowledge the risk.

“We’re going to go really slow,” says Knowles. “And we’re going to see where collaboration makes sense. If it makes sense for both parties, we will do it. And if it doesn’t, we won’t.”

That measured approach reflects a wider shift happening across the experiential sector.

For years, agencies largely positioned themselves at opposite ends of the spectrum: either boutique and creative, or scaled and operationally robust.

Now clients increasingly want both.

“We have had more demand from some of our corporate clients, the really big multinationals, to see more of a turnkey end-to-end service,” says Kadin.

But she is equally clear that clients still crave founder-led energy and flexibility.

“There is a desire to work with more startup kind of energy agencies,” she says.

That contradiction is reshaping the agency landscape.

Large clients want agencies capable of handling global delivery, multiple markets and increasingly complex event ecosystems. But they also want originality, speed and cultural relevance - qualities that are often harder to preserve as businesses scale.

For Chorus, the acquisition partly emerged from those growing client expectations.

The agency had already been exploring international expansion opportunities while working with global brands, but Knowles says clients increasingly wanted capabilities beyond pure experiential marketing.

“They all do big partner conferences, big sales conferences,” she says. “And they really love our creative angle and they want to bring some of that B2C energy and creativity into their B2B delivery.”

At the same time, Brands at Work saw experiential opportunities slipping away because clients associated the agency primarily with corporate communications and internal engagement.

“We were out of consideration for those experiential campaigns,” says Kadin. “To really do this, we needed to bring in the discipline, the team who have that bank of creds and can speak that language.”

The result is less about consolidation for its own sake and more about convergence.

The lines between B2B events, experiential marketing, employee engagement and brand storytelling are increasingly blurred. Internal conferences are expected to feel cinematic. Consumer experiences now borrow heavily from live entertainment and festival culture. Brand worlds need to work both internally and externally.

Clients no longer separate those disciplines as neatly as agencies once did.

“It was a natural extension of the world we’re already in,” says Kadin.

Still, none of this is happening in an easy market.

Running an agency has become significantly more difficult over the past five years, both founders admit.

“Absolutely,” says Knowles, laughing when asked whether anything has changed. “All of it.”

The pressure comes from multiple directions simultaneously.

Costs have surged across logistics, transport, materials and freelance talent. Clients are demanding more while budgets remain tightly scrutinised. Procurement processes have become tougher. Competition has intensified.

“It’s a wildly crowded marketplace,” says Kadin.

At the same time, agencies are also navigating changing workforce expectations around flexibility, progression and career development.

“Talent also have higher expectations around progression,” Kadin says. “Sometimes not always fully understanding the depth of capability needed for that progression.”

The result is an industry where agencies often feel squeezed from every angle: operationally, creatively and financially.

Both founders return to the idea of partnership - not just internally, but between agencies and clients themselves.

“A lot of clients do expect you to do more with less,” says Kadin. “And are sometimes unaware of the importance of the role that they need to play in helping achieve the mutual goals.”

Knowles agrees that clients are increasingly looking for trusted long-term relationships rather than purely transactional suppliers.

“We’re a people business and it’s all about relationships,” she says. “Once you’ve built that trust with the clients, they naturally want to work with the people that they trust the most to deliver the best work.”

That emphasis on relationships feels particularly significant at a moment when the industry is simultaneously confronting rapid technological change.

Daunted and excited

Artificial intelligence hovers constantly in the background of the conversation - both as opportunity and threat.

Kadin describes herself as “daunted and excited in equal measure”.

But rather than viewing AI as something that diminishes live experience, both founders believe it may actually increase demand for human connection.

“The absolute call for the human touch and for connection and community is going to be larger than ever,” says Kadin.

As automation accelerates and digital communication becomes increasingly synthetic, live events may become even more valuable precisely because they are physical, emotional and shared.

“When you get in the room and you create an experience with people… you’re creating human connection,” she says.

It is perhaps the clearest argument yet for why experiential marketing continues to grow despite economic uncertainty and technological disruption.

In a world increasingly mediated by screens, algorithms and AI-generated content, physical experiences offer something harder to replicate: presence.

“Live experiences are back with a bang,” says Knowles.

There is another layer to the story too - one that both founders discuss candidly.

The partnership also represents a collaboration between two senior female agency leaders in an industry where leadership at the top level remains disproportionately male.

For Knowles, that matters.

“Female leadership is really underrepresented in this industry,” she says. “It’s a lonely place to be at the top.”

The real challenge

As agencies grow, preserving culture increasingly means preserving humanity too - not just creativity.

That may ultimately be the real challenge facing the experiential industry as consolidation continues.

Clients want scale, capability and global reach. But they also want authenticity, agility and emotional intelligence. Agencies want growth, but fear becoming slow or generic. Technology is accelerating rapidly, yet the appetite for physical human connection appears stronger than ever.

There may not be a perfect formula for balancing all those tensions.

But increasingly, agencies are trying to build businesses that can operate at scale without losing the founder-led mentality that made them successful in the first place.

For Brands at Work and Chorus, the acquisition is being framed less as a takeover and more as an expansion of creative possibility.

“This wasn’t acquisition for acquisition’s sake,” says Kadin. “It wasn’t growth for growth’s sake.”

Instead, she describes it as a way of connecting brand storytelling across internal culture, customer engagement and live experience.

“To be able to offer that thing from brand narrative all the way to brand experience all in one place now is an exciting proposition.”

Whether agencies can successfully maintain that balance over time remains the bigger question.

But in an industry increasingly shaped by scale, technology and consolidation, one thing still appears to matter most - human connection.

Or, as Kadin puts it: “Long live humanity.”

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