Linda Boff: independent agency model beats holding companies on speed and focus

August 31, 2026 · Digiday

Twenty-five full-time staffers and a freelance bench of about 2,000 people make up Said Differently, the independent marketing services group Linda Boff now leads as CEO. The former longtime GE CMO built her reputation seating competing agencies, including BBDO, the Barbarian Group and Mekanism, around the same table to generate what she calls creative tension. Said Differently, which is private equity-owned and fully remote, has no offices and assembles a bespoke team from its freelance network for every project. Boff told Digiday's Media Buying Briefing that every one of its roughly 25 B2C and B2B clients, among them UNICEF, Marc Jacobs, Honeywell and Brookfield, has returned for a second project.

Clients working with Said Differently get a team cast fresh for the brief in front of them, drawn from a freelance network built to match each project's needs. Boff argues that independent shops answer only to client needs, since they carry no internal practice layers to satisfy and no shareholders demanding quarterly results, which lets them move at a client's speed or ahead of it. She still values her relationships with holding company leaders and credits private equity for staying out of creative and staffing decisions at Said Differently, but said the financial discipline that comes with an owner is part of the deal. As holding companies work through their own restructuring, the model Boff describes gives budget holders a lean, project-based alternative when scale stops being the deciding factor.