Crossmedia and Mile Marker make moves now to grow in their rosters in 2026
By Michael Bürgi • December 16, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
Two independent media agencies, one larger and one still growing, positioned themselves for further growth in 2026, with both expecting a potential windfall of clients leaving the holding companies for better service and results.
Crossmedia, which is less an independent given it’s part of the Dawn collective of agencies, promoted Anne Bologna to president from chief strategy and integration officer, Digiday has learned. A seven-year veteran of the 25-year-old media agency, Bologna will take over the day-to-day U.S. operations and lead the executive team, having informally been chief client officer for the last two years as well. She’s also charged with building out the agency’s abilities in newer areas such as retail media and social in hopes of doubling revenue in five years, while maintaining the shop’s inclusive culture crafted by co-founder and global CEO Kamran Asghar.
“I’m a fish in water — when I’m in charge of a specific remit,” said Bologna, who ran Fallon in the early aughts. “Being strategic, understanding the business, understanding the culture (what I would call the magic of Crossmedia), and knowing what clients’ needs are pretty intimately since I’ve been looking after clients for almost two years now, I feel incredibly well positioned to take the day-to-day running of the operation off of Kamran’s plate.”
The move frees up Asghar to pursue a more global agenda even as he looks for expansion opportunities here in the U.S. “When you’re a founder-run and -led agency, you’re often working in these multiple dimensions, and there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of things you want to do,” said Asghar. “With Anne in place, I can focus on those three pillars client happiness, people, happiness, and scaling the business, particularly here in the U.S.”
Bologna and Asghar have some history together, including when she hired Crossmedia without a pitch when she was running brand strategy at TripAdvisor. Asghar credits her with having led more than $100 million in net new business wins. Clients include Empower, Invesco, Ricola and Lincoln Financial.
Crossmedia did lose an executive recently to fellow indie media agency Mile Marker, Digiday has also learned. The relatively new media shop hired Neil Smith to be its evp of growth, coming over from his global chief client officer role. Smith’s hire is joined by Emilie Vasu, who joined Mile Marker last month as vp of business development, reporting into Smith, who in turn reports directly to Scott Shamberg, the agency’s president and CEO.
Just under a year old, Mile Marker has enjoyed strong growth since formed out of the union of DR shop PlusMedia with omnichannel media agency Cage Point. In that time, said Shamberg, the agency has won nine out of the 13 pitches it’s been in. But the plan, given its backing by PE firm Lightview Capital, is to keep growing at an aggressive rate in 2026. And that’s predicated on landing larger clients than it’s gotten in year one, said Shamberg.
“We want to move up the chain aspirationally, in terms of the types of clients that we work with the sizes of their budgets,” said Shamberg, “but still stick within the framework of who we believe we best serve. That’s very ambitious growth marketers who have the necessary needs for the tools and technologies that the bigger agencies have, but historically have not sold to them because they just don’t have the budgets. And they’ve outpaced the media boutiques, because the media boutiques just don’t have the tools in tech. We’re starting to get into that, that next level.”
Whether Crossmedia and Mile Marker will end up pitching the same potential clients remains to be seen. What we know is that they’ll both be waiting, arms open wide, to take in any client refugee from the larger holdcos that focus more on the giants of marketing.
