There is a small joke hiding in Mod Op’s logo: it refuses to stay put. On the company’s website, the mark can become a rhino, selected for being strong, fast, agile, and disinclined to follow a herd. The animal will eventually disappear. That is the point. Mod Op has built a corporate identity around the idea that identity is temporary.
This would be a tidy piece of agency whimsy if the business beneath it were not changing just as quickly. Mod Op began with the creative-production instincts of Modus Operandi, launched in 2011 by Aaron Sternlicht and Miles Dinsmoor. The modern company, led since 2017 by CEO Eric J. Bertrand, has spent years acquiring the skills that clients once bought from a procession of separate firms: media, public relations, data science, web development, strategy, packaging, events, automation. It is an agency assembled like a tool chest.
The numbers suggest the assembly has found a market. Mod Op says revenue grew from $32.3 million in 2023 to $93.5 million in 2025. Headcount moved from 206 to 449 in the same period. ADWEEK ranked it No. 16 among the world’s fastest-growing agencies in 2026. Inc. put it on the Inc. 5000 in both 2025 and 2026.
The first thing to fail was the handoff
The traditional agency relationship can resemble a children’s relay race arranged by procurement. The brand strategist passes to the creative shop, which passes to the production company, which passes to the media buyer, which passes a spreadsheet to somebody in analytics. Each specialist may be good. The baton still gets dropped.
Mod Op’s answer was not to invent every discipline. It bought established ones. MCC added integrated communications in 2019. One Eighteen strengthened West Coast creative work in 2022. Then the pace quickened: Context Creative brought a Canadian base; dPrism brought transformation consulting, data, and AI; Crenshaw brought technology PR; RTO+P brought a decorated creative culture; LAM Design brought packaging; Evans Hunt brought more Canadian digital depth; Image Media brought large-scale events; Ascend Marketing brought automation and account-based marketing.
The change of mind was less philosophical than commercial. Bertrand said client demands were changing quickly: brands needed more than data, and the agency needed enough creative power to turn an insight into something people might remember. The acquisitions became a response to requests arriving at the front door. Instead of sending the client elsewhere, Mod Op bought the room it was missing.
“Clients plug in wherever they are in their marketing journey and scale across services as they grow.”Mod Op’s stated operating promise
A $10 million bet on connective tissue
Buying the rooms creates another problem: a bigger hallway. By 2024, Mod Op had an impressive collection of agencies, but a collection is not the same thing as a system. The distinction matters because the customer does not care how many logos appeared on an acquisition slide. The customer cares whether the campaign arrives on time, whether the package and the ad look related, and whether anyone can explain what worked.
This is where the cost becomes unusually concrete. In June 2025, Mod Op said it had invested $5 million in AI research, development, deployment, and its enterprise technology stack, against a pledged total of $10 million. The money funded an innovations team, engineering and data-science work, an AI Council, and a set of proprietary tools. Acquisition prices have not been publicly disclosed. The visible check is for the connective layer.
Growth while the machine was assembled
Reported revenue · USDThe result is Orion, Mod Op’s connected intelligence ecosystem. “Ecosystem” is one of those words businesses apply to everything from software to snacks, but Orion has a comprehensible job. It gives the agency a shared AI workspace, connects brand knowledge to agents, puts performance signals in one view, and turns selected capabilities into client-facing products.
Some pieces are mundane in the best sense. Connected Agents handle research synthesis, first drafts, deck building, and analysis. Mod Heat watches news and social chatter for brand risk and relevance. Digital Audience Simulation pre-tests concepts. AI-enhanced reporting suggests what to do next. Custom agents can live inside a client’s own business. The ambition is not merely to produce ads with a chatbot. It is to reduce the scavenger hunt that consumes expensive human hours.
There is evidence that the tools moved beyond the demo. By mid-2025, Mod Op said it had deployed more than 50 client-specific Brand Agents trained on each customer’s guidelines, assets, voice, and key messages. In 2026 it launched a free AI Search Visibility Audit. The product tests how a brand appears across major answer engines, compares it with competitors, examines citations, and produces a prioritized roadmap. It is a neat example of the model: PR, search, content, analytics, and technology are all required to solve what looks, at first glance, like an SEO problem.
What a customer is really buying
Mod Op sells services, usually through projects and ongoing agency relationships. A consumer brand might use it for a campaign, influencer program, packaging system, media plan, or product launch. A B2B company might buy account-based marketing, public relations, demand generation, and marketing automation. An executive team can buy transformation consulting or an AI roadmap. An event team can buy the live experience as well as the communications wrapped around it.
Its public roster moves easily between categories: Nestlé, Duracell, ExxonMobil, VTech and LeapFrog, DoubleVerify, Baha Mar, Nokia, Verizon, Warner Bros. Interactive, Sheetz, Sparkling Ice, and Dietz & Watson. This is where Mod Op sits in the market. It is too broad to be a specialist studio, too independent to be a classic global holding company, and increasingly too technical to be described as only an ad agency. Its pitch is the firepower of a network with the directness of a boutique.
That last phrase is also the difficult part. Networks become slow for reasons. More people create more approvals. More disciplines create more incentives. Acquired companies arrive with beloved habits, leaders, and software. AI can retrieve the brand guidelines, but it cannot make two executives agree about a budget.
The part worth stealing
The useful lesson is not “buy thirteen agencies.” Most companies should not. The transferable idea is sequencing. Mod Op repeatedly started with an observable customer need, added the missing capability, kept experienced operators close to the work, and then spent real money connecting the pieces. The sequence is more disciplined than stapling AI onto a fragmented process and calling the result transformation.
It will not work under every condition. The model weakens when acquired specialists lose the cultures and judgment that made them worth buying. It weakens when cross-selling outruns genuine integration, when client data cannot safely move through a common layer, or when every problem is forced through the same system. It is especially fragile when leaders mistake faster output for better work. Twenty concepts in a day are useful only if someone can recognize the one with a pulse.
That is why Mod Op’s most sensible line about AI is also its least technological: AI scales capability; people create meaning. The company’s experiment is whether those people can remain opinionated specialists while working as one connected firm. The mutable logo is charming. The real shape-shifting act is organizational.