• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, Yesterday

Two decades after launching independent media services agency U.S. International Media (USIM), Dennis Holt's latest portfolio of companies is looking more like what his original baby -- 1970 startup Western International Media -- did when he sold that company to Interpublic in 1994, a rapidly growing, highly diversified group of advertising and media services operating under one big umbrella.

Holt's new umbrella, Irvine, CA-based Kingstree Ventures, is a rollup of an array of companies quietly launched, incubated and affiliated with USIM, with plans to invest in and acquire.

Kingstree, which is named after the city in South Carolina that the long-time Angeleno now calls home, is a new kind of holding company comprised of independent agencies providing diversified, but complementary services, including:

• Flagship full-service media agency USIM.

• MatrixPoint, a consultancy founded by USIM's leadership team in 2021.

• Quantum11, a programmatic agency specializing in audience targeting and bid-based media buying.

• Social media agency Liquid Audience.

• Performance marketing agency Flux Marketing Group.

• Venture capital firm Insight Ventures.

• Interactive telecommunications, database management and internet solutions developer Patriot Communications.

The formation of Kingstree, which has been under wraps for months, is interesting timing given that Interpublic itself is poised to be subsumed into Omnicom, and comes as the ad industry contemplates the reduction of its long-time "Big 6" into five major, publicly traded holding companies, although at least one other, Stagwell, is also poised to fill some of that gap.

"Kingstree Ventures is the natural evolution for our business," Holt tells MediaPost, adding: "Kingstree is a network of marketing and consulting agencies that are committed to driving growth, innovation, and long-term success by empowering businesses with strategy and expertise across marketing and emerging industries."

"This has been Dennis’ life story – aggregating a lot of companies – but now we are putting it under one umbrella and one structure to present it more holistically to clients," adds Eran Goren, a long-time USIM partner who along with USIM's Doug Livingston, serve as managing partners of Kingstree. Dennis Holt is chairman.

The org structure is still pretty new and flexible and likely to evolve over time, but it was soft-launched internally across the portfolio of operating companies over the past month to ensure the teams were all on the same page.

"This is not one of those big holding companies where somebody in one division doesn't understand what somebody in another division is doing," explains Goren.

"The timing is right because the landscape is changing so fast, as are the needs of clients," Goren continues, citing the rapid evolution of AI and its impact on the services and org structures of agencies and holding companies.

To that end, Goren says Kingstree's point of differentiation vs. the big holding companies is its independence, as well as the independence of each operating company within it, and he says its competitive set is somewhere between the industry's biggest independent, Horizon Media, and Fort Worth, TX-based PMG, both of which have also been acquiring and diversifying their portfolios too.