Marketing Agencies
Any agency can buy the tools. Buying them won’t set yours apart.
Per Upshift’s AI Exposure Index, 7 of 16 marketing service lines are work a client can now get without your agency. Edelman and 5W already sell clients a service with AI built in: how they show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Services firms like yours could sell next.
Examples of services marketing agencies could sell, with AI doing the legwork behind each. A pilot tests one on your own client work in two weeks. A plan picks which to pursue across the firm.
AI visibility audits and GEO
A productized audit that shows a client how it appears across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude, then prescribes the earned content, schema, and narrative moves to fix it.
Agentic media orchestration
A productized AI-driven planning, buying, and optimization layer sold as access to the agency’s orchestration capability with human strategy on top.
AI content governance subscription
A recurring subscription where the agency runs brand-voice review, schema and metadata governance, output audits, and autonomous-agent oversight on the client’s AI content operation.
What’s changing for marketing agencies.
Deliverable pricing collapse
Deliverable-based pricing is collapsing.
Client insourcing
Clients are producing their own content with AI and questioning why they’re paying agency retainers.
Undercutting on price
Competitors are undercutting on price because they’ve figured out the AI-augmented model and you haven’t.
Pricing the AI workflow
Clients want to buy the agency’s AI capability directly, and no one has a model for pricing it.
13%
30%
Industry average
Agencies that narrowed their services
Assessment
See how your firm compares.
Eight minutes. You get an assessment showing where your firm has real commercial gaps, how you compare to other marketing agencies, and a report you can take to your next partner meeting.
See where your firm stands83%
of marketing leaders would cut agency spending if they could fully automate content.
Typeface, via eMarketer 2025
29.6%
of US ad spend now runs through the Big Six holding companies, down from 44.6% in 2019.
Advertiser Perceptions
85%
of agencies now prefer retainer work over projects, and engagements are running longer.
SparkToro, 2025
Related reading
The Offering Graveyard
New-service ideas stall when nobody records the client, what they said, or the price. Writing those down is what gets an idea to a pilot.
The Courage to Codify
The hardest shift in professional services is writing down what lives in senior partners’ heads and building it into a service that scales.
Questions
Not the ones that change what they sell. 60% of marketing leaders spent less on agencies in 2025 as a direct result of AI (Typeface via eMarketer), yet 52% say they want better ideas, not lower fees (Agency Edge 2026). Clients aren’t dropping agencies; they’re refusing to pay agency rates for production AI now does cheaply. Growth is going to agencies that sell strategy and outcomes instead of billable hours.
60% of marketing leaders spent less on agencies in 2025 because of AI (Typeface Signal Report, 2025). S4 Capital, parent of Monks, reported H1 2025 net revenue down 12.7%, with headcount cut 8.9%. Executive director Wes ter Haar told Digiday (September 2025): “AI is eating the agency business.” 83% would cut further if they could automate content creation in-house.
AI-visibility audits and brand-monitoring subscriptions covering how clients appear in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Edelman shipped GEOsight; 5W ships its own version. AI content-governance retainers where the agency owns oversight while the client generates the volume.
The deliverable model is breaking. One in four North American agencies has shifted to fixed-fee pricing (Forrester / Dentsu, Adweek May 2026), and 85% of agencies now prefer retainer work, up from 81% a year earlier (SparkToro). Search Engine Land reported in April 2026 that agencies are being squeezed from both sides: they automated delivery, but their clients adopted the same tools.
Ad spending grew 8.6% the year holding company revenues fell 1.2% (eMarketer). The deliverable layer is moving in-house. The agencies still winning are the ones selling visibility and governance, not asset volume.
15% of agency jobs are forecast to be eliminated in 2026 (Forrester). Using AI internally doesn’t change what an agency sells, and the efficiency advantage evaporated when clients adopted the same tools.
Agencies that reduced their services grew 13% at 30% net margins in 2025, against a 7.5%-growth, 13%-margin field (Promethean Research, 119 agencies). The math works when the contract is sold differently. It doesn’t when AI is bolted onto deliverable-based billing. The savings get passed through to clients as discounts.
Start as small as one idea, or as big as the whole firm.
Bring what put AI back on your agenda. In 20 minutes we’ll tell you whether it’s worth acting on, and where to start.
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