Marketing Agencies
Clients can make the asset themselves now. They won’t keep paying agency rates to produce it.
Sell them what they can’t make: how they show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Edelman’s GEOsight and 5W already do.
The pressure marketing agencies are facing right now.
Deliverable Pricing Collapse
Deliverable-based pricing is collapsing. A blog post that took 4 hours now takes 30 minutes.
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.
What firms like yours are designing in the Workshop.
Most firms feel the itch and start experimenting: a few tools, a pilot, a project that looked promising on paper. The expensive version is finding out a year in that clients won’t pay for it. Whether you’re still deciding where to start or already two pilots in, the Workshop narrows what you take to your clients before you commit more budget to building it.
Every engagement is different. Your team’s domain expertise is the input. These are the kinds of offerings marketing agencies leave with, specified and priced. Your team tests them with named clients, then builds what earns it.
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.
83%
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 Most Valuable Input in AI Is the Thing You Sell by the Hour
AI companies spent a decade pricing human work: commodity rates for execution, billions for judgment. Your hourly invoice charges for both at the same rate.
From Episodic to Continuous: The Revenue Model That Doesn’t Reset to Zero
Every professional services engagement starts at zero. The continuous model (always-on monitoring, subscription advisory, real-time pipelines) eliminates the re-sell cycle.
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%. Its CEO stated: “The reality is 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. 83% of marketing leaders say they would reduce agency spending further if they could fully automate content creation. 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). Most agencies have adopted AI tools internally. Revenue hasn’t changed because they haven’t changed what they sell. 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.
$15,000
A full day with your senior team, then 2–3 offering briefs. Test what clients will pay for before you build.
Book a conversation30 minutes with Shawn Yeager. No pitch.