Marketing Agencies
Any agency can buy the tools. Buying them won’t set yours apart.
Clients can already buy 7 of 16 marketing service lines from AI companies. Edelman and 5W already sell clients a service with AI built in: how they show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Services your firm could sell next.
New services marketing agencies sell with AI doing the legwork, each built on work your team already does.
AI search visibility audit
Shows a client how it appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, then sets out the content and site fixes that change it.
AI media buying, with your strategy on top
AI plans, buys and adjusts the client’s media; your agency sells access to it, and your people set the strategy.
AI content oversight, by subscription
A monthly fee for the agency to review the client’s AI-made content for brand voice, keep its metadata in order and oversee the AI tools producing it.
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 what clients already buy from AI companies.
About three minutes. It names what clients in your field already buy from AI companies and gives you three steps toward a new service your firm could sell, in a report for your next partner meeting.
Take the free assessment83%
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
You’ll Answer for the AI You Never Touched
Most agency clients hold their agency accountable for AI in their marketing, even when their own in-house team runs it. They have named an offering, and most agencies hand it over for free.
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.
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 on your agenda. In 20 minutes you’ll get our first read on it and a direction worth pursuing.
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