Marketing Agencies
Clients can produce the asset. They can’t see how they appear in ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Sell them that visibility. Edelman 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.
60%
of marketing leaders cut agency spending in 2025 because of AI.
eMarketer
15%
of agency jobs are forecast to be eliminated in 2026.
Forrester
8.6%
more was spent on ads the year agency holding companies lost revenue.
eMarketer
Assessment
See how your firm compares.
Eight minutes. You get an assessment showing where your firm has real commercial gaps, how you compare to peers in your vertical, and a report you can take to your next partner meeting.
See where you standWhat 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.
Related reading
Efficiency Is the On-Ramp, Not the Destination
A $5.6B legal AI vendor’s own customers report winning new work and moving to fixed fees. The efficiency story is real. It’s also only the on-ramp.
What the Billable Hour Was Hiding
For decades the hour bundled execution and judgment into one number, and nobody had to pull them apart. AI changed that, and most firms still can’t say how much of their rate is which.
Questions
60% of marketing leaders spent less on agencies in 2025 because of AI (eMarketer). 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. AI content program margins run 65–75% vs. 40–50% on traditional production (Digital Agency Network).
The deliverable model is breaking. One in four North American agencies has shifted to fixed-fee pricing (Forrester / Dentsu, Adweek May 2026). 78% now use monthly retainer models, up from 64% in 2023. 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.
AI content program margins run 65–75% versus 40–50% on traditional production (Digital Agency Network). 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.