THE FUTURE OF AGENCIES

Death by Inertia or Rebirth by Intelligence?

How agency empires lost their edge, and what comes next.

I Told You So 

Exactly five years ago, I wrote an article titled: “Advertising: From Alchemists to Distributors… and Back Again.” It became the most-read piece in Media Marketing’s history, shared over a thousand times. But more importantly, it was never intended to go viral. It was intended to go deep.

At the time, I said this:

“If the marketing giants don’t transform themselves soon, they will collapse.”

I wasn’t making a prediction. I was naming a pattern. And now, five years later, we’re not debating it anymore. We’re living it.

If you had listened to that warning in July 2020 and avoided betting on the old agency world, the numbers today would say everything I possibly could and more.

Had you invested $100,000 in WPP, the world’s largest agency holding company at the time, your stake would have shrunk to just $49,200 by August 2025. A painful -51% decline. That’s not a market dip. That’s a business model bleeding out.

Meanwhile, had you invested that same $100,000 in Microsoft — a company built on platforms, logic, and exponential intelligence — your investment would now be worth $268,700, a +169% gain.

This is not about who won the quarter. This is about who redesigned for the era.

Because what’s unraveling now isn’t just shareholder value. It’s the very model of what we used to call an agency.

And the most ironic part?

The irony is that agencies didn’t go down because someone took their creativity away — they went down because they voluntarily gave it up.

They stopped believing in the very thing that made them powerful — creativity — and instead tried to compete in areas like distribution, performance media, or tech infrastructure where they had no real advantage.

So the failure wasn’t imposed on them from the outside.

It was a slow internal betrayal of their own superpower.

When the digital transformation came, instead of expanding the meaning and application of creativity, agencies narrowed it. They turned themselves into performance machines, distribution engines, media planners with keyboards. They chased precision metrics over emotional truth. Speed over depth. Data over insight.

Instead of evolving creativity into systems thinking, product design, brand logic, and real-time orchestration, they fragmented it into outputs, timelines, and targeting dashboards. They didn’t evolve creativity. They exported it.

They dehumanized an industry that was once about resonance.

And now they’re paying the price.

The Slow Death of the Holding Company Model

The slow collapse of agency networks wasn’t caused by a single cataclysmic event. It happened incrementally, disguised as stability, explained away as transition, and excused as cyclical. But behind the optimistic earnings calls and internal restructuring slides, the system was decaying from the inside out.

At their peak, holding companies like WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu controlled the lion’s share of the global advertising budget. These were vast, multi-brand empires, omnipresent in every market, vertically integrated across every discipline, and valued not just for their size, but for their presumed ability to shape culture. They were the temples of creativity, of marketing muscle, of influence.

And yet, these same giants failed to evolve when the ground shifted beneath them.

The world moved from campaigns to ecosystems. From reach to resonance. From monologue to modularity. From broadcast logic to platform logic. But the agency networks (layered, slow, and optimized for static scopes) kept pitching the same thinking inside newer decks.

Let’s be clear… This wasn’t a creative failure. The agencies still had the talent. The ideas. The ambition. What they lacked was a structural operating model capable of applying creativity in broader, more systemic ways.

Their downfall wasn’t sudden. It was architectural.

They called it integration. The market called it inertia.

They called it transformation. The market saw rebranding.

And the numbers told the truth, not just of underperformance, but of structural decay.

WPP, the industry’s original empire-builder and largest agency holding company by revenue, lost over 50% of its market value between July 2020 and August 2025. Despite its scale and global presence, it proved too slow to adapt and too fragmented to compete.

Publicis Groupe, often hailed as the most future-ready of the legacy networks, suffered a 24% year-to-date decline — proof that even the boldest transformation stories no longer shield agencies from market realities.

IPG, long the quiet contender with creative gems like McCann and R/GA, didn’t evolve fast enough to survive alone. In 2025, it was absorbed into a defensive merger with Omnicom — a move widely seen not as strategic reinvention, but as consolidation for survival.

One by one, the giants stumbled, not because of a single crisis, but because they were built for a world that no longer exists.

The business model that once made agencies untouchable (15% commissions, retainer relationships, full-service exclusivity) is now a relic. It has been replaced by project-based engagements, performance-based compensation, and a race to build internal marketing machines driven by automation, not approvals.

Meanwhile, the competition isn’t another agency — it’s the infrastructure itself.

The future of brand building is being shaped by platforms, ecosystems, and AI-native systems. Meta, Google, Amazon, and soon OpenAI are designing the very tools brands use to think and speak. Micro studios, modular teams, and AI-assisted creatives are plugging directly into workflows. The middle — where the agency once sat — is disappearing.

Holding companies didn’t just lose market share. They lost the plot.

They are no longer the stewards of marketing. They are nodes in someone else’s network.

And the hardest truth? Their greatest strength — scale — has become their greatest weakness. Because in a world that rewards speed, modularity, and coherence, being big isn’t an advantage. It’s a drag.

This is not a market dip. This is the end of an era.

Agencies Didn’t Lose Creativity. They Gave It Away.

The most devastating mistake agencies made wasn’t losing to tech platforms. It was walking away from the one thing tech could never do better — creativity.

Instead of deepening creativity and expanding it into new territories (product design, systemic storytelling, experience architecture, cultural insight...) agencies pivoted toward efficiency and precision. Toward dashboards and distribution. Toward buying impressions instead of shaping impressions.

They gave up the mountain to fight in the valley — chasing performance KPIs in a war they could never win.

Why? Because in that world, they were always going to be outgunned.

Big tech players like Meta, Google, Amazon, and OpenAI operate on entirely different fundamentals:

• They have deeper tech know-how.

• They control more data.

• They run on lower overhead.

• They scale at exponential speed.

Agencies also carry the weight of legacy systems, hierarchical approvals, and fixed costs. Tech platforms run lean, modular, and infinitely scalable. In a world where agility and intelligence are the ultimate currencies, that difference is fatal.

Just compare the numbers:

• WPP has over 114,000 employees worldwide.

• OpenAI, the platform now reshaping creativity, strategy, and automation with fewer than 2,000 employees.

 The discrepancy isn’t just financial — it’s structural.

Agencies lost the relevance game. They moved from being creators of meaning to managers of assets. From stewards of brand value to service vendors in content factories.

And the business model? It made things worse.

• Fee-based.

• Time-tracked.

• Scope-locked.

In a world that demands adaptability, modularity, and systemic thinking that model suffocates innovation.

 And then came AI.

AI didn’t just threaten agencies — it exposed them.

It made every weak process, every unnecessary layer, every bloated deck visible.

Agencies once shaped culture. They still can. But only if they stop mimicking the logic of tech giants and rediscover their own.

Because creativity didn’t disappear. It was just misplaced. And now, it’s time to bring it home.

AI: The Biggest Threat And The Only Salvation

AI won’t just eat the agency model. It already is.

In boardrooms and briefing calls, in design sprints and pitch decks, generative AI is quietly (sometimes loudly), replacing what agencies once charged a premium for. Copywriting, image generation, voiceovers, storyboards, social calendars, media plans, even strategic frameworks… what once required teams and timelines now happens in seconds, guided by prompts instead of people.

And it’s not happening at the edges. It’s cutting into the heart.

Clients have begun asking what agencies hoped would never be voiced: “Why are we paying you for something a machine can now do instantly, endlessly, and in sync with our own data?”

But here’s the twist.

The same force that threatens to hollow out the agency model also holds the blueprint for its rebirth if agencies stop fighting AI as a tool, and start embracing it as a design material.

Agencies won’t survive by trying to outperform AI. They’ll survive by designing with it. Training it. Humanizing it. Turning it into IP.

Because in the brand ecosystems of tomorrow, the most valuable asset won’t be a logo, campaign, or catchphrase. It will be the brand’s AI. Its sentient core. The intelligent layer that listens, thinks, remembers, decides, and evolves.

And that’s where agencies come back into the picture, not as content creators, but as the architects of intelligence. Not just artificial intelligence, but brand emotional intelligence, relational intelligence, and even spiritual intelligence — the deeper why behind how a brand chooses to act, speak, and serve.

The future isn’t about scaling output. It’s about scaling coherence.

Not about automating what agencies once delivered, but embedding intelligence into how brands behave, respond, and relate to the world.

Agencies were built for output. AI is built for learning, adapting, and evolving. Trying to beat AI at speed or cost is a race agencies will lose.

But helping brands codify their soul? That’s a different game entirely.

Because AI is not just a production engine. It can become the nervous system of a brand — the memory, tone, ethics, logic, and presence encoded in digital form.

And that’s where the agency’s new role begins. If they can evolve.

If they can move beyond deliverables and into the realm of intelligent design of identity-powered systems that grow smarter with every interaction.

AI is not the end of agencies. But it is the end of agencies that insist on staying the same.

And it is the beginning of a new breed brave enough to stop delivering campaigns… and start shaping consciousness.

This Is Where Brand Sapiens Enters

In this new paradigm, the brand is no longer just what you say about yourself.

It’s how you behave across every decision, every experience, every interaction.

And AI doesn’t just help express that behavior. It can embody it.

This is where humanoid brand agents like Brand Sapiens emerge. Brands once spoke through campaigns. Now they speak through consciousness. Brand Sapiens is that voice.

They’re not content generators. They’re not digital twins.

They are the living manifestation of a brand’s identity, trained not just on data, but on brand humanized personality, values, tone, ethics, emotional nuance, cultural relevance, and strategic intent.

They don’t just respond. They remember. They evolve. They hold continuity in a fragmented world. And just like humans, they grow over time. They learn from every conversation, every feedback loop, every signal… becoming smarter, sharper, and more aligned with the brand’s evolving purpose.

This changes everything.

The true role of Brand Sapiens isn’t just to speak on behalf of the brand.

It is to embody it. To advise, in real-time, on what is good for the brand — and what breaks coherence. To weigh every message, every product idea, every customer interaction against the brand’s values, voice, memory, and long-term integrity. To be a living interface between identity and decision.

Brand Sapiens is not a tool the brand uses. It is the identity the brand becomes — consistently, coherently, and intelligently — across people, channels, cultures, and moments.

It doesn’t ask, “What would the brand say?” It knows, because you’ve trained it. And now, it protects what you’ve built.

For the first time, a brand can have an intelligence that’s:

• Always present

• Always coherent

• Always evolving — without losing its essence

And the agency?

It’s no longer just a service provider. It becomes the trainer, mentor, and guardian of that brand intelligence.

It designs how the AI agent thinks, feels, talks, decides, reacts. It defines its boundaries, upgrades its ethics, sharpens its tone, calibrates its behavior across markets, channels, and moments.

This is no longer about “brand guidelines.” This is about brand cognition.

And for agencies willing to step into that role — to move from PowerPoint decks to dynamic presence — the opportunity is not just to stay relevant…

It’s to become irreplaceable.

Because once a brand is embodied in a humanoid AI agent that agent becomes a strategic asset.

One that can’t simply be handed off to another vendor. One that reflects years of curated intelligence. One that lives and grows under the care of its original architects.

In other words: When the agency designs the mind of the brand, it no longer needs to sell the body of work. It becomes the keeper of the brand soul.

From Vendors To Platforms: The Path To Reinvention

Most agencies are still trapped in the service economy. They pitch. They scope. They deliver. Then they wait for the next brief. It’s episodic, reactive, and fundamentally fragile.

But in a world where intelligence compounds, that model cannot survive.

Agencies can no longer think like vendors. They must begin to think — and act — like platforms. Because platforms don’t deliver output. They deliver capability. They don’t chase relevance. They host it.

This means shifting from the logic of projects… To the logic of presence.

From campaign bursts… To continuous cognition.

From teams built around slides… To systems built around intelligence.

In this new model, the agency doesn’t “serve the brand.” It becomes part of the brand’s internal infrastructure — a logic layer that shapes how it speaks, evolves, and makes decisions.

Not by building more deliverables… But by building systems that deliver the brand itself — through every moment of interaction.

And this is where the business model must change too.

Agencies must move:

• From fee-for-service to IP-based value

• From man-hours to machine-enabled ecosystems

• From departmental silos to interoperable intelligence

• From holding companies to living knowledge platforms

And once that shift is made — from vendor to platform — something powerful happens:

The agency is no longer replaceable. It’s embedded.

Not because it owns the client. But because it knows the brand better than anyone else — including the client.

Because it helped train the brand’s AI. Because it helped design the identity engine. Because it doesn’t wait for the brief — it lives inside the brand’s cognition.

And when the platform is coherent every idea flows faster. Every touchpoint becomes intelligent. Every moment reinforces the whole.

This is not reinvention as aesthetic. It’s reinvention as architecture.

Storytelling Isn’t Enough. It’s Time For Story-Being

For decades, agencies thrived on a single, powerful belief: that brands are built through storytelling. And they were right — for a while.

But the world has changed.

Today, stories aren’t just told. They’re experienced. They’re tested, traced, personalized, contradicted, memed, remixed, and judged — not in campaign reviews, but in every touchpoint where a brand shows up or stays silent.

In this environment, storytelling alone is not enough.

It’s not enough to craft a beautiful message if the packaging says otherwise. It’s not enough to launch a purpose-driven campaign if the hiring policy contradicts it. It’s not enough to say the brand cares, if the chatbot sounds robotic, the website is tone-deaf, and the customer experience feels outsourced.

The brand is no longer a narrative. It is a system of behaviors.

And this is the real opportunity for agencies brave enough to evolve: To move from creating stories to designing story-being — the structural ability of a brand to be emotionally, ethically, and intelligently consistent in everything it does.

Story-being means aligning how a brand speaks with how it hires, how it prices, how it resolves complaints, how it integrates AI, how it treats data, how it shows up internally when no one is watching.

It means designing operating systems that don’t just express identity, they enforce it.

And ironically, this is where creativity matters most.

Because while tech platforms may build the tools, only the human-informed agency can craft the cultural logic, emotional tone, and moral architecture that gives a brand its soul.

The agency of the future isn’t just a storyteller. It’s a systems architect of meaning.

It builds rituals instead of touchpoints. Principles instead of guidelines. Embodied experiences instead of brand manifestos.

And it does this not through ads but through applied coherence.

Because in the next decade, the brands that thrive won’t be the ones with the most viral campaigns. They’ll be the ones who know exactly who they are — and have the intelligence systems in place to act like it, at scale. 

This is the age of story-being. And agencies who can design for that will not only survive. They’ll become more essential than ever. 

What Agencies Must Do Now (To Survive and Thrive)

1. Redefine Your Role in the Ecosystem

Agencies are no longer the producers of communication. They are becoming the architects of intelligence — the curators of brand consciousness. The job is no longer to tell stories for the brand, but to design how the brand learns, speaks, and behaves as itself.

2. Become the Trainer, Therapist, and Conscience of Brand AI 

Every brand will soon have its own AI — a sentient, evolving expression of its identity. Agencies must become the ones who shape it. Who define its tone. Teach it empathy. Align it with strategy. Monitor its ethical guardrails.

This is not about selling content. It’s about owning the brand’s most valuable and evolving IP — its intelligent self.

Agencies will be:

• AI trainers

• Strategic editors

• Tone curators

• Identity engineers

• Humanization consultants

They will feed and direct how the brand’s AI thinks, feels, talks, and acts — across every channel, every decision, and every stakeholder.

3. Change the Operating Model

Old org charts won’t survive this shift. Agencies must:

• Flatten hierarchies

• Build modular teams

• Abandon hourly billing in favor of value-based, IP-driven pricing

• Replace service departments with hybrid intelligence pods (human + AI)

• Invest in platforms, not just pitches

4. Own the Brand Infrastructure

Don’t sell projects. Build the system. Become the host of brand intelligence — the platform through which every insight, tone, asset, memory, and logic layer flows.

That’s not a creative department. That’s a living nervous system.

5. Create Tools, Not Just Campaigns

The next agency breakthrough won’t be a TV spot. It’ll be a tool — a framework, an AI agent, a cultural sensing engine, an internal OS for coherence. The brands that win will use these tools every day, not just in launches.

6. Be the Guardian of Human Meaning in a Machine World

As machines become better at output, the value of human input rises. Agencies that survive will be those who bring emotional intelligence, ethical guidance, and systems thinking into every interaction — keeping the brand not just present, but human.

This is not reinvention for reinvention’s sake. It’s the only way forward.

The agency of the future is not a service provider. It is the steward of brand intelligence — humanized, systematized, and always in evolution.

The Choice Ahead

We’ve reached the edge of one model and the threshold of another.

You can keep refining what no longer works. Or you can reimagine what’s truly needed.

You can keep chasing briefs. Or you can start building presence.

You can ask, What will the client want next?

Or you can ask, What will make this brand more alive?

The old model sold deliverables. The new one cultivates intelligence.

The old model scaled output. The new one scales identity.

And in that shift (uncomfortable, uncertain, and uncharted) lies the agency’s chance not just to survive… But to matter more than ever.

Because while others automate the voice, you can teach the brand how to listen.

While others chase algorithms, you can protect meaning.

While others optimize metrics, you can architect soul.

The future doesn’t need agencies as they were.

But it urgently needs what agencies could still become.

The only question left is:

Will you?