THE AGENCY AS OPERATING LAYER

The media agencies furthest along with AI are becoming the operating layer their clients run their marketing on. Client teams at those firms check performance directly inside the agency’s platform, and at least one holding company is piloting a persistent agent that sits with both teams and flags issues before anyone asks. The shift is starting to reprice how agencies win business, get paid and get valued.

Our latest point of view is written by Andreas Roell, our Founder and CEO, with Jitendra Kumar, Head of Commercial, Advertising at Hightouch and Strategic Advisor at Evros Group. Jitendra spent 20 years at Google leading its agency and ad tech partnerships. Together they map the data foundation the leading agencies are building and the pricing model most likely to replace FTE retainers.

Across our sale processes and value creation work, most independent agencies sit earlier on this path than they believe. For founders, the measure that matters is the share of each client’s daily workflow running on something the agency owns, and we believe buyers will weigh that share heavily when pricing the business.

If you’re weighing how far your agency is from this model, download the report, and we would be glad to discuss what it means for your business