Geoff Clarke, Managing Director, Business Transformation, Omnicom Media
There's a question doing the rounds in boardrooms and pitch presentations across our industry: Are media agencies becoming obsolete? It's usually asked with a mix of genuine curiosity and thinly veiled concern, often by clients who've read one too many LinkedIn posts about AI replacing entire marketing departments.
My response - forged over three decades in this industry's engine room – is a hard no. We’re not becoming obsolete, but we are finally being forced to confront what we should have been doing all along.
Do we have the courage to let AI replace the parts of our business models that were not defensible in the first place.
The reality is no-one is prepared to openly discuss our industry’s value. Let's be honest, much of the traditional media agency model has been built on high-frequency, manual, low-value tasks dressed up as strategic expertise. Campaign setup, spreadsheet wrangling and reporting that could be automated with a halfway decent macro. We've employed brilliant people genuinely talented strategists, both from a pure strategic and implementation, execution points of view, and then buried them in administrative quicksand.
Sadly, I've watched this play out for years. A junior executive, brimming with ideas and energy, spends 70% of their week copying and pasting data between platforms, building decks that repackage last month's deck, or chasing invoices. When they finally get a moment to think strategically, they're too exhausted to do it well. We call this "paying your dues." What it really is, is the accumulated cost of decisions made for short-term convenience at the expense of long-term value. In other words, ‘operational debt’.
AI and broader Technology Convergence are not making us obsolete. They're exposing the parts of business that were always vulnerable to commoditisation because they were never truly strategic to begin with.
The agencies will grow are those who embrace this reckoning.
To thrive, agencies must recalibrate the engine room, from execution to elevation and allow AI to finally deploy human talent where it actually creates value.
By automating the mundane campaign setup, routine optimisation, basic reporting teams can be liberated to focus on what machines genuinely cannot do:
- Deep strategic thinking: Analyse complex market dynamics, identify emerging cultural trends, craft long-term brand narratives.
- Creative problem-solving: Use AI as a co-pilot for ideation, not a replacement for human creativity and intuition.
- Client partnership: Build relationships rooted in trust, understand nuanced business challenges, and provide bespoke solutions that go beyond the response for proposal (RFP).
- Intellectual property development: Invest time in proprietary frameworks, tools, and insights that differentiate an agencies offering.
This isn't about doing more with less; it is doing better with different. Every hour reclaimed from manual processes is an hour reinvested in upper-funnel, strategic resource allocation. The result is a higher percentage of a team's time is spent on work that genuinely moves the needle for clients without necessarily increasing net cost dramatically. Even if it does increase cost, there is a strong argument to justify paying for improved IP.
This is the shift from a business model where humans execute tasks to one where humans leverage AI to amplify strategic and creative impact. It's not a reduction in human value; it’s an elevation of it.
There is a commercial solution, but the industry has been too afraid to build it, and commercial models haven't kept pace with this evolution.
For too long, agency remuneration has centred on inputs, such as billings, assumed resource requirements, hours worked. This approach inadvertently positions agency fees as the hero, rather than the tangible outcomes that drive client success. It's a model that made sense in an era when media buying was opaque and execution was labour-intensive but in the age of AI and programmatic transparency, it's indefensible.
The future lies in output-based commercial models, pre-defined, pre-purchased packages of agreed-upon deliverables, directly connected to measurable business outcomes. Transparency, predictability and value-centric remuneration tied to produced output, not hours logged.
This isn't a radical idea; it’s how most other professional services industries operate. Yet in media, we've clung to outdated structures because they were familiar, not because they were fit for purpose.
AI forces the conversation. If a machine can execute the task, why should a client pay a human rate for it? The answer is simple: they shouldn't. But they should pay a premium for the strategic insight, creative thinking, and business impact that only humans augmented by AI can deliver.
The most profound shift AI enables is media agencies can finally become what we've always claimed to be, strategic consultancies, not just media buyers.
AI-powered analytics allow agencies to process vastly larger and more complex datasets at unprecedented speeds, unearthing insights that were previously undetectable. Real-time optimisation, predictive modelling and sophisticated attribution across fragmented customer journeys.
Media agencies are no longer just placing ads; they are providing data-driven strategic consulting services that directly impacts a clients' bottom line.
I believe the future for media agencies is not one of obsoletion, it is one of transformation. What's becoming obsolete isn't the agency, it's the outdated practices, bloated processes, and defensive commercial models that as an industry, we’ve been too comfortable to challenge.
AI is the mirror and what it's reflecting back at us is a choice, evolve or calcify. The agencies that will lead the future are those that embrace this transformation, recalibrating their talent, reinventing their commercial models, and harness AI not as a cost-cutting tool, but as a catalyst for delivering unparalleled strategic value.