Agencies will never die!

Everyone's saying it. Agencies are finished. Google and Meta want the whole thing to run itself, cutting out the middlemen. And lately, it sounds true.

And I believed it too, a while ago. Then I tested it myself. All of it. CLIs, MCPs, the hottest features and models out there, promising the whole lot of it. And pushed them as far as they'd go, worth noting, I hold an IT degree and an MBA, and exited as founder of a programmatic media agency I scaled over ten years.

A lot keeps its promise. Work that used to take a whole agency before can now be done all alone.

But what the tools still can't do: take any responsibility. Tell a system to do what it takes to achieve a goal, and it will do it somehow. But is it the right way? Was there no other option? The more you keep asking these questions, the more you drown in both opportunities and uncertainty.

So my personal outcome and belief is: yes, AI does help us. As adtech helped us. But will it replace agencies? I honestly doubt it. Clients are lightyears away from understanding, let alone applying, let alone taking responsibility for creating advertising and running media budgets on their own. At least not most of them. Because they just don't have the time to understand and do so. Or the organizational structure allowing them to.

That's why there will always be demand for agencies. Creative, experienced, consultative. Understanding the DNA of any client request, providing creative ideas, leading the way with options and a transparent basis for decisions, and helping them reach their goals without neglecting or risking their own job.