Key Messages
- AI doesn’t make agencies obsolete; it makes them more relevant. As data, technology, platform logic, and business goals converge, strategic consulting becomes more important – consulting that derives real impact from these elements.
- The value of agencies is shifting from execution to business impact. AI takes over repetitive tasks, freeing up time for critical services such as strategy, guidelines, creativity, growth, and measurable results.
- In the age of AI, human interpretation is needed more than ever. Without strategic guidance, AI systems often optimize for averages, efficiency, or easily measurable KPIs. Agencies ensure this results in distinctive, credible, and economically relevant communication.
Topic Overview
Seven Developments Shaping the Debate
The current industry debate offers a clear picture of where agencies stand. Advertisers are questioning their operating models, expanding their in-house capabilities, evaluating AI platforms, and expecting agencies to deliver far more than just execution. This has quickly fueled the narrative that agencies are becoming irrelevant. However, I believe the opposite is true. AI makes many things easier, so the real task is becoming more demanding: turning data, technology, and platform dynamics into sound business guidance and decisions.
The push toward in-housing is understandable. Many companies want greater control over their data, costs, and speed. However, control dies not equate to impact. Anyone who believes that complex decisions can be managed in the long term through an AI interface is confusing ease of use with the ability to influence outcomes. Many companies will test this approach. It will only work sustainably where technology, strategic consulting, proven expertise, and business knowledge truly come together.
For this reason, the current debate should not focus on the demise of the agency. Rather, it should serve as the starting point for redefining the agency’s role. Clients are rightly looking for closer, longer-term partnerships, greater proximity to the business, less budget administration, and a stronger contribution to growth and profitability.
This does not mean that agencies are becoming obsolete. Quite the opposite. As communications become more intertwined with technology, data, transactions, and business performance, companies need partners who can understand, manage, and translate this complexity into results.
At least seven developments support this view.
First: Data
In recent years, we have become highly proficient at using structured data, such as age, gender, purchase history, and click paths. AI is now opening up a much larger world of unstructured data, such as sentiment in reviews, tone in customer support chats, and context in images and videos. This is not just an incremental improvement in how we work. It is a fundamental one. It brings us closer to understanding the real reasons behind our audiences’ purchasing decisions, offering insights into actual behavior rather than statistical approximations. McKinsey estimates that targeted personalization alone can improve marketing efficiency by 10 to 30 percent, and while corporate adoption has already exceeded 90 percent. Anyone who sees this as evidence that agencies are becoming obsolete has misunderstood situation. It simply makes us smarter and better at what we do.
Second: Collaboration With Platforms
The relationship between agencies and major platforms is often tense. Some of that tension is understandable, since each platform must protect its stakeholders’ value. Nonetheless, today, AI is consolidating and connecting media consumption to such an extent that close collaboration has become an economic imperative for both sides, whether Mark Zuckerberg likes it or not. The Boston Consulting Group consistently describes AI as the defining technological disruption of our time. AI systems can plan, reason, and act autonomously. They are equipped with reasoning capabilities, memory, tool use, and delegated decision-making authority. This is precisely what makes the agency’s job more demanding. Platforms are providing increasingly powerful systems, and clients want more control. Agencies must bring the two together. This will not replace us. Rather, it will make us essential translators between platform dynamics, client data, and business strategy.
Third: The Inverted Pyramid
Although communications and media are evolving, they still involve a considerable amount of manual, sometimes repetitive work, including reporting, optimization cycles, and standardized processes. AI is increasingly taking over these tasks. This does not represent a loss. AI creates capacity by providing more time and expertise for strategic work, meaningful communications consulting, and solving clients’ business challenges. According to a report by the Boston Consulting Group, 42 percent of frontline employees who regularly use AI are already saving an average of one full workday per week. That time does not simply disappear. It can be redirected toward work that makes our industry more relevant, such as strategy rather than execution.
Fourth: Guardrails
We need to openly address the risk here rather than ignore it: Left to their own devices, optimization algorithms almost always gravitate toward the average. They optimize for what is easiest to measure, such as clicks, reach, and superficial engagement, rather than focusing on what delivers the greatest business value. AdExchanger aptly describes this phenomenon as a "sea of sameness." Scaling a mediocre strategy simply produces more mediocrity, not better results. This is precisely why our expertise will become increasingly important. AI systems require strategic guardrails defined by people. Within those boundaries, systems may compete to optimize for the best outcome in a given situation rather than settling for an average result. Defining those guardrails is strategic consulting in its purest form.
Fifth: Credibility and Distinctiveness
In a world where content can be generated in unlimited quantities and virtually any form, distinctive, unexpected work that deliberately challenges convention becomes the most valuable currency. The first reliable data points already support this idea. According to Gallup, enthusiasm for AI among Gen Z declined from 36 percent to 22 percent in one year. Daily users showed the greatest decline in optimism. In other words, skepticism grows with experience. The value of strategic creativity remains. It's not just about producing a single appealing advertising idea. It's about having the courage to think two steps ahead, stand out from the crowd, and identify possibilities that others haven't seen yet. This is precisely why agencies are needed now more than ever.
Sixth: Talent
Strong talent will be more important to clients than ever before. The generation that grew up with AI brings a new set of capabilities, including an intuitive understanding of technology, curiosity, and a different pace when working with tools and data. For agencies, this presents an opportunity. They can leverage these capabilities to provide high-quality consulting services and become more attractive to the next generation of talent. Forbes describes this as Gen Z’s “unexpected advantage” in an AI-driven job market. Rather than fearing it, the industry should actively embrace this advantage.
Seventh: Genuine Business Partnership
AI provides greater speed, a deeper understanding of transactions, and more shared data intelligence. This is the real answer to the in-housing debate. The future isn't about moving communications and media entirely in-house. Rather, it's about fostering stronger, smarter, and more enduring connections between companies and their agency partners. This involves operating closer to the client’s business, allocating less time to budget administration, and assuming greater responsibility for growth, profitability, and impact. Agencies often have closer relationships with end customers than other internal departments. People now spend roughly half of their waking hours in front of a screen, and this percentage continues to rise. Therefore, media has never been more relevant. AI enables us to more precisely understand the value of every interaction, from transaction to brand strength to ultimate campaign objective. The 4As' Look Ahead 2026 report clearly describes this shift: compensation is moving away from execution alone and toward outcome-based partnerships. In these partnerships, agencies become strategic advisors and active contributors to client transformation. AI will further strengthen collaboration across the relationship between consumers, agencies, and advertisers. The objective remains one that has defined our industry for decades: delivering the right message to the right person at the right time.
"AI will make agencies obsolete." This argument is too simplistic.
The demise of media agencies was previously predicted with the advent of programmatic advertising, and again with the emergence of social platforms. In reality, however, our industry has used these developments to build new capabilities, such as a stronger understanding of technology, greater data expertise, and more strategic consulting. The same process will unfold with AI, only faster and at a more fundamental level. Agencies that redefine their role will not disappear. They will become more relevant, closer to business impact and the value they create for clients, and closer to the future needs of communications.
This Article was first published in Horizont (German).
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About Mediaplus
Mediaplus is one of the largest independent media agencies in Europe and part of the Serviceplan Group — an integrated communications network headquartered in Munich. Founded in 1983, the agency group today brings together around 2,200 specialists across more than 20 wholly owned offices in Europe as well as markets in Asia, the Middle East, and North America. Through partner locations, Mediaplus maintains a presence at 42 sites worldwide. Its service portfolio spans Media Strategy & Innovation, Media Planning & Buying, Data & AI, Performance Marketing, Advertising Technologies, and Commerce & Retail Media. Through its group-wide AI framework House of AI, Mediaplus combines proprietary data models with deep market expertise to deliver measurable brand growth for its clients. Mediaplus has repeatedly been ranked among the leading independent media agencies in both the WARC Media 100 and the RECMA Quality Ranking, and was named Media Agency of the Year at the German Media Awards for the fifth time in 2026.