Jay Pattisall, the Forrester Research advertising analyst is back, and this time with a doozy of a prediction: starting in 2024, the big gun advertising battle will be waged between large agencies, each vying to build brand-proprietary AI platforms for their clients.  

As reported by Adweek’s Olivia Morley, this will mean: 

“Agencies will shift from traditional services toward selling productized technology marketing services.”

“AI, in its various forms,” will be imperative to “agencies’ solution-oriented models.”

“Each brand (will have) its own bespoke algorithm trained by the presence of a foundational model layered on top of that (algorithm).”

“Instead of earning coin by charging for “FTEs,” a.k.a. human beings doing actual work, the industry will be “getting paid for the technology.”

“Encouraged by AI’s cost savings, CMOS will lean on external agencies”—especially “those equipped to create and scale content faster.” 

As a result, “digital specialty shops” will either vanish or be assimilated into larger, integrated, orgs. In-house, ditto, since it’ll be cheaper to outsource your LLM than DIY.

Lot o’ bolts in this bucket, but if you’re wondering how this will really work in practice, and in non-tech speak, here’s what to expect—

Those who can afford the capital requirements, most likely holding companies and the large consultancies, are now all building out the basic AI platforms.  

Once completed, these systems can be “trained” on a brand’s history, audience, language, and analytics. The services purchased, and the interface—think the CMO’s privy dashboard—can be tweaked to be precisely what’s desired. After which, you can ditch a whole lot of both in-house and external agency meatware, since automated is always going to be faster and cheaper.

Whether it will be more interesting or effective is something else entirely. 

As of this moment, I’m with the tech CEO who observed “if the future looks a lot like the past,” AI will be bloody perfect. However, if you’re interested in something new and powerful, well, bro, sis, or other, you can parse all the damn books in the library and still never, ever, come up with a single new idea.

Still, I don’t gainsay what the analyst says. He says he’s already seen prototypes.

It also makes total sense that this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Lacking either the corporate mettle or the skill to overcome advertising’s central challenges and demonstrate sustainable value, the bigs will push this with all of their M&A might.

And, with that, the script directions might read, “exeunt, stage right,” for the agency model as a whole.

After all, when the core proposition is “our built-to-rent-AI is better than their built-to-rent-AI” what the real product?

It’s not creativity. In fact, it’s not even advertising, at all. Is it?