Even in the age of AI, agencies that know their value will never give everything over to the tool.
One of the big lessons I learned when working on a Miller Lite campaign back in the day was that agencies can come out with some really crazy work that pushes boundaries but it can’t stop there. Without a long-term branding strategy, a campaign that appears highly successful can register just a temporary spike in interest. The minute you roll back the media investment, attention returns to baseline.
At a time when content is being generated faster than ever before with AI, marketers should be grappling with the tension between disposable campaigns and building brand affinity over the long haul. Yet that’s not what is happening. With media being put up one day and disappearing the next, one side is winning out.
The numbers and ROI have become so dominant in the marketing landscape that people are losing sight of the top of the funnel — why people engage in the first place and why brand matters. We must remember that AI is just a tool. It can put messages in front of people at the right time, but those messages still have to resonate to be effective.
Balancing short-term efficiency with long-term branding is certainly a challenge, but it’s one all agencies now have to master.
The Race to the Bottom
The fintech company Klarna recently announced that artificial intelligence had helped it cut marketing agency spend by 25% through eliminating stock photography and using AI for 80% of its copywriting. But questions remain. What was the quality and impact of the work? Gartner also reports that marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of company revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023. In this “era of less,” most CMOs are banking on AI saving the day.
So many marketers feel they have no choice but to join this race to the bottom. But what are they giving up? Of course, we cannot lose sight of the transactional part of the funnel, but at some point you have to give people more than a rational reason to engage with a brand, otherwise the brand itself becomes commoditized.
The truth is, people connect with many brands through their hearts and emotions. You don’t win loyalty by giving 20% off someone’s next meal at Raising Cane’s. You engender loyalty by developing people’s affinity with the brand — and that’s precisely what AI doesn’t do well. There has to be some human engagement to keep campaigns connecting with consumers.
Align Around a Shared Vision
The challenging piece for anybody in marketing today is staying on top of trends and adapting from the traditional way great work gets created. AI may be saving time and money, but there still has to be care, thought, and creativity that goes into the impact that even disposable campaigns can have on a brand.
Toys “R” Us made a 66-second spot almost entirely with OpenAI’s text-to-video tool Sora in just a few weeks in order to debut at the Cannes Lions festival. The ad shows founder Charles Lazarus as a child dreaming of what would become the company’s mascot, Geoffrey the Giraffe. However, the depiction has been described as unsettling, nightmarish, and laden with mistakes and inconsistent character models.
In an environment like this where media moves so quickly and profits get slim, agencies may be tempted to turn everything over to the tool. I suggest taking the opposite approach — and really lean into what makes your agency’s work and approach unique. Ask yourself: Why are you here? What gets you excited? Why do you show up for work every day? Forget mission statements that just sit on employees’ shelves. Create a statement of intent that’s actionable, emotional, and values-driven.
As we preach to our clients all the time: you need to figure out what you want to be when you grow up and be hard on yourself. It is a really effective way of differentiating an agency in the market.
Be Willing to Sacrifice
When we posed those questions internally, we drilled down to a purpose of “sparking thriving and dynamic relationships between great brands and their customers.” The wording was specific, because we want to spark and disrupt the conversations being held between brands and consumers. That’s where the world is these days — a two-way dialogue, not just brands talking at customers.
For smaller agencies especially, this process lends itself to specialization. But don’t mistake this for being limited to certain verticals. Specialization is not about becoming the real estate, automotive, or social media experts, but understanding your discipline and sacrificing the parts of your business that don’t fit that offering.
For example, we adopted the challenger mindset and focused on our core strength — strategy and creative — while letting go of our full-service media department. As we exited the pandemic, we just realized that we didn’t need to handle all of a big client’s business. The point here is agencies need to acknowledge what they are great at, but also be adaptable enough to work within the changing marketing environment because AI is here to stay.
The Value of Differentiation
Rational marketing that focuses on pricing and benefits can spur sales — and the predictable efficiency of AI can churn out content to efficiently support it. But this feeds commoditization. Brand loyalty is an emotional connection and one you can use to shape perception and value. That’s when you need an affiliation strategy.
Think about two people walking down the street carrying the same item, but one bag is branded “Walmart” and the other “Target.” An observer may make some assumptions about those people based upon those bags, yet they probably paid the same price for their purchase. An affiliation strategy shapes the perception of a brand — in this case, one brand is not necessarily “better” than the other; they are just seen differently. Creativity and efficiency can go hand and hand, so long as we remember brand affinity is built over time and with considerable human skill and focus. This is how you avoid commoditization and truly separate yourself in a crowded market.
