• by Cory Treffiletti , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

If you read my column regularly, you might be starting to sense a theme.  I’ve been diving into AI from a very practical application perspective, trying to determine short-term and long-term impacts.  In the short term, it’s all about efficiency.  In the long term, it’s about restructuring the work environment more holistically.  It’s definitely ad agencies that are starting to take this approach as well.

I started my career in ad agencies, and they hold a very special place in my heart.  I trod a path from DeWitt Media to i-Traffic (Omnicom), Freestyle to Carat, Real Branding, and finally Catalyst:SF. 

I was trained to identify audiences, develop a plan to engage them, and measure the impact at each step, culminating in conversion -- or reclassification into a different audience.  My superpower was the ability to think differently and come up with out-of-the-box ideas.  An agency only succeeds if it’s able to fulfill client goals and come up with new and interesting ways to stay ahead of the curve.

Right now, agencies are quickly learning AI can do a lot of this work, so they’re experiencing massive restructuring and consolidation. 

What made me successful can be broken down into two parts: planning and creativity.  AI can do the planning, and it can do it pretty well.  Agencies are starting to realize this, and that will have an impact on their hiring for the next 10-15 years. 

AI is still a linear model trained on existing data, while humans are better at being creative because we don’t have to be linear in our thinking.    I was testing this theory over the weekend and working with Gemini on an idea.  I chose the conversational interface and had a discussion with the AI. I quickly realized that it relies too heavily on prompts and the ability to follow a guided path.  In the end, AI provided a great starting point. But an AI doesn’t get excited and interrupt you with an idea -- or connect two disparate dots and come up with something from left field. 

Just watch “Star Wars” and check out C-3PO.  C-3PO doesn’t brainstorm well.  He will tell you the odds, and he will answer questions, but it was always Luke, Leia, Han or Obi-Wan coming up with the fresh takes and new ideas. 

There’s a massive restructuring going on in the agency landscape because leaders know they must be like Han Solo and not C-3PO.  They are using AI to create the foundations and essentially replace inexperienced talent.  Agencies will differentiate based on the value extracted from senior-level folks who are also non-linear thinkers.  These are the teams who come up with the ideas and who can create something from nothing because they maintain a healthy disdain for the data. 

Agencies can structure a foundation of analytical teams to craft the initial plan using AI and be wildly more efficient. The true differentiator for each agency will be the brainpower in the middle and at the top.  The lower levels will be LLM jockeys, while the mid-to-senior-level talent will be the creators and differentiators. 

Will the agency model be changed forever?  Yes, but funnily enough, it will end up looking more like a consulting company than ever before.  This model is the same as the McKinsey, Deloitte and Accenture models that essentially reuse work over and over, but with a different wrapper that differentiates the output.  The agency world will move back to a cult of personality, led by extreme thinkers and supported by LLM jockeys to build the foundations for their brilliance.

This may be the way the agency world survives the next 30 years!