• by Laurie Sullivan , 8 hours ago

Matt Seiler, a three-time CEO and leader in performance-based compensation and automation, has joined the board of directors at full-service performance marketing agency Converge, the company announced Wednesday.

Seiler -- who has decades of experience managing global clients and has worked at leading agency brands such as IPG Mediabrands, UM, Omnicom’s PHD, BBDO and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners -- has a strong commitment to artificial intelligence and technology.

“I really believe in the value of advertising, and I’ve been very passionate about it my whole life,” Seiler says. “It just makes me really sad agencies are living in these bizarre head-in-the-sand moments.”

Seiler is a major advocate for positive change, specifically moving from the traditional agency compensation model to Performance-to-Pay (P2P) -- one he championed to align an agency's financial incentives with a client's business outcomes.

While he worked at IPG, the team brought in billions of dollars in revenue tied to P2P, including the $1.5 billion Chrysler account, which was based on a pure performance compensation.

Until he took a seat on Converge's board, Seiler had been looking for ways to become more involved with an agency to really prove the value of performance-based compensation.

Seiler says that joining the board gives him further hope that one day agencies will wake up to all the possibilities of AI -- including tying it to the P2P model.

“Someday I want to see the big guys recognize performance-based compensation to onboard all things,” he says. “One of the large advertising agencies is attempting to charge their clients more for the use of AI. This very famous advertising agency is painting themselves into a corner and could be kept from using AI and charge less.”

Seiler’s appointment reunites him with Converge Chief Executive Officer Shoshana Winter, with whom he previously worked with at Dentsu, Japan’s largest advertising agency. Converge is a private company.

“Being private allows you to do much bold- and client-centric types of things,” he said. “I have kept in close contact with Shoshana since her time at Merkle, and mine at Dentsu, and loved that she went into performance and in a position to affect real change.”

The opportunity can prove positive -- not just for Converge, but the entire industry -- what it means when “you actually take responsibility for your client’s business,” he said.

Seiler notes that professional services organizations operate at about 70% billable operation, while 85% of professional services firms still rely primarily on hourly billing models through traditional time-based compensation, and only between 15% and 20% have successfully transitioned to outcome-based pricing, despite proven higher margins. 

Many advertising and creative agencies are unable to fully leverage the potential of AI because they are trapped in traditional compensation models. 

Instead of getting paid for results they deliver, agencies often charge clients based on the time and resources spent on a project, such as hourly billing or retainers. It’s also tied to how many people it takes to run the business and how much money they can be convinced to spend.

“Think about the root of the word agency, it’s 'agent,' and what it means to be an agent working on behalf of the client,” Seiler says. “As most holding companies move to principal media buying they lose track of for whom they work.”

He says this is a reason why agencies should adopt AI and performance-based compensation models. The agentic AI agents, which are intended to improve performance, are being developed and tested across the industry today.

“There’s poetry to the fact that human agents have forgotten their job as an agent to help clients, because the tech agents are doing it instead,” he says. “It’s not AI vs human intelligence, but the speed in which you can get things done through AI is awesome.”