• by Erin Wilhoite , Yesterday

When Accenture Song Vice-Chairman David Droga argued in The Drum that holding companies need to “smash” the traditional agency model, he reignited a debate about how agencies operate, one that has largely overlooked the reinvention brands need to undergo themselves. 

The industry has focused so much on the future of the agency model, it’s paid little attention to how brands manage their own systems.

From a chain to a web

A decade ago, a brand’s marketing system was linear, running through a creative and media agency. Today, it might include social specialists, creator partners, in-house studios, and AI platforms. 

Similarly, 10 years ago a 30-second spot anchored most campaigns. But that’s no longer de rigueur today, and creative agencies can struggle to land the big brand concept.

“New” requires an agile partner model where the lead may share the account with others. In some cases, social agencies lead.

Fragmentation evolved as new channels emerged and audience behavior shifted. But a sprawling web has more points of failure than a chain.

It shows up in briefs interpreted inconsistently across partners, duplication of work, and marketers spending more time coordinating than shaping. 

The recent in-housing wave is the clearest evidence of it. A 2023 study by the Association of National Advertisers found that 82% of member companies had built an in-house agency, up from 78% in 2018. Yet 92% of those companies still worked with external agencies.

AI is following the same arc, only faster. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that marketers now allocate an average of 15.3% of their budgets to AI, while only 30% describe their organizations as having mature AI capabilities. That gap is opening at a moment when the money isn’t growing: Gartner puts 2026 marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, essentially flat against 7.7% the year before.

The missing layer

In the past, a marketer’s primary job was to select the right agency and manage the work. Now it’s managing multiple partners. 

Coca-Cola’s 2021 restructuring is one example of a brand addressing this complexity. The more significant move wasn’t naming a new agency; it was WPP starting OpenX, an integrated team to run creative, media, data and technology.

Centers of excellence are becoming more influential at large companies because they own what sits between the specialists, with consistent onboarding and shared standards. This kind of governance is what lets a brand add a new partner without redesigning the whole system.

One misconception is that governance means standardizing how every partner works. The strongest governance frameworks set consistent expectations while giving specialists room to apply their own expertise. But marketers’ own workflows need to change alongside them.

Continual improvement loops

Organizations rarely stall because a partner lacks skill; more often, the friction sits in the system itself. Instead of writing off a partner at the end of the year because the relationship didn’t work out, it’s worth asking whether the setup of the partnership played a part. 

Treating the operating model as something to design and revisit every few years no longer fits how the work moves. Advertising production needs to adopt the continual-improvement mindset, where operating models are continually adjusted to conditions. 

Marketing production is not going to become simpler because of AI. In many ways, AI adds complexity as it disrupts familiar structures and pricing models. I suspect this will cause partner ecosystems to become more diverse, not more consolidated. 

The brands that thrive will give their own operating models the same scrutiny as they give their agencies.