Full disclosure, house rules: I have known Jordan Finger since the early 2000s, and we met on a debt collection run.

Two guys chasing money strangers owed, who then spent twenty years chasing money consumers had not yet agreed to spend. Beautiful. So when Jordan sits down to announce the death of the agency, understand that neither of us has ever once in our lives left money on a table voluntarily.

He wants me to know he is calm about it. "I'm just not angry," he says. "I'm just a realist." Sure, buddy. The realist opens by calling agencies "glorified execution shops running the same 2020 DTC playbook that stopped working years ago." Zero anger. Just a man who brought a flamethrower to a book club.

And the thing is, he has a body to point at. WPP, the biggest agency group that ever lived, watched pre-tax profit fall 71 percent in the first half of 2025 and got tossed out of the FTSE 100 like a bad tenant. New business pitches at WPP Media dropped to a third of the year before. So Jordan is not eulogizing a healthy patient. He is standing over the gurney with a brochure.

His villain has a face, and it is a 27-year-old. Picture it the way he paints it: some smooth founder sells you the retainer, and then "they got some 27 year old that they just trained on Facebook ads, like six months ago, running a multi-million dollar account." What do you get for your money? "Here's your performance," Jordan says, doing the voice. "There's no insights. There's no partnership." A PDF and an invoice. And Forrester agrees the kid is toast, forecasting 32,000 agency jobs vaporized by automation by 2030, with the clerical and account roles first in line. The machine is not coming for the corner office. It is coming for the intern who exports the Meta deck.

Then he twists it. The tactical work is gone, he says, because even Meta now tells you to stop targeting and just "give us great content" and let "the AI find your audience." Which means the thing agencies charged a premium for is now a checkbox inside a subscription. Sam Altman puts it at 95 percent of what marketers use agencies for, at nearly no cost. Jordan's version is retail: a hundred bucks a month and the shop is obsolete. Same gospel, smaller pulpit, better tan.

Standing ovation. Now the part where I do my job.

Jordan, what are you selling? And he says "pattern recognition built over decades in the trenches," which, if you slow it down, is an agency. It is a guy you pay because he did this before. His defense is that he is "one person," except "I do have a team behind me, you see them right here," gesturing at what I am fairly sure was an empty room. The seal team. Single-origin, small-batch, artisanal agency. And the market loves it: fractional executives were a 9.4 billion dollar business in 2025, a fractional chief runs 40 to 65 percent cheaper than the full-time version, and a quarter of US companies already hire this way. Jordan did not build a lifeboat. He boarded one early and started selling seats.

So I go for the throat. Isn't pattern recognition exactly the thing AI is best at? And I watch him defend the moat live. His answer: garbage in, garbage out, and Claude will happily tell a panicked founder the whole business is on fire off a seven-day slice. Then he hands me the tell, the load-bearing sentence of the whole hour: "You still need a thought leader, because Claude doesn't tell you what to ask." The machine is "my brain on superpower." He just has to stay the brain. For now. He said for now about nine times, and I counted every one.

For the record, the old playbook he keeps kicking is a corpse with a coroner's report. Meta CPMs hit 10.88 dollars in early 2025, nearly double 2020, and average DTC customer acquisition cost climbed to 226 dollars, up a deranged 222 percent in eight years. Which makes his single favorite thing to hate, "you just throw up ads on Meta with a hundred dollars a day and become a million dollar business in 30 days," not merely dumb. Mathematically illegal.

I did not let the résumé slide either. At Freshly he was VP of growth, not CGO. Nutrafol was already cooking on doctor referrals before he showed up to scale the direct side. So I asked the question every growth marketer hates, how much was you versus the product and the timing, and to his credit he took it on the chin. The exits mostly survive contact with the record: Nestlé paid 950 million for Freshly, up to 1.5 with earnouts, and Unilever took Nutrafol at a number the founder called a "conservative" 1.2 billion.

And then he shut me up, which does not happen. A family ranch in Wyoming sitting on the 80 percent of every steer that becomes ground beef, and instead of running pretty ads, Jordan says, "let's sit down and look at the unit economics, let me get your CFO on the phone," and turns the trim into a high-margin beef stick. Six million to twelve in a few months, into the profitable side of the business. That is not a vibe. That is turning the scraps into the product, the oldest good idea there is.

Which is also why, when I asked him for the best DTC brand nobody is talking about, he said "Merryweather Farms," paused, and added, "they're my client." Of course they are.

So here is the ruling. The agency is not dead. Jordan embalmed the version that deserved to die, the one with the vanishing account kid and the receipt-free retainer, and sold you the funeral and the replacement. The difference this time is that the coffin has WPP's name on it, the numbers are real, and the guy holding the brochure can actually find the beef stick you were feeding into the grinder. Everybody who announces a death is standing next to a coffin selling something. This one, damn it, is selling something good.