Let’s start with a number so depressing it should come with a Prozac prescription: 31 of the top 60 advertisers have underperformed GDP for 15 years straight. That’s not a seasonal dip or a bad quarter. That’s a fifteen-year nap with a do-not-resuscitate order taped to the wall.

The world’s biggest advertisers — the Procters, the Unilevers, the “we own half your pantry” conglomerates — have basically been playing musical chairs on a sinking ship, each congratulating themselves for finding a cheaper seat while the band keeps playing “Efficiencies and Synergies in E Minor.”

Somewhere along the line, performance marketing became a religion, complete with its own prophets (CFOs), rituals (quarterly reports), and commandments (“Thou shalt optimize thy CTR”). Procurement ascended the corporate Mount Sinai, clutching a spreadsheet instead of tablets, and declared that all marketing must now serve measurable efficiency. Creativity was demoted to “nice-to-have.” Humanity was outsourced.

And Jay Friedman — bless his guts and heavy caffeine levels — finally said it out loud:

Why is CMO and agency trust so low?

Because, Jay, the entire relationship has turned into a hostage negotiation with shared custody of the budget.

This isn’t partnership anymore.

It’s alimony with metrics.

Michael Farmer has been the industry’s reluctant elder doctor for years, the guy walking into the hospital room saying, “This isn’t the flu, kids; it’s organ failure.”

His latest analysis reads like the postmortem Madison Avenue didn’t want written.

He points out — with the precision of a man who’s been watching this slow-motion implosion for decades — that AI won’t save agencies; it’ll speed up the amputation.

Holding companies think they’ve found salvation in “AI service fees.” The logic: if machines replace 25% of creative hours and 40% of media buying, we’ll just charge for the machines. Brilliant. Except Procurement’s job description is literally don’t fall for that.

Farmer summed it up neatly — good luck convincing Procurement to pay for AI line items when their KPIs are about cutting your fees.

It’s a business model so delusional it deserves its own DSM classification: Agency Cognitive Dissonance, Subtype A (Automation Denial).

The irony is vicious in his eyes. CMOs now trust consultants — the PowerPoint samurai from McKinsey and Deloitte — six times more than the agencies that actually make the ads. The people who design strategy decks are making more than the people who design meaning.

Consultants are the fancy dinner date who promises deep conversation but never calls back. Agencies are the long-term partner who used to know your quirks but now just sends invoices. And Procurement? Procurement’s the jealous ex lurking in the background with a calculator and an axe to grind.

Somewhere between 2008 and now, marketing had an identity crisis and decided to get a tech job. We traded gut for graphs, storytelling for spreadsheets, and hired armies of analysts to explain why people don’t love us anymore.

We didn’t lose the plot; we outsourced it to an algorithm.

Dashboards became our crystal balls — glowing, beautiful, and utterly soulless. They tell us what happened, not why it mattered. They whisper vanity metrics like a lover: “Look at that engagement rate, baby,” while quietly erasing brand loyalty one banner at a time.

And let’s be honest — the word “performance” got weaponized. It used to mean “how well the work worked.” Now it means “how cheaply it ran.”

Jay Friedman nailed it: brand trust collapsed because everyone became addicted to short-term dopamine hits — the quarterly uptick, the viral moment, the KPI that looks good on a PowerPoint slide even if the company’s soul is evaporating.

Michael Farmer took it further: the industry’s obsession with doing more for less has turned agencies into content factories with anxiety disorders. They keep producing more units of “creative” with fewer humans and less meaning — like a factory line for feelings, except the conveyor belt’s running too fast and no one knows what the product does anymore.

We used to sell dreams. Now we sell deliverables.

If the advertising industry were a person, it’d be a middle-aged executive in denial — driving a leased Tesla, wearing an “AI Guru” hoodie, and insisting everything’s fine while secretly googling “What does relevance feel like?”

CMOs are having their own existential spiral. They’re trapped between CFOs demanding measurable ROI and audiences demanding authenticity. Agencies promise both, deliver neither, and drown in jargon about “brand ecosystems” and “cross-channel synergy.”

It’s like two people arguing over who killed the relationship while the house burns down around them.

And here’s the punchline: we built dashboards instead of brands, optimized ourselves into invisibility, and now wonder why no one remembers us.

The story arc of modern advertising reads like a Greek tragedy written by a data analyst — hubris, over-automation, and a total misunderstanding of human emotion.

Farmer’s thesis should be carved into the industry’s forehead: AI will make cost-cutting worse, not better.

If we keep chasing “efficiency” as the holy grail, we’ll end up saving so much money we erase the reason anyone buys from us.

The only path forward isn’t automation — it’s resurrection. Agencies need to stop begging for scraps from Procurement and start acting like growth architects again. CMOs need to stop mistaking consultants’ confidence for competence.

You don’t rebuild trust by measuring more. You rebuild it by mattering more.

Because right now, Madison Avenue isn’t dead — it’s just automating its own eulogy, one beautifully formatted dashboard at a time.

Zack Rozga doesn’t sugarcoat the challenge: AI is rewriting the rulebook, and agencies are still fumbling for the table of contents.

He predicts that survival will hinge on “best of breed prompt engineers”—creative technologists deployed across multiple brands to stay ahead of machine-led commoditization.

But there’s one frontier he believes AI can’t fully fake: authenticity. Rozga envisions a near future where influencer content carries blockchain-backed certificates verifying that it’s human-made, not an AI mimic.

For him, the future of the agency isn’t in scale or cheap impressions.

It’s in craft. Creativity and authentic engagement will become the new currency—while reach and frequency will fade into what he calls “empty calories” of brand nourishment.

Let’s drop the polite industry spin and call it what it is: AI isn’t a new line item — it’s a wrecking ball aimed squarely at agency revenue.

Michael Farmer, in his C-Suite Blues piece “AI Will Decimate Agency Staffing and Fees,” didn’t mince words. He estimates automation will erase 25% of creative fees and over 40% of media fees. And here’s the kicker — procurement officers aren’t seeing “AI efficiency” as innovation. They’re seeing it as the next frontier for cost extraction.

Procurement isn’t your innovation partner; it’s your financial assassin with a KPI dashboard. These teams are literally bonused on cutting fees. Farmer nailed it when he said, good luck convincing Procurement to add AI fees to invoices. That line didn’t just land — it became the new agency punchline, whispered in holding company hallways right after “We’ll make it up in volume.”

The brutal truth? CFOs don’t reward automation with bigger budgets. They reward it by trimming whatever margin you thought you’d reclaimed. Agencies are trying to turn cost savings into billable value, while CFOs are quietly updating their spreadsheets to reflect new savings targets.

This is the corporate equivalent of showing your boss a new way to do the job faster — and getting fired for proving you’re replaceable.

Here’s where it gets darker. Firms like TrinityP3 and QuickCreator have started quantifying the new math: marketers are using AI to insource work and cut agency costs by 25–60%. That’s not theoretical — that’s happening now, line item by line item.

And agencies, in their infinite optimism, walked straight into the trap. They pitched “AI-enhanced productivity” to clients, thinking it would sound innovative. Procurement heard, “We can do the same work with fewer humans,” and immediately started drafting a retainer reduction plan.

Congratulations — you didn’t innovate. You wrote your own layoff memo.

In practice, those productivity gains are being treated as rate-down opportunities, not value-up achievements. AI didn’t become the golden goose. It became a spreadsheet trigger for a 15% haircut on next year’s fees.

Holding companies, desperate to hold the illusion of “innovation premium,” have tried slipping in “AI surcharges” and “tech platform fees” — little 1–5% add-ons designed to look futuristic. It’s adorable, really.

TrinityP3’s data shows most clients either flat-out refuse to pay or treat them as table stakes — the cost of doing business in 2025. The CFO’s translation: you’re lucky we’re not billing you for the time we spent approving this nonsense.

The idea that AI will replace billable hours with new billable categories is pure delusion. It’s like thinking you can offset the loss of your paycheck by charging for the air you breathe while you’re unemployed.

Farmer and a growing number of consultants say the only path forward isn’t more automation — it’s redefinition. Agencies need to stop pretending they’re factories and start behaving like growth partners.

Use AI not to replace people but to redeploy them — to free capacity for insight, strategy, and innovation. In other words, stop selling deliverables and start selling outcomes.

Agencies that move toward performance-linked compensation or “ScopeMetric”-style units (tying fees to actual business growth rather than time spent) can survive this bloodletting. But those clinging to hourly billing are about to find out what happens when your “man-hour” becomes a “machine-second.”

If you’re still in the fee business, AI is coming for you.
If you’re in the growth business, AI becomes your leverage.

AI doesn’t tax clients. It taxes agencies that mistake efficiency for value creation. Procurement loves efficiency — because it’s the easiest justification for paying you less.

The only way to win is to build what Procurement can’t price: brand growth, foresight, and creativity that compounds instead of just completes.

Agencies that survive this next decade won’t be the ones with the best AI decks — they’ll be the ones that change how they charge.

Here’s what’s already working in 2025:

Set clear deliverables. Charge for the result, not the hours. The risk? You’ll underbid and overdeliver. The solution? Iron-clad scopes and change-order clauses sharper than a CFO’s pen.

Ongoing, predictable income for ongoing, predictable brilliance. You’re not the vendor; you’re the strategic partner. The retainer isn’t dead — it’s just allergic to vagueness.

Tie your fees to impact, not output. You lift sales, margins, or brand equity? You get paid like you did. Stop being the cost center and start being the compounding asset.

You hit the KPI, you get the bag. No hits, no bag. It’s risky, yes, but so is pretending hourly billing will survive another five years.

Bundle the chaos. Standardize deliverables. Let clients choose between “Essential,” “Premium,” and “Don’t Ask How Much” tiers. Predictable work, predictable cash flow.

Combine what works — a retainer base plus performance bonuses, or fixed projects with value premiums. Keep it flexible, but keep it strategic.

AI isn’t the apocalypse. It’s the audit. It’s the moment agencies find out whether they’ve been building value or just billing hours.

So yes — AI is coming for your fees.
But only if you’re still charging like it’s 2012.

Judy Shapiro — CEO & Co-Founder of EngageSimply and Topic Intelligence — has spent her career on both sides of the marketing divide: first inside big agencies, then as a client. Her vantage point offers a rare, unvarnished look at how trust between brands and agencies quietly disintegrated over two decades.

Agencies dismissed the rise of adtech, confident that creative brilliance and strategic pedigree would keep them indispensable. Shapiro recalls how this arrogance left brands stranded in a growing sea of marketing technology, forced to figure things out alone. That neglect marked the first break in what had once been a solid bond of trust.

As Shapiro explains, adtech vendors began courting brands directly, promising cheaper, faster, smarter solutions. Agencies, blindsided and desperate to keep control, leaned hard into programmatic — even when it eroded transparency and trust. Clients learned they could function without middlemen, and the rift deepened.

To claw back profits, agencies started acquiring adtech companies and pushing clients to use their proprietary tools, often ill-suited to brand goals. Shapiro points to this as the tipping point — when skepticism became cynicism. MFA sites boomed, engagement metrics inflated, and both sides stopped believing the other’s numbers.

For Shapiro, rebuilding trust will require a radical shift: agencies must trade hourly billing for outcome-based models and embrace transparency as a competitive advantage. The future of marketing, she insists, depends on making trust the foundation — not the afterthought — of every deal.

Legacy brands are quietly losing a war they no longer realize they’re fighting. While half the Fortune 100 fixated on optimization dashboards, 31 global advertisers spent 15 years underperforming the U.S. economy itself.

In the ADOTAT+ edition, we unpack why Progressive broke the curse, how Michael Farmer’s AI “moon-shot” could restore agency trust, and what the next-generation agency model really looks like—where efficiency funds intelligence, and creativity compounds like capital.

You’ll get:

🧩 The free story explains the problem. ADOTAT+ shows how to fix it.