The Future of the Marketing Agency

Last Friday, I attended a talk by Jeremy Shell at George Brown College ’s digital marketing management seminar series.

Jeremy is currently managing partner at a boutique digital marketing agency, Fuel Growth Agency, and I felt particularly inclined to hear him as we share some common background. He earned his bachelor’s in political science and creative writing. For my part, I started (although later abandoned) political science and ended up with a bachelor’s in Spanish and comparative literature. And of course, I then worked as a freelance writer and journalist and got into digital marketing. So, I was naturally intrigued by what Jeremy would say during his lecture. Even more, Jeremy’s first approach to marketing came as he was into film production. He wanted to film and had a hard time, so he got involved with different productions.

What I was not really expecting were the harsh truths that came from his mouth during his lecture: production is currently dead. Or maybe not completely dead, but it is in decline, and getting to the top of the game is almost impossible. Reasons are the expected, although it doesn’t make it any better: the seemingly never-ending race to the bottom of production costs and the rise of automated tools have made producing high-quality content and ads just not very feasible.

While Jeremy is mostly optimistic about what this new era of automation has brought, he also made some sad predictions for humanists like myself—and, may I ask, him as well?

However, I question whether this new era of automated everything, particularly automated content, won't encounter some insurmountable obstacles.

For one thing, we all saw the backlash Coca-Cola endured last year when it put out a 100% AI-generated ad. This is a problem that not enough techno-optimists seem to be considering: will humanity ever overpass the uncanny valley effect?

If my writing is getting too technical, let me put it in simpler terms: have you ever felt something icky when watching something that resembles a human but that it is not? You are not alone. Nor I. The “AI ick effect” is something CEOs of the current advanced AI tech worry about (you can learn more about this on this podcast: https://omny.fm/shows/it-could-happen-here/the-ai-ick-what-big-tech-is-bringing-for-2025)

I may be being a little unjust to Jeremy Shell. While he recognized that these technologies are advancing and becoming increasingly important, he still sees them as tools, not substitutes for real human creativity. However, he also mentioned that he sees how current corporate mergers in the marketing agency business are resulting in thousands of layoffs, many of whom are being replaced by large language models.

So, what is the future for marketers trying their luck in agencies? Niches. Specialization. The era of generalists is over. According to Jeremy, if you want to thrive as an agency marketer, you must specialize in just one aspect of the business and probably need to become a freelancer. Marketing agencies these days just don’t have the budgets to maintain a big staff under the roof of a shared office, always ready to get their hands on incoming projects. Instead, marketing agencies are becoming smaller and more boutique. They will have the leanest staff possible and rely on a few freelancer partnerships. Then, when a project comes to them, they will contact those freelancers for their specialty.

Every time I hear things like this, I have mixed feelings. In one sense, these business models provide opportunities for entrepreneurship. If you can get some diverse partners for different aspects of digital marketing, there is not much on the way that would impede you from establishing your own micro-agency.

For another thing, I feel like something fundamentally human is being lost in these endless races that put the “more for less” as their top priority. While working in an office and with other people can sometimes feel dreadful, there are many amazing perks to experiencing day-to-day conversations, exchanges of ideas, and little moments with other people in our line of work. That is also a fundamental part of the human experience. But, as Jeremy Shell put it, “These are bad times for humanists.”