TL;DR

• This quarter's Agency Pulse Survey is live! Join Delphi to learn if it's you or the market.​
• We're working on the next salary survey, and we'd love your input!
• Brands hire agencies to solve problems that they either don’t have the knowledge or capacity to handle themselves.
• AI doesn’t know what’s important, so it rushes to include everything, regardless of merit.
• We’ve noticed an uptick in the complexity of service offerings in many of our engagements over the last 9 months, resulting in agencies creating things above and beyond what’s necessary.
• Agencies that zero in on the value they bring will quickly outcompete those that try to do anything and everything.
• Taste and discretion have become even more valuable. It’s important not to give those over to an AI that’s ignorant of what actually matters.

Is it me, or the market?

Find out by joining our free Delphi group.

Our fourth-quarter agency pulse survey is live. Join Delphi and get all the details about how sales pipelines are moving, what’s selling well, and what’s lagging.

Help shape our next agency salary survey

A few of you have asked us when the next salary survey will go live.

We're considering adding a private benchmarking option to help you compare your employee salaries or pay ranges with those for similar roles at other agencies.

Before we build that out...

Don’t AI-away your agency’s advantage

Brands hire agencies to solve problems that they either don’t have the knowledge or capacity to handle themselves.

Many marketing, design, tech, and executive leaders at brands also look to agencies because agencies can solve problems around the organization's bureaucracy. Agencies are smaller and more nimble and can get things done that many internal teams just can’t.

An issue we’re seeing crop up with how agencies are using AI is the massive scope creep that it can introduce into otherwise simple projects.

Need a site built? Well, what about this 48-page governance and privacy policy that simply must be a prominently featured component?

What about a GtM strategy? Ah, here’s a 9-month action plan full of decision trees, go-live lists, and to-dos for everyone, perfectly detailed across 37,000 words in a markdown file.

How about a brand refresh? Great! AI can create the most detailed design system fit for a Fortune-100 enterprise with 14,000 locations, with extensive details on how to deploy it across each.

AI doesn’t know what’s important.

It doesn’t have a clue.

It has such a poor understanding of importance that users have to constantly prune topics from the chat so it won't carry them forward and name the final file "Final Homepage - Not the one with blue circles."

So it rushes to include everything because that’s what the training data includes and that’s what the hundred or so listicles said are important. There’s so much unimportant bullshit that AI comes up with that it can quickly drown a good idea in superfluous lines of code, extensive boilerplate caveats, and broken prose.

The thing is, knowing what’s important is a key reason why you’re being hired.

You know what should and shouldn’t be included. Where to focus. What can safely be ignored. Where the pitfalls are and how to best avoid them.

AI doesn’t.

AI knows “Build something impressive-looking!”

They even introduced a Planning switch in the Claude Desktop app so that it would pause for a second and think before running off like an over-caffeinated intern with too much confidence.

One of the things we look at in our Growth Review Service is an agency’s service mix. What do they offer, and how does it relate to what their ICPs want?

We’ve noticed an uptick in the complexity of service offerings in many of our engagements over the last 9 months, while pricing has stayed relatively flat or declined slightly. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. That complexity adds friction that might look impressive at first, but once someone digs in, it falls apart.

It’s resulting in agencies creating things above and beyond what’s necessary and beyond what they’re being hired for. Sure, there’s some filigree you can add to a project. Something that helps you stand out or that makes the experience a bit more special, but a massive privacy policy isn’t it.

I have a feeling agencies that zero in on the value they bring will quickly outcompete those that try to do anything and everything.

Taste and discretion have become even more valuable. It’s important not to give those over to an AI that’s ignorant of what actually matters.