I feel sorry for agencies.
They thought they signed contracts with clients. They got clients plus an invisible co-signer named ChatGPT. Every brief now arrives pre-processed through a language model that has read every marketing case study ever published and retained none of the context that made any of them work.
Marketing was already the most subjective discipline in business. Opinions dressed up as strategy. Taste masquerading as insight. An entire industry built on the premise that nobody can prove you wrong until the campaign runs, and even then you can blame the media buying.
Now agencies face clients who have been armed overnight. That junior brand manager who used to nod along in meetings? She spent the weekend with ChatGPT running through positioning frameworks and brand architecture models. She can suddenly articulate why your concept feels “off-brand” using language she didn’t know last month. She has graduated into a marketing critic without attending a single class.
The democratization of generic marketing knowledge has created a weapon. Not a precision instrument. A blunt one.
Because ChatGPT knows everything about marketing and nothing about this marketing. It knows the template but not the tension. It can generate a creative brief that reads exactly like a creative brief should read, which means it reads like every creative brief, which means it’s useless. But it sounds correct. It has activated everyone’s inner consultant.
So agencies now operate in a two-node feedback loop. The client in the room. The model in their pocket. Every idea gets run through both filters. The human reaction and the algorithmic second opinion. Does the client like it? Let me check what GPT thinks. GPT says it needs more emotional resonance. The client suddenly agrees that yes, emotional resonance was the missing piece all along.
Agencies respond the way you’d expect. They feed their own work through ChatGPT. Punch up this headline. Make this presentation tighter. Generate three alternative concepts for slide twelve. The agency is no longer just the agency. It’s Agency plus GPT.
Which means every client meeting has become a hidden four-way negotiation. Agency plus their model versus Client plus their model. Two humans with two AI co-pilots, cross-examining each other’s ideas using frameworks that sound authoritative because they’ve been pulled from the collective average of all marketing thinking ever documented online.
Nobody admits this is happening. The ChatGPT window stays open in a different tab. The phrasing that came from the model gets delivered as if it emerged from strategic thinking. Both sides pretend their insights are purely human while both sides know they’re not.
The work doesn’t get better. It gets more defensible. Everything can be justified with a framework. Every choice can be supported by a principle that ChatGPT retrieved from some marketing textbook written in 2015. The work becomes argument-proof, which is different than being good.
Agencies used to manage client relationships. Now they manage a negotiation between four parties who are performing certainty they don’t feel. The real client isn’t the person sitting across the table. It’s the model that person consulted before the meeting, armed them with questions they wouldn’t have asked otherwise, and gave them confidence to reject work they might have accepted.
I feel sorry for agencies because they’re trapped in an arms race where both sides are using the same weapon. And the weapon works best at generating plausible-sounding reasons why any creative idea could be better. Which means every idea can always be better. Which means nothing is ever good enough.
The meetings get longer. The revisions multiply. The feedback becomes more sophisticated in language and less useful in practice. Everyone is fluent in marketing speak. Nobody is saying anything new.
This is the double doom. Marketing was already drowning in opinions. Now those opinions come backed by AI that can instantly generate supporting evidence for any position. The subjectivity hasn’t decreased. It has been weaponized with the appearance of objectivity.
Agencies will adapt. They always do. They’ll learn to speak GPT back at clients. They’ll get better at prompting. They’ll find ways to use the models to shortcut the busywork so they can focus on the actual creative thinking.
But right now they’re stuck in the transitional phase. Where everyone has the tool. Nobody has figured out the rules. And every project has doubled its stakeholder count without anyone acknowledging the new participants in the room.