- Prioritise human insight over commodity content
- Focus on meaning, not volume
- Use AI for efficiency, but differentiate with strategy
- Build trust, credibility and brand authority
- Optimise for distinctiveness and context sensitivity
Let me tell you what I keep hearing in boardrooms and on Zoom calls across the marketing world: ‘Our agency is using AI now, so surely the fees should come down.’ It’s the question that seems obvious, logical even, and seductive in its simplicity. And it is, I’ll argue, one of the most expensive assumptions a brand can make right now.
The numbers tell a more complicated story. According to recent research from the World Federation of Advertisers, nearly two-thirds of brand owners are already using generative AI in their marketing strategies. That’s a remarkable rate of adoption.
Yet 80% of those same multinational brands have serious concerns about how their agency partners are using it on their behalf. Legal exposure, ethical risk, reputational liability; these aren’t abstract worries. They’re the kinds of issues that keep lawyers up at night and end careers.
The big squeeze
So here we are: AI is everywhere, everyone is using it, and almost nobody fully trusts it. And the prevailing reflex, to squeeze agency fees as the technology scales, misreads the moment entirely.
I’ve spent enough time in this industry to know that what we’ve historically paid agencies for was never really the production. It was never the hours logged resizing a banner or reformatting copy across 17 markets. That was always the least interesting and least valuable part of the relationship.
What brands have always needed, and what the best agencies have always, sometimes quietly, provided, is judgement. Cultural fluency. The ability to know what a brand should never say, even when a brief seems to be asking it to. The capacity to hold a creative idea to the light and know whether it will land or shatter.
The human differentiator
AI cannot do that. Not yet. Not reliably. And in some important respects, not ever in the way humans can.
What AI has done, brilliantly, usefully, genuinely, is automate the commodity layer of creative and media work. Content at scale, ideation at speed, task automation, media optimisation.
The WFA research confirms that these are exactly the areas where adoption is highest: 79% for content creation, 67% for content ideation, 54% for task automation. Good. Necessary. But commodities, by definition, compress in value over time. That’s not where the argument should end; it’s where it should begin.
Because what the same automation reveals is the irreplaceable premium of work that machines can’t replicate. The cultural insight that comes from lived experience. The strategic tension that a great planner holds in a room. The creative courage to tell a client that their instinct is wrong. The human understanding that a joke will land differently in Lagos than it will in Leeds.
Welcome to the creative era
We are entering, paradoxically, a golden age for truly human creative work. Not because there is more of it, but because it matters more. When everything else can be generated, the irreducibly human becomes exponentially more valuable.
Brands that understand this will invest accordingly. Those that don’t will find themselves with cheaper agencies, faster outputs, and a curious inability to connect with the people they’re supposed to be reaching.
The client-agency relationship is shifting, but not in the direction the fee-cutters imagine. What is emerging is a new kind of partnership. Agencies are becoming more like strategic and creative studios: leaner in production, deeper in thinking, faster in iteration.
The brands benefiting from this are not the ones that renegotiated their retainers downward the moment their agency mentioned AI. They’re the ones who asked a different question: what can we do together now that we couldn’t before?
That’s a generative question. Quite literally.
The big sea change
I am not naïve about what this transition demands of agencies. Those that built their business models on the labour arbitrage of production will need to evolve, and some will not survive. That disruption is real and fair.
AI should reduce the cost of tasks it can perform. But the assumption that the thinking, the strategy, the cultural intelligence and the creative vision should cost less because a machine can now draft your first ten options? That’s not efficiency. That’s a false economy.
The brands I worry about are those that treat AI as a procurement solution rather than a creative opportunity. They will save money in the short term and haemorrhage brand equity over the medium. In an era of AI-generated everything, the scarcest resource will not be content. It will be meaning.
So the next time someone in your organisation suggests that AI should bring your agency costs down, I’d invite you to ask a different question: are we paying for what machines can do, or for what humans uniquely can? Because if it’s the latter, the answer is not cheaper. It’s worth every penny.
Monica Gomes is managing director of the Brave Group, a tech-forward, innovative communications company that delivers fully integrated brand solutions that combine creativity, strategy, and technology to grow brands. Brave is a hivemind of specialised businesses, including House of Brave (an integrated creative advertising agency), BOLD (a PR and corporate communications company), and Bravado (an experiential marketing firm). These Brave companies work together seamlessly to create innovative, relevant solutions that shape culture and power measurable business value. Brave’s clients include GEPF (Government Employee Pension Fund), Unilever, Tiger Brands, African Bank, Kenvue, MasterChef, and the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University).
