Marketing in the AI Agency Era

Conversation transcript

Joe Eisenhardt (JE): Hello everyone and welcome to the conversation. My name is Joe Eisenhardt. I’m here with Todd Brook, the founder and CEO of Envisionit, the strategic growth and digital marketing agency known for its integrated and data-driven approach to digital marketing. Todd has more than 20 years experience in marketing. He is a well-known advocate of technology, especially artificial intelligence and its practical application towards solving business problems.

Todd brings a deep understanding and enthusiasm for AI’s potential. Today, we’re going to talk with him about how AI has changed the face of marketing as well as the agency-client relationship, and what an AI-powered future could look like. 

Welcome, Todd, and thanks for joining me. 

Todd Brook (TB): Thank you.

The impact of AI on Marketing and Agency Models

JE: So let’s start off by addressing the elephant in the room. In just the past couple of years, AI has forced a lot of marketers to re-examine the value they bring to the table. Is AI the end of the agency model?

TB: I don’t know if it’s the end of the agency model. I think we’ve seen a massive shift in the way—for many years—in how clients engage with agencies, and also what are reasonable expectations for an agency to deliver. 

But when I look today at the role that technology has—I think the old way of thinking, which has been dying for many years—has really hit a point now where I think agency leaders need to reassess what it is we’re ultimately doing to create this value in the market. And I say that because, when I look at the past, we were judged by the amount of stuff that we would be able to deliver for a client. We would be judged by the different things that we might build. We would be judged by what we perceived as the human capacity to deliver this result for a client. 

And I think we took such pride in those things that we brought or that we delivered that as technology emerged that allowed us to do it faster, easier, bigger, or cheaper, many agencies still really looked to do everything manually. And it’s a hard change because we look at our role and our contributions and our self-actualization of what we bring to any situation is so driven around what we’ve historically perceived as that value. And I think what AI has done is taken a change that’s been in heavy motion for some time and just accelerated it. And when I look around today, I genuinely perceive that what clients should expect—I’m talking right now out of an agency—is a healthy blend of using technology where it absolutely can be used effectively to go ahead and support the human side. 

Humans, I expect to bring immense creativity and strategy and that level of thinking, as well as the ability to make very strong recommendations and not bury the lead. But looking at it from the client’s lens, what I would expect is that the client has access to really interact with their data differently, to better understand it, and to feel in greater control of avoiding what for many years has been that agency spin of us trying to tell this great story, and instead really look at those cold hard facts to inform decisioning. 

The agency should make it really easy to make those decisions. Definitely never bury the opportunity, but also be very willing to give up some of that revenue they may have historically seen by going ahead and utilizing technology. And that is a hard transition for an agency to make.

Evolving roles in marketing and the agency landscape

JE: So speaking of that contribution, do you see traditional marketing roles evolving or are there any new roles that are emerging?

TB: Yeah, I think we’re going to see quite a bit of shift.

I think we’re gonna see that people suddenly are leading technology that’s there to support them. I hate the term, but I believe all organizations will be armed with an AI workforce of kinds. And what we’re ultimately gonna see is those that have experience leading are gonna thrive in this environment if they can let down their shield and recognize that their ego may actually slow them down with this. 

But, if they’re effective at it, what we’re gonna find is people are able to do more with less and therefore we’re going to have people that are creative thinkers, people that are very effective at making decisions really rise to the top. I think that when we look at the types of roles, I think you’re going to find a lot more AI engineers making their way into most industries. 

And I don’t think the agency world is any different. I think we’re going to have greater emphasis on the human connection. We’re going to have greater emphasis on how we support our relationships and guide them, but I think in terms of the practical doing, we’re going to see a lot of those, what I can only describe as production, move more and more into the hands of technology.

It is a great opportunity to level up all areas, though, of the industry where the junior team members suddenly get this experience of what it looks like to lead, how it is to manage things, in this case, it’s technology and an opportunity to grow it at astounding rates.

AI-first agency models and strategic thinking

JE: That’s great. How does that apply within the agency? What does an AI-first agency model look like in practice?

TB: Yeah, and to me, it’s funny. We talk AI-first; I’m actually going to flip that. I would say to you that when we look at the agency space, it’s actually the human first. We are changing the dichotomy of how we interact with our relationships and the fact that right now so much time is spent in minutiae and it’s necessary. Agencies cannot avoid it. And suddenly a technology is enabling us to invest more time into the relationship, the guiding, and that higher level of thought. 

If you think of your day—and this is for anybody I’ve ever worked with—you could probably easily divide your day into two buckets: high value time that really moved the needle for your organization, and then that lower value time that probably didn’t energize you the same way that first bucket did. And in fact, may have zapped the life out of you. And that stuff, for so many people, eats up the majority of their day. 

If technology gives you permission to invest more and more time into the human side, the level of work goes up, the relationship-building goes up, and the opportunity to achieve a far different level of result also goes up. And I want to be clear here, this technology is nowhere close to replacing the strategic thinking. But if I can enable our team to have that time now to do the strategic thinking at parity to what they may be paying now, if not less, that value creation is very real to the relationships that we serve.

New services and client empowerment through AI

JE: So, with people having more time freed up to think strategically, are there entirely new services or offerings that you’ve been able to create because of AI?

TB: When I’ve considered new service offerings, I believe so much of what we’re going to be looking at is actually not new services that we offer within our walls, but new capabilities that we arm our clients with. This won’t just be us—it shouldn’t just be us. The market needs to allow agencies to start putting in front of their relationships tooling that allows them to do more with less as well. Tools that allow them to build SEO content, strong SEO content that is on brand, great tonality and really matches that strategy that the SEOs have put together. 

So the role shifts because we go ahead and we give the capability to our client to do something they were very dependent on someone else to produce. The act of deciding which stories we proceed with or what content we proceed with, I see the agency coming in there. The ability to do QC at a scale where we’re going ahead and able to check things on multiple dimensions; improve higher quality of output. 

But what that means also is we can give our clients tools that allow them to analyze and understand what we’re seeing and ask the data questions. We recognize that in any good relationship, we better be outstanding at the questions we ask because that’s where discovery occurs. But we also believe that our clients need to be empowered to do the same thing if we want that collaborative economy, that ability to interact with one another and drive those strong results.

JE: It seems like AI represents not just opportunity for capability, but also an entirely new way of thinking. So, how do you think agencies should be thinking differently to provide the best service to their clients? And then in addition to that, what new expectations does that bring from clients?

TB: Yeah, I think it’s pretty simple. I think at the end of the day, agencies need right now to be considering with a level of intentionality, “What is the role AI serves in our interactions?” 

We’ve got to remember we all carry something with us called an ego. And I don’t mean that in the bad sense or in the sense of, you know, somebody being cocky or coming across that way. I’m saying in the truest sense, our identity, as I said earlier, is very connected to the service we deliver. And it’s going to change.

It’s going to change for all of us. It’s going to look different in a year from now than it does right now. But that isn’t new. It’s the rate of change that’s really evolving. And what I would suggest is, if you are afraid as an agency to recognize that the things that used to cost X may cost less today, or that historically, we have required six months for this thing, and now technology is unable to do us something similar in just a couple months, we have to be okay with that. We can’t let that threaten the value that we deliver in the market. 

We instead have to understand that this change is real. It’s happening and it is a huge opportunity to give people back the freedom to actually think on clients, to be on multiple relationships, and give each one a level of intention that historically wasn’t a reasonable expectation. But, you also now need to level up the human side of the relationship. 

With technology comes a negative byproduct: it’s easy to take your eye off the ball in terms of what’s really important. And it’s easy to lose that individual accountability for the result. And that, to me, is not only the greatest challenge that agencies will have in adopting this, but also the greatest opportunity because that’s what we all want. We want to be in control of that outcome. And we want that accountability for the result. That’s why we’re in this field. But it’s a change in behavior from where we may have found ourselves for many years under just the immense pressure of trying to get the work done and deliver it at a great quality.

Adapting traditional processes with AI

JE: Speaking of that process of discovery and application, Envisionit has traditionally used its proprietary I.D.E.A.S. process to optimize programs both for short and long term. Now, ideas is an acronym for immerse, define, execute, analyze, and suggest. Have you had to adjust this approach at all since incorporating AI?

TB: No, really it’s a complement. When we look at any technology, it’s an augment to what we do already. And a good technology allows you to deliver a better result or find time savings or efficiency or cost savings. I mean, we’re looking for a value creation. What I feel this has done more than anything is it’s given us other dimensions to view it through. 

Today, we’re bound by the team size. Let’s say the team has 5, 12, 15 team members on a problem. When you adopt these technologies—AI with its huge database of knowledge—you’re able to not only train it in the way that you think and what you believe, but you’re also able to go ahead and leverage your own business know-how and blend those two together. And you are now standing on the shoulders of a lot of other knowledge bases.

The end goal of an agency is to make great decisions that deliver great results and learn very quickly about those things that may not be working. We’re there to be a guide to answer questions, because there’s a lot of questions when these things come up, but also to be able to ensure that if something isn’t working, we’re not so proud that we defend it, but instead we acknowledge it. And what I would say more than anything is this technology has not only allowed us to do certain things faster, but it’s allowed us to identify when something isn’t working at a new clip and help point to what are those possibilities so that we know where to look and to do those deeper dives. 

It focuses the attention, if done right.

AI’s role in creating new opportunities for clients

JE: So specifically, how is AI helping to create new opportunities for clients?

TB: I gotta tell you of the questions you’ve asked me, this is probably to me the easiest one because it speaks directly to the problem that I’m yet to hear a relationship of ours not have. Every single client I’ve ever interacted with has the same problems. They don’t have enough time, they don’t have enough people, or there’s a gap in capability.

I believe the biggest opportunity that this technology offers is when we blend strategy or a big idea or a thought or a perspective with the technology that helps guide or do a thing that today a client’s team is forced to do, due to the demands of their role. When we give that to them in that moment, I see things change and I see them change quick. That could be for content; the idea of a tool that helps support the creation of content. That could be a tool that helps to understand data and performance. These could be all sorts of different tools that serve all sorts of different roles, and each one of these give the client the ability to gain back freedom of time to pay attention to the requests and the relationship of not only their people, which often they’re stuck rushing through because there’s so much of it, but also each of their agency partners. 

So if we can go ahead and all adopt that growth mindset with that abundance mindset, the idea of, you know, give away these capabilities so that the client now can perform better in their relationship with us, just like us with them. We all win. 

And so one of the biggest areas that we focused in on in terms of giving capabilities to the client, and we’re just starting, is arming our clients with tools that save them time and save them energy to give them the ability to put more of that thinking into what they do versus just the act of doing.

JE: That makes sense. So speaking of that act of creation through AI, generative AI (or GenAI) has become so much more sophisticated and much more prolific. How does Envisionit use AI to develop, optimize and distribute content that really resonates?

TB: Yeah, I mean, it takes a number of pieces. It takes an understanding of what, in fact, is the strategy. Are we clear on it? What is the tonality? What are the brand guidelines? What are the different components that we need to train the model on so that we’re training it like an employee that is an expert purely at our client’s business? Because once it’s trained, we can then give it specific tasks to support us with. 

And I want to be clear at this stage with AI, it has become so much more advanced, but it is still not there that it works independently. Content creation still requires human interaction, still requires a level of human accountability, still requires great decisions and guidance to be made. But the ability to do something that possibly took you eight hours to now do it in one hour or less, that is the prize. 

Often, I believe today people misunderstand this technology and think it will remove a step or it removes the need for me to “something,” whatever that thing is. I would encourage us to look at it a bit differently and say it is there as an amazing support that allows me to achieve a lot more than I had been able to historically. I think that mindset is really important to adopt. 

I would also say that because the accuracy and because the idea that there is a level of hallucination, but you also have the ability to have AI fact check itself and it’s reasonably strong at that, you need the human to still be fully accountable for the result. Imagine having an agency partner that says, “Sorry, you know what? AI… AI’s fault!” it doesn’t fly. It won’t fly with an employee of your organization either. Regardless of what your business does. If an employee said to you it is AI’s fault that this occurred, we won’t stand for that. We will absolutely expect the individual accountability. 

And so, to me, when I look at Gen AI, it has all these amazing qualities. It does a lot of things pretty well. What it’s going to do is change the way we interact and the sophistication over the next five years will be astounding. But we are already at a point where we can begin adopting it now and transforming our organizations.

The future of agency-client relationships

JE: So keeping that futurist hat on, how do you see the agency-client relationship evolving with AI over the next five, 10 years?

TB: I believe when we consider how and what the impact of AI will be over the next 10 years in the client-agency relationship, I can’t help but to feel that what will not change—we’ll start there— what’s going to stay the same is the importance of strong relationships, wonderful communication, and creative thinking. That is all going to stay very much intact. 

I think the role and what clients are able to manage within their walls will expand. I think that agencies will focus in on two things: One, they have to be experts at using this technology and this capability. It’s why as an agency we’re investing so heavily in it. We’ve still got to know how to use the tools effectively. And if AI is one of those tools, we want to make certain that we’re using it in the best way possible and that we’re experts in terms of how we engage with it; how we provide the information to make the right decisions. 

And I think the second area is I think clients are gonna find themselves having access to information faster. And so this means the relationship will evolve when you’ve got access to a lot of information. The question of “So what?” and “What does this mean for me?” is going to also accelerate. And so I believe that the relationship will require a lot more of that two-way dialogue to constantly remain aligned on expectation, constantly challenge yourselves to figure out what can we remove and delegate out and put into this technology? What is ready for today versus what isn’t? That it’s going to be that teamwork of figuring out what is next. What is our roadmap? 

Quite honestly, no different than any marketing roadmap we lay out today where it’s here’s what we’re doing now. Here’s what we’re testing against, and here’s what’s next. We’ve just got a technology to add to that conversation.

Emerging AI applications and their potential

JE: So what emerging AI applications are you most excited about? And how do you think they can benefit your clients over the next few years?

TB: I believe the concept of agentics is going to be game changing.

We’re already seeing AI agents just in general start to emerge at a pretty high velocity. And these agents are basically trained on your information but can interact with other tools that live out there. And so we’re seeing products like what chat GPT released with operator very powerful operator gives us the ability to go ahead and actually have it control your web browser and it will read manuals and learn things. And it’s only at generation one where this is heading is going to be truly game-changing. 

I’ll give you a couple of—three examples. A product called Plaud right now. Plaud allows us to have live conversations in a meeting, identify who said what, take that and bring it now into the technology world of complying to maybe a brief format, going out and doing research on the topics we’ve discussed. A technology like this is still in its infancy, but the ability to associate who said it, learn our voices, be able to adapt… it is gonna be incredibly powerful when you think of all the interactions we have with any of this. There’s gonna be privacy considerations. But I think that’s very powerful. 

I think another one that’s very powerful is this idea of the continued growth of moving from these web bots or chat bots or assistants, whatever you want to call them, that we can give it the data. It can access the data using an approach called RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) and then generate that data back for us. So it can be trained on our content. 

Super powerful, but the next generation is agents. These interact not only with our data, but with other third party products.

We’ve seen that occur with something that ChatGPT launched called Operator, which is one of the more powerful tools I’ve seen, and it’s in an early generation. It could read entire manuals and say how to use Salesforce or Product XYZ or just explore it and figure it out. And it can control your web browser as well. So anything cloud-based, even if it’s not AI-ready, it can interact with and make decisions on. 

And then the newest thing we’ll be hearing more about over the next six months, two years, is agentics—which will have a lot of cost associated with it, but it actually learns from behavior. 

Imagine you’re a marketer running an ad campaign and it can analyze the performance of each one of the programs and it could spend all of its time referencing and trying to pull out insights and identify what’s working what’s not working and make great suggestions. That is where we’re going to start to see this go more and more. I don’t believe the technology gives us permission to pull the human out of it… yet. I don’t think that will change in the next year, year and a half.

But I do believe that it allows us to significantly reduce where that human spends their time on the production, or it allows us to invest a lot of energy and resource into figuring out why something might be the way it is and ask really good questions and give us very interesting perspective that we may have not otherwise considered.

What marketers should be focused on in the age of AI

JE: Moving over to the client side of the conversation, what do you think marketers should be paying attention to right now to stay ahead of the curve? There’s a lot going on in AI. There’s a lot that AI can do, but what should they be focused on and how should they apply it to solving their own problems?

TB: I mean, it is a great question. And when you consider the idea of of what should marketers be be looking for today to solve their own problems, I believe there are many avenues that they can consider. There’s everything from, on the social side, better sentiment analysis and being able to understand trends and how people are feeling and what they’re perceiving. But do it dynamically, do it real time and create all sorts of early warnings. 

I believe they should be able to support content calendar creation and the ability to go ahead and rapidly identify topics of interest based on briefs that they’ve created. They should be adopting technology to accelerate the creation of content. Notice I’m not saying write it for you, but accelerate the creation. You still need to be the guide. You still need to feed it certain bullet points. If you’re trying to have it do it all for you, you’re gonna be disappointed overall. 

I believe we’re gonna see a lot more cross analysis, understanding, investment versus return, being able to tap into AI tools that give us that data. I think the ability to do deep research… many products on the market today are landing that allow for a deep level of research. GPT, Gemini, Copilot, and a product called Perplexity all offer versions of this deeper level of research and faster. We should be looking there. So, and that’s just to name a few. 

There is a lot of opportunity that we don’t even know about yet. We’re seeing it adopted in call centers where inbound calls are now being captured and the types of questions we can then produce content for and dynamically create emails and programs off it. Really, the sky is the limit. It comes down to either you build it yourself—and what’s so beautiful about AI is it’s not costly in the grand scheme of things—or you find a product that does something that meets whatever security requirements and cost requirements you might have. But there is a lot on the market. 

I’d say the biggest challenge is not what to adopt, it’s how to pick what to adopt when there is so much opportunity.

Choosing the right agency in an AI-driven world

JE: So, getting back to the agency/brand interaction, the experience, the relationship, how do marketers know which agencies to align with? Are there any new questions they should be adding to their list when vetting potential agency relationships?

TB: Yeah, so if I was looking at it through a client’s lens vetting an agency relationship today, I would look at it very similar to the way I would look at any new hire.

To me, the idea and the question of belief around AI is a lot like saying, do you believe in the internet? Do you believe in a CRM? This technology isn’t around belief. It’s around understanding where in our world and how in our world we’re going to adopt it. So when I’m partnering with anyone, I want to know what is your perception of this technology? How are you taking steps to bring it into your your world? 

I’d want to be looking out for: are they looking for some sort of black box tech that does it all? That would scare me. AI is not there and I would love to have that conversation with someone who feels they’ve nailed it because they’ll be the first I’ve come across and we’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at products.

On the other side, I would be very energized by organizations that are able to go out there and say, we’re bringing it in to support ourselves this way. I would wanna understand what the interaction between the agency and the business looks like, and the client looks like, what expectations there are.

What are you looking for as a client? Do you want to be authoritative and have an agency produce? There’s going to be agencies that are for you if that’s what you want. Do you want the collaborative scale where you believe that both partners can bring great ideas and you want that collaborative economy? What are you looking for? 

And I think if you’re very clear, if we assume for a minute that a capability level—we all believe we have the best, and let’s just assume for a minute we all do. Every agency out there has the best talent. If you get past that, it’s the uniques about the relationship: the uniques in the way they engage, the uniques in the way that they communicate, and really what you’re looking for. Do you always want access to data or are you okay with an agency once a quarter providing you updates, insights, reports? It’s figuring out what is important to you and seeing whose beliefs align. 

And the last thing I’ll add to that is while technology is certainly a layer in all of that, I really do believe it’s if you can identify the four or five beliefs that are most important to you for an agency to have and then you ask those questions around those beliefs, I think you’ll find you’ll gain the greatest ground. 

And you know, to me, after you’ve selected that partner, it’s really understanding that every organization and every relationship goes through a few stages. Our goal is as quickly as possible to have that high performance relationship, but we go through a forming stage where we’re learning each other. We’re going to say here’s what we’ve seen. That’s great. You’re going to tell us what you need. Then there’s the storming phase. This is where we’re all working together. It’s trying to find that rhythm, which we hope is the shortest distance and then that normalizing phase where it starts to feel good and then performing where everyone’s operating at our best.

And the goal of any agency has to be to understand how from the forming stage do we get them to the performing. And every one of these elements, technology being one of them, is part of that process.

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