The communications, marketing and advertising agency landscape is in flux, reshaped by mergers and acquisitions, consolidation among the large holding companies, the proliferation of boutique and specialist agencies, and AI-driven service model disruption. At the same time, marketing and communications leaders inside large and small corporations are struggling to make sense of a media environment that keeps moving under them: new AI tools, blurring lines around authenticity and accuracy, and visibility in new “media” confines created by Large Language Models (LLMs), the advanced AI systems that power popular chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
As a result, these corporations – in their capacities as prospective agency clients – are struggling to map out their overall programs, determining if they need an agency partner and even how they go about selecting one.