There's an agency for that
AI is breaking in-house marketing
I wouldn’t want to be a marketer right now.
Of course, I am a marketer right now.
I market myself. I market the companies I advise. I help marketers market.
But I specifically wouldn’t want to be one marketer, at one company.
AI is breaking the role.
Why? And what should founders and marketers do about it?
The case for humans
There’s an explosion in AI tooling for marketers.
Most seek to 10x, 100x, or 1000x existing output. Some want to automate the entire endeavor.
One can’t help but ask: is there still room in marketing for humans?
I believe the answer is and always will be yes.
Taste matters. Slop smells.
World-class marketing requires the unexpected. A flash of insight. A little je ne sais quoi.
Humans provide this raw creativity.
In-house marketers
The logical conclusion for most of the last century was to employ full time marketers.
Marketers take your message to your market. Your product reaching your customers. Beating your competitors in your channels.
This required an enormous amount of context.
The cost of learning all that context justified permanent roles.
Specialties, constantly covered. The social media marketer, the performance marketer, the content marketer1.
A permanent team of builders.
Always producing, always on.
Context shift
AI is increasingly capable of handling vast context.
With near-instant ramp-up time.
And they’re getting faster to adapt, more nuanced, and more self-directed on long-range tasks.
The context that necessitated in-house marketers is rapidly shifting from meatware to software.
This threatens the in-house marketer.
Not directly from software. Marketers won’t directly lose their jobs to AI agents.
The bigger threat is its humble namesake: the marketing agency.
AI-powered and fiercer than ever.
Cambrian-era explosion
Agencies aren’t new.
They’ve long bridged the gap between annoying work companies would rather skip, and business outcomes.
How are they changing?
A century ago, agencies were expensive to run, expensive to hire.
Affordable to only the biggest companies.
This made sense. Production required actual factories. Distribution required horse-drawn carriage. Media access was scarce and secretive.
The internet compressed this.
A few high-skilled professionals were all it took.
One Ad Managered, another Photoshopped, a third SQLed.
AI is compressing it yet again.
Now all it takes is an individual and an internet connection.
They don’t need to write any copy, push any pixels, crunch any numbers.
Their AI does it all.
Why is this better than an in-house marketer?
They get to try, fail, and learn across dozens of companies at the same time. The in-house marketer doesn’t stand a chance.
Tiny, AI-first agencies are flourishing.
We’re in a Cambrian-era explosion of agency diversity.
Every possible niche in the marketing ecosystem is being filled by Ai-powered agencies who do one thing, extremely well, over and over again.
There’s an agency for that
I’m seeing it first hand.
For every marketing need at startups I advise, a boutique agency meets the need 10x or 100x better than an in-house marketer.
Want to host B2B sales prospects at fancy dinners?
There’s an agency for that.
Flood social media with UGC?
There’s an agency for that.
Hack Reddit threads?
There’s an agency for that.
From organic and paid search, to LinkedIn ghostwriting, to memes on X, and beyond.
If you can imagine it, there’s an agency for it.
They exist because they supply human taste.
Intimate IRL dinners. Authentic Reddit posts. Funny X memes.
These aren’t automatable, but they sure are delegatable.
Strictly rational
This part is non-obvious to founders and marketers.
For startups, it is strictly rational to hire the agency.
On one hand, spend 30 hours over 3 months to hire one person.
On the other, spend 30 minutes over 3 days to find the world's best agency.
Your employee sees 1 company.
The agency sees 10 companies, sees 10x more, learns 10x faster.
The choice is clear.
By the time you’ve defined, opened, and filled the role, the channel’s changed. The W’s on X. The arb’s gone.
Hire a marketer?
You needed them last month.
Chief Marketing Orchestrator
As a founder or marketing leader, your role has shifted.
From:
runner → coach
executor → coordinator
marketer → multithreader
You distribute context, pull strings, and uphold taste.
You are the Chief Marketing Orchestrator.
With a myriad of agencies at your disposal, your success depends on 3 things:
Defining a cohesive strategy
Finding the world’s best
Driving accountability
I cover defining a cohesive marketing strategy here.
So how do you find the world’s best and hold them accountable?
Finding the world’s best
Consider an analogy: painters, plumbers, electricians.
Knowledge-intense specialists who bring meticulous execution with a dollop of creativity.
How would you hire for excellence in those roles?
You’d ask your friends to get high-signal referrals.
Then you’d ask a few things.
How many times have you done this before? Answer: hundreds, if not thousands of times.
What’s your track record? Answer: endless 5* reviews.
How soon can you start? Answer: immediately.
How fast are you? Answer: unbelievably fast.
How expensive is this? Answer: surprisingly reasonable.
Litmus test: don’t trust a marketing agency that sucks at marketing itself.
Driving accountability
Underrated yet necessary skill: driving accountability.
On average, in-house marketers care more. Their upside and downside are higher.
This doesn’t mean agencies are worse, but they do need to be managed.
First, define excellence.
Absorb industry benchmarks
Observe the best in your industry
Define your goal, in numbers, feel, or both
Write it down. Be precise.
Then, demand excellence.
For each effort, require written update weekly; accept nothing less.
Use this template:
Relative to our goal:
What did we accomplish this week?
What results did we drive?
What did we learn?
What will we do differently next week?
If progress is being made each week, up the stakes.
If stalling out, cut and replace.
It’s that simple.
Have a marketing problem?
There’s an agency for that.
Choose well. Delegate hard. Replace fast.
I anticipate that the few interesting full-time roles in marketing left behind will be product and brand marketing. Everything else will be better handled through agency and automation.
I have the same observation but a different takeaway:
Marketing is very much a “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. It is very easy to apply automation and agencies to every marketing problem - that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea to.
1. Internal business needs and industry context can change on a dime - there will always be a delay in feedback and communication - not to mention the logistical challenges of juggling a hundred different agencies.
2. You touched on this - if you don’t possess actual marketing knowledge, how can you hold agencies accountable? How can you put them in the best position to succeed? Numbers don’t always reflect the full context - CPA numbers in a void don’t mean anything. Moreover, ruthless optimization towards a KPI without any business context can actually hurt the business in the long run.
3. What differentiates your marketing motion from any of your competitors? Does your Alpha merely boil down to which agencies you onboard?
It is very easy (and recommended) to replace average marketers with in-house agencies. But I think the best marketers will continue to keep their strategy in-house and use agencies purely for the labor and execution.
Unfortunately, I’ve been seeing this trend more and more, where marketing leaders actually don’t have a lot of domain knowledge - they’re just really good at managing agencies.
Not the end of the world if that improves the bottom line, but my bar for marketing talent is higher.
Man. This is so good. 👏