Jellyfish CEO Nick Emery: ‘Traditional agencies are finished’

This interview was conducted and first published by The Media Leader France.

Nick Emery doesn’t mince words. For the Jellyfish CEO, traditional agencies are a thing of the past, even if some of their services persist.

“I think traditional agencies are finished, but some of those services aren’t,” he clarifies, before adding that AI represents “such a substantial change” that it’s incomparable to previous disruptions.

Jellyfish, acquired by The Brandtech Group in 2023, had anticipated this shift as early as when the group was founded in 2015. Originally built around machine learning, two years ago, the company spent twelve months reworking all of its marketing practices around AI.

It was within this context that a Jellyfish engineer, Jack Smythe, developed a pioneering model based on agents, which Nick Emery describes as “the most important buyers you’ll ever meet.”

The Brandtech Group’s acquisitions of Jellyfish and of Pencil, an AI-powered advertising creative platform, allowed the group to combine platform relationships, media expertise, and AI creative within a single entity.

Jellyfish now offers three models to its clients: SaaS-based technology access, an in-house integration model, and transformation support for large companies.

Emery cites L’Oréal as an example of an advertiser that has undertaken a truly top-down transformation. He acknowledges that large corporations structurally struggle to innovate quickly.

“At Mindshare, we used to say you had to destroy the company every six months and rebuild. Now, you have to do it every minute.”

Regarding the proliferation of AI announcements at Cannes, he calls for vigilance without illusions: “From the first second, you know it’s rubbish,” he says.

He argues for the ability to distinguish genuine progress from promotional rhetoric, and reminds us that the existential threat facing agencies is real: a client today theoretically has all the AI ​​tools necessary to do without them. What Jellyfish sells, therefore, is “insight, invention, creativity, and the way to deploy it.”

Watch the full interview