Sit down, Nick. The media agency isn’t done, it’s becoming what clients have always needed

In response to comments made by Jellyfish’s CEO during Cannes Lions, Goodstuff’s executive director of creative media fires back.

Every few weeks, someone declares the death of the media agency. During Cannes week, it was Jellyfish’s Nick Emery.

Jellyfish CEO Nick Emery: ‘Traditional agencies are finished’

It happened when digital arrived, when procurement took hold, again with in-housing, and now AI has become the latest supposed executioner.

Emery is right about one thing: marketing is changing fundamentally. AI is reshaping how campaigns are planned, bought, optimised and measured at extraordinary speed. Agencies that continue to define themselves by trading, process and scale should indeed be worried.

So, he has diagnosed the challenge correctly but named the wrong casualty.

The casualty isn’t the media agency; it’s the old media agency. To conclude that the ‘traditional’ media agency is finished is to mistake evolution for extinction. 

Perhaps Emery has been away a while, but the best agencies have already changed. 

In fact, I’d argue they’re changing faster than most client organisations can. That isn’t a criticism of clients. Large organisations face governance challenges, complexity, competing priorities, and legacy systems. They should move carefully.

Agencies have the ability and the responsibility to move first.

We experiment across dozens of categories, channels and audiences. We see hundreds of marketing problems every year. We build technology, test new workflows, learn quickly and transfer that knowledge from one client to another. That accumulated experience is precisely why agencies remain valuable.

AI only increases that advantage.

The conversation around AI often assumes technology replaces expertise. In reality, technology amplifies expertise. The tools are becoming democratised remarkably quickly. Judgment isn’t.

Everyone will have access to increasingly capable AI. Not everyone will know which questions to ask, which outputs to trust, how to connect media with creativity, or when to ignore what the machine recommends because the answer is strategically wrong.

Marketing has never suffered from a shortage of data. It has always suffered from a shortage of interpretation, still a profoundly human task.

Ironically, even the businesses leading this AI revolution prove the point.

Jellyfish has invested brilliantly in AI. So have many agencies. Good. They should.

But this isn’t evidence that agencies are obsolete.

It’s evidence that agencies remain the best place to define or invent the future of marketing.

The winners won’t be those with the biggest language model. They’ll be those who combine technology with commercial understanding, cultural intuition and client leadership.

At Goodstuff, we’ve invested heavily in AI, proprietary tools and agent clouds (thank you, Stagwell!). They make us faster, smarter and more effective. But they don’t define us.

Technology sits behind us, rather than us hiding behind it

Clients don’t appoint agencies to admire their infrastructure. They appoint us to solve difficult business problems.

The best agencies increasingly look less like buying houses and more like strategic operating partners. They help clients navigate fragmented media, changing consumer behaviour, organisational transformation, measurement challenges and now AI adoption itself.

That’s a bigger role than we’ve ever played.

The future agency won’t simply buy media. The agencies that survive clearly won’t be those clinging to yesterday’s trading models. They’ll be those capable of leading clients through tomorrow’s uncertainty.

Fortunately, many already are.

Again, the best ‘traditional’ media agencies aren’t dead or done; they’re using AI as the catalyst for change and, hopefully, sprouting wings.

The agency model that is emerging is considerably more valuable.

Simeon Adams is the executive director of creative media at Goodstuff.