You pay for hours, not results

That leaves two levers for profitability (and therefore survival): land as many new clients as possible and staff the teams across as many accounts as possible.

None of it tells you whether the campaign worked, or whether the team did everything it could to improve performance. And in this model, nobody is ever paid to save you money.

The squeeze turns brutal as soon as low-value tasks eat up the hours. Administrative weight, fragmented expertise and technological complexity leave the big agencies structurally unable to serve small and mid-sized accounts well (the ones under €200k of annual revenue).

Advertisers can feel it. In the WFA and MediaSense study Future of Agency Remuneration, run with more than 80 multinationals representing $60bn of spend, 75% of brands say they care how their agency makes money — but only 28% believe they have transparency on it. 84% point to the lack of data and measurement between advertiser and agency. Three brands in four want to change their remuneration model within three years.

When an agency is agentic by design, a large share of operations is automated. Value creation moves back to where it should always have remained: strategy, ideas, audacity, judgment, years of experience and results.