How is AI changing the media agency business, and what should an independent agency do to avoid being left on the platform as the train pulls out? In short: AI absorbs execution, reporting and data consolidation first, and value moves up towards advice, understanding the client's business and the ability to challenge a brief. Independents don't need to imitate the big groups. They need the same depth of analysis, without paying to build it.
The diagnosis comes from inside the business. In a piece by Stratégies, the French trade title, on the "new era" of media agencies, Sanja Vlaisavljevic, general manager of Lift, warns that "AI will gradually compress part of that execution" and that it "will gradually shift agencies' value". Less in production, more in advice.
What is really changing for media agencies?
Day-to-day life at a media agency often looks like what Vlaisavljevic describes: producing, consolidating and sharing reports and dashboards. "Eight versions of an Excel file, three PowerPoints." Everyone has lived through that Tuesday.
That is exactly the layer being compressed. In her view, the real question is not what AI will replace, but what agencies will do with the time saved. Her answer: "move up the value chain". Understand clients' businesses better: their products, pricing, distribution, competitors and how their consumers behave. "Be able to challenge a brief, not just execute it."
Two consequences follow. Agencies will need sharper specialists rather than generalists. And they won't be able to claim a strategic role while billing mostly for time spent.
Media, creative, independent: who is affected, and how?
AI doesn't hit every agency model in the same place. Here is a reading by type of shop.
| Agency type | What AI compresses | Where value moves | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|
| Holding-group media agency | Reporting, optimisation, automated buying | Data, business advice, negotiation | A remuneration model still indexed to volume |
| Independent media agency | Data consolidation, campaign wrap reports | Proximity, responsiveness, niche expertise | Lacking the analytical firepower to back up its advice |
| Creative agency | Adaptations, format versioning, desk research | The idea, the point of view, judgement | Watching production become a commodity |
| CRM or data agency | Segmentation, message variants, deployment | Reading behaviour, orchestration | Being reduced to a technical operator |
| Social or influencer agency | Monitoring, creator shortlisting, performance reporting | Understanding communities and cultures | Still being judged on volume rather than impact |
The common thread: everywhere, the first thing to disappear is the work the client never saw. What remains is the work they gladly pay for once they understand it.
Is AI making the decisions for agencies?
That is the temptation of the moment: believing technology alone dictates the future of the business. Sociologists call it technological determinism, the idea that a tool shapes organisations and practices whether their leaders like it or not.
That reading is half right. Yes, execution will be compressed whether or not the agency prepares for it: once a client knows a report can be produced in minutes, they won't pay for three days to get it. But technology doesn't decide what you do with the time freed up. An agency can turn it into short-term margin, into price cuts it never chose, or into advice.
Fundamentally, AI mostly produces volume: more data, more signals, more variants. Value goes to those who connect that mass to the human behaviour it describes. In connecting data to humanity, clarity emerges from chaos. That is interpretation work, not execution.
The real gap between the big groups and the independents
For years, the big groups' advantage rested on their tech stacks: analytics, data and AI tools they have invested millions in, and which their clients buy along with everything else. A 40-person agency could neither build nor maintain the equivalent.
That gap is narrowing, provided you don't try to build everything yourself. The Defy platform was designed for exactly that: to give independents the same analytical and AI capability as the big networks, without the development cost or the maintenance burden. SAMY, the global influencer agency, for example, uses Defy Agents to automate its performance reporting, cutting it from three days' work to one.
That time mustn't simply vanish into margin. It should go into knowing clients better, which is precisely the value Stratégies describes.
Where should an independent agency start?
- Map the execution. For two weeks, list everything that counts as repetitive production: monthly reports, consolidations, formatting, adaptations, competitor monitoring.
- Put a number on the time. Estimate the hours each task takes. That is your time reserve, and your best internal argument.
- Automate what the client doesn't see first. Reporting and data consolidation are the obvious candidates: immediate gain, low risk.
- Reinvest the time saved in knowing the client. Pricing, distribution, competitors, usage: that is where the ability to challenge a brief is won or lost.
- Specialise your people. Choose two or three sharp areas of expertise where you want to be the reference, rather than covering the whole spectrum.
- Rethink how you bill. If time spent falls, time-based billing drags your revenue down with it. Prepare fixed fees or a results-linked element.
Which AI tools should you favour, and which should you avoid?
Resist the urge to collect subscriptions. Ten tools that don't talk to each other recreate the eight-versions-of-Excel problem, only more expensively. Three criteria are enough to sort them.
- Traceability. An AI-generated conclusion must be checkable against the source data. Otherwise you can't defend it in front of a client.
- Fit with real work. A tool the team can query in its usual environments will get used. Yet another dashboard will be forgotten.
- Total cost. Count maintenance, training and integration time, not just the licence.
Finally, keep one simple rule: AI takes the chores, people keep the judgement. A media agency that only does execution has no reason to exist. An agency that advises better because it executes faster, on the other hand, has a good decade ahead of it.
