Email Intercept: On AI and the Future of Marketing Agencies
I started Journey in 2013. I was broke and needed a job. At the time, the company was called Omega Media. Part of the reason I started the company was that I had discovered a so-called macro trend: i.e. a trend that will outperform the rest of the market.
That macro trend was the rise in the importance of Google and search engine optimization (SEO). I discovered that most marketing managers in 2013 had not understood the value of Google yet — and that there was a huge business opportunity in being one of the first movers into this new, emerging market.
A few years later, in 2015–2016, the market for Google-focused marketing services exploded and Omega Media was perfectly positioned to grow with the wave. The rest is history. Since then, Journey has had a turnover of nearly €25 million EUR in sales of marketing services — and has become a fast growing Gazelle company 8 years in a row.
A New Chapter
In late 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Since then, AI has been the subject of enormous media focus. Everyone is talking about AI. And “everyone” has become AI experts. Yet I notice that very few have begun to actually use AI in an integrated, holistic way. I’m not talking about using ChatGPT for trivial, everyday tasks or writing funny toastmaster speeches. No, I’m talking about fully integrating ChatGPT into your work cycle, in such a way that the lines between AI-supported and human work are blurred.
This is where I think the next big macro trend lies: Building and offering AI knowledge, in such a way that you can deliver knowledge, processes, services and products that primarily originate from artificial intelligence. Simply put, to commercialize the operational use of AI and sell this to other companies that need specialized AI expertise.
A Painful Realization
The market for traditional human-driven marketing services is dead. AI has killed it. The industry is a zombie — a living dead — but doesn’t know it yet. Today, there are a thousand advertising and marketing companies in Norway and Europe that won’t exist in ten years. They will be bankrupt. Because who wants to pay €1,000 EUR to have a piece of content produced within two to three weeks, when AI can deliver a superior product in seconds, virtually for free? And who wants to pay hundreds of thousands for technical SEO reports, when ChatGPT can do the job far better, faster and cheaper? A human cannot compete against AI in the long run. It is a fairly simple, but at the same time painful and fundamental realization.
However, the shift will not take place immediately. It will take time, probably a few years. But slowly and surely, the clients of marketing companies will find that they can do much of the work themselves. New specialized AI tools will pop up, which — for a low license fee — will allow them to tap into the insane power of AI. And a totally new breed of tech-focused and AI-supported agencies will outperform traditional agencies on price, quality and speed of delivery. For agencies like Journey, it will be a matter of survival: Adapt or die.
The Road Ahead
After meditating on the rise of AI over the past few months, I have come to the following conclusions:
- We must, to the greatest extent possible, move away from hour-focused billing. When AI can do the job in seconds, it becomes pointless to talk about hours. In any case, customers have never really paid us for our hours — they have paid for results these hours produce.
- We must move away from human-driven processes. Humans will still play a crucial role in creating and maintaining (human) customer contact. And it’s people that must develop and lead strategy processes. But we can no longer base our business primarily on human development of content, services and products. We must shift to an “AI first” mindset.
- We need to change how we think about service verticals. With AI, everyone is essentially equally good across all subjects. We must become generalists; experts in getting AI to deliver what we need within a certain discipline. We must be pragmatic in relation to our own ability to deliver. From now on, everyone can basically deliver everything. We must go from being Paid Ads and SEO Specialists to becoming expert Prompt Engineers.
The changes I outline above don’t have to happen immediately. Nevertheless, we must begin our transformation as soon as possible. We must go from being a marketing agency to becoming an AI agency that, among other things, provides marketing services. Marketing services will be only one service vertical in Journey. From now on, we will be able to deliver services ranging from data analysis and HR, to research, automation and much more. Exactly which products will be the most important in our service portfolio will only be determined by the future and AI.
Nothing has to happen overnight. The destination is not the goal; the journey is the destination. If we start to focus completely and wholeheartedly on AI today, we have the potential to be among the best in AI-supported innovation in 2–3 years. Even then, we will probably be early compared to the rest of the market. But we will be perfectly positioned for the wave to come — just as Omega Media was perfectly positioned for Google’s growth from 2015 and onwards.
An Eternal Work In Progress
This memo, Journey’s AI Manifesto, will bring about a number of changes to Journey. We will have to redefine our products and services, our business model, how we put together teams and departments and we will have to carry out a significant AI-focused knowledge boost across thirty people in the organisation. This work begins now and can be considered an eternal “work in progress”.
I don’t know what the future holds, but I promise it won’t be boring. Because if we are to have any chance of creating our growth, we are going to have to think and be “AI first”.
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
