Digital agencies · strategy, pricing and product

Stop selling hours.

AI is compressing the work you bill for, holding companies are shedding brands and clients are keeping more in-house. Here's how I'd think about the next two years if I ran an agency.

See the four shiftsOr just talk
A busy creative studio with a saffron hourglass, nearly run out, on the shared worktable

Four shifts,
four first moves.

The view from the back seat of a vintage taxi, the saffron fare meter running on the dashboard
Pricing01 / 04

Hours are the wrong unit.

If AI cuts a three-week job to three days, hourly billing turns your own efficiency into a revenue cut. You're a cabbie on the meter who just learned every shortcut. The agencies that get through this price the outcome and keep the margin the tools create.

Try this: Pick one service you deliver often. Fix its price, name its outcome, and ship it as a product.

Two giant ocean liners lashed together in a harbor while small saffron sailboats slip out between them
Consolidation02 / 04
$26Bcombined revenue as Omnicom closed IPG; DDB, FCB and MullenLowe retired · Campaign, Nov 2025

The giants are merging. The talent is loose.

When the holding companies cut brands and people, good clients and good talent go looking for somewhere smaller and sharper. That's an opening, but only for independents who can explain in one sentence why they're different.

Try this: Write the one sentence. Test it on your last three lost pitches.

A home workshop full of ordinary tools, a master clockmaker in a saffron apron building a tower-clock mechanism
In-housing03 / 04
53%of marketers want in-house teams to act as strategic collaborators · ANA State of In-Housing, Jun 2026

Sell what the in-house team can't build.

In-house teams are moving up from production to strategy. What clients still buy from outside is judgment, specialist skill and systems they don't have time to build. Agencies that keep selling production are competing with their client's own payroll.

Try this: Audit last year's revenue: how much was work the client could have hired for? Move that capacity up the stack.

A restaurant kitchen beside a small bottling line filling saffron sauce bottles into shipping crates
Owned IP04 / 04
2 pathsin the 4As 2026 outlook: own the tools and IP, or own the advice · WARC on the 4As, 2026

Bottling the sauce is a different business.

Owning a product raises what an agency is worth. But a restaurant that bottles its sauce is now in retail, with a roadmap, a support queue and customers who never ate there. Most agencies need a product owner before they need the product.

Try this: Before you build, name who owns the roadmap and what it will cost to support for two years.

Four questions for your next partners' meeting

  1. 1What share of last year's revenue would survive if every job took half the hours?
  2. 2Which service could we price as a product by next quarter?
  3. 3What do our best clients buy from us that their in-house team can't do?
  4. 4If we built our own tool, who would own its roadmap for two years?

Got an agency
to reinvent?

Let's talkbrandon@brandonx.io