As new tools emerge in the market, brand expectations from agency partners will likely rise.
AI tools are a small contributing factor that are making agencies worried about pricing.
Mike Barrett, chief strategy officer, Supernatural
This presents agencies with the opportunity to build AI expertise and capture a larger share of production budgets, according to Mike Barrett, chief strategy officer at Supernatural. Roles such as prompt engineering will become increasingly prominent.
“Instead of asking for one ad, clients could ask for four ads,” said Barrett. “You may not need as many producers on staff, but you’re going to need people who can work with the new technology.”
However, Barrett remains skeptical of pricing shifts given the oversupply in the market for creative services. On one hand, clients are bringing more creative tasks in-house; on the other, there’s a market saturation of providers offering creative services.
“In that environment, the industry as a whole faces downward pressure on its ability to price projects or retainers with clients,” he said. “AI tools are a small contributing factor that are making agencies worried about pricing.”
New expertise and roles
Still, there are opportunities for agencies to be proactive and bring creative ideas to clients before a client becomes fixated on cost reduction, Roetzer said.
One strategy, according to Roetzer, involves agencies conducting an AI impact assessment on their talent, people and services.
“Look at the services you provide that make up different percentages of your revenue,” he said. “And be critical of how much revenue those services generate.”
Agencies must anticipate client needs that don’t exist today. As agencies are expected to undertake more production tasks, Momentum’s Snyder envisions specialized producers responsible for ethically and responsibly managing synthetic content and integrating it into media production capabilities.
As a result, the agency is introducing the role of synthetic media producer, specializing in creating and managing AI-generated content.
“We [still] have to address the issues around transparency, usage and copyright, and the bias embedded within [AI] models,” he noted.
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