The age of the marketing machine

The agencies I grew up competing with priced hours. Then a machine learned to do in seconds what those hours produced — not all of it, not yet, but enough of it that the math on hiring a retainer stopped working for a lot of people who used to sign them.

I'm not interested in the culture-war version of this argument. I'm interested in the structural version: what a marketing firm is for, once the things it sold are no longer scarce.

The work that got commoditized first

First drafts. Brand-safe captions. Monthly reports that nobody reads. Landing pages that follow a template a machine has now seen ten million of. These were the bread-and-butter deliverables of the agency I started in 2008 — and by 2024 most of them could be generated, in your brand voice, in under a minute.

[D13 stub — full body carries forward from live site at Stage 6.]

What's actually scarce now

Judgment. Taste. Context about your specific business. The willingness to say "don't do that, it won't work, here's what will." These didn't get cheaper — they got rarer, because most agencies trained their people on the commoditized stuff and never built the muscle for the rest.

[D13 stub — full body carries forward from live site at Stage 6.]

Where that leaves a firm like mine

Not in the retainer business. Not in the deck business. In the systems business — the one where I build the thing that would have cost a team to run, hand it to a client, and stay on only if there's a reason to.