The New Theater of Agency Marketing
In the 1950s, the U.S. government started designing bomb shelters.
By the mid-1960s, they were spending hundreds of millions actually building them.
Not because bomb shelters were proven to save lives - but because it was unthinkable not to build them when everyone else was. The fear wasn’t that you didn’t have the best protection. The fear was that someone else did.
That was all part of a historic arms race. It wasn’t because the United States and the Soviet Union wanted war. But because they couldn’t afford to fall behind.
What started with bombs and shelters led to satellites. What started with fear led to GPS, weather forecasting, microchips - and eventually, someone walking on the moon.
That’s the thing about an arms race. It creates waste and progress. We’re living one today with AI.
Agencies are spinning up proprietary tools, “AI-powered” services, and case studies re-written by ChatGPT. Some of it’s theater and some of it’s extraordinary. But most of it is driven by the same thought: we can’t be the ones who didn’t show up.
One agency I work with built an AI tool to streamline research. It hasn’t landed a single client but it made their process 50% faster. Another slapped “AI” on a recycled capabilities deck and landed three new ones.
That’s a fair representation for how things are going right now - everyone’s building and bluffing all at once. And no one's going to know who’s who until much later.
It would be foolish not to stock up in this AI race, but it’s not worth banking your entire reputation on it. Calling yourself an “AI agency” won’t mean much in a year, just like “internet marketing agency” doesn’t mean much today. Everyone will be using it. And when we’re all teched out, ogling at the next big thing, we’ll circle back to the differentiators that have always mattered: who you serve, what problems you solve, and how you’re uniquely positioned to help.
It feels very urgent to signal you’re part of it - even if your actual contribution is uncertain. But once the dust settles, I’ll bet that it’s not the loudest adopters who benefit most. It’s the ones who used the moment to quietly sharpen their focus, rethink what they offer, and build something that still works when the hype wears off.
