Tim Libby

CMO’s and agencies are so enamored with bottom-funnel targeting tactics that they totally lost the ability to move people effectively—their judgement is out of balance with real needs today. The targeting down funnel ‘disease’ gives marketers a feeling that they aren’t being wasteful but so much is showing they aren’t being effective either. “This ….reveals …a fundamental mismatch. Respondents are applying bottom-of-funnel tactics to what they've identified as top-of-funnel brand building objectives.”

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The Four Factors Behind DigitasAI’s Impact At Digitas North America, we’re obsessed with proving DigitasAI's value—not just promising it. That’s why we measure the impact of DigitasAI across four factors that actually move the needle: Accuracy: Are we seeing the full picture—unbiased, holistic, and real? Efficiency: How much precious time does AI save our teams, freeing us for lateral leaps and bigger ideas? Impact: Is there measurable lift—for our clients’ business, and for ours? Sparkle: (Yes, you read that right.) Does AI unlock creative magic—unexpected thinking, inspiring ideas, that “wow” factor? And this has direct line to our core principles: Networked Experiences—integrating brand, platforms, and people in ways that earn attention. Earn Your Way In—using intelligence to create real value, not just noise. Integrated Intelligence—where every solution is powered by insight, not instinct alone. We want AI to deliver more than efficiency theatre, so we're measuring what matters. I'll be posting updates on how we're tracking as regularly as possible! #NetworkedExperiences #DigitasAI #EarnYourWayIn

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Ad agency margins have been plummeting for decades, says the WSJ. We shouldn't be surprised. The big media platforms (Meta, Google, Trade Desk) have been working hard for a decade to make this happen. They've done an amazing job at discrediting every single hard-earned industry belief in the name of driving media dollars in their own direction. The idea is a simple one: the platforms had finally made fully accountable ad spending possible, and it was catnip for marketers who shifted huge percentages of their media spend to response-based formats with the expectation that they would finally be able to measure the exact ROI on advertising. This change in thinking reframed marketing entirely. Now advertising was simply a financial transaction. Gone was the art, gone was the idea that it's a long-term investment, gone was the strategy. An ad was simply a widget like any other part of the supply chain whose price can easily be negotiated down by the procurement department. Fast forward a few years, and you end up with a new generation of marketers who don’t believe that the creative part of advertising has any value, and why would they pay extra for something they don't value? The only thing they know they need is media planning and buying and you can see what's happened as a result. Publicis is simply throwing the creative in for free with the media. Holding companies are downsizing, merging, jettisoning production, and putting all their resources into data and media buying. Marketers are handing their brands over entirely to influencers. The outlook gets even worse with AI threatening to execute all the ads and variations in seconds. If marketers see advertising as a numbers game why wouldn’t they just hand the execution over to a low-cost semi sentient computer program? In reality, the tools that the platforms have been pushing are not good value. They can’t anticipate a purchase, can’t accurately predict an audience, and they devalue the very brands they're promoting. The likelihood of a single online ad converting to a sale is around the same as being struck by lightning over the course of your life. That is not pinpoint targeting, it's a probabilistic system that, given enough scale, gets lucky every once in a while. There's also the reality that when everyone is placing ads with the same tools, and the same data, and the same idea generators, marketing becomes nothing more than a test of who’s willing to pay the most for an impression (and I don't have to tell you who benefits most in that scenario). At that point, ironically, the only way for brands to develop any sort of advantage over their competitors will be through strategy and ingenuity, with an original creative idea that stands out from the noise, sticks in a person's brain, and shapes the way they feel about a product long before it comes time to buy it, the very type of idea that nobody is willing to pay for anymore.

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WPP yesterday declared itself "no longer a holding company." That's the right diagnosis. Seven years after Publicis proved the model was broken. But read what replaced it. Rose calls WPP an "intelligent orchestration layer." The holding company is dead. Long live the holding company. Here's the problem. The cost and complexity of coordination have fallen. AI made it cheap. Almost free. That changes the logic of scale. That changes the justification for the margin. What hasn't fallen is exposure. Automation compresses time. Distribution is instant. When something misfires, it rarely stays contained. It propagates across markets before governance can react. That's not a production issue. It's a liability issue. Platforms cap their downside contractually. Models carry none by design. Clients absorb reputational and commercial risk. So the strategic question remains: if coordination is easier, where does accountability sit at scale? The agencies that stay indispensable won't differentiate on capability alone. They'll differentiate on how clearly they structure consequence. Shared downside. Defined governance. Decision rights that hold under pressure. That shift isn't cosmetic. It changes procurement conversations. It changes legal exposure. It changes margin structure. Becoming structurally optional is its own form of compression. Elevate28 may reassure investors. Clients will still ask who stands behind the outcome when it breaks.

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Really appreciated being part of this conversation. Big industry shifts raise questions, but they also create space for new ideas and new ways of working. Chicago’s creative community has been through change before, and it always finds its footing.

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I just came across Forrester’s provocative framing on the agency big bang: the idea that agencies are rapidly reshaping themselves into “algorithms of record”: integrated marketing OS + proprietary data + execution logic that brands buy as algorithmic capability, not just talent or services. It’s a clear sign that the market is already moving past traditional agency value and toward organizations that can codify, automate, and scale strategic and creative muscle. But what if we pushed this one step further? What if the same logic applies at the individual level? What if you could become your own algorithm of record? 👉 Not your résumé. 👉 Not your hourly rate. 👉 Not your titles or your tools. But a trainable model of how you think, see, and make sense of the world, your cognitive signature. In the next phase of AI-augmented work, I’m convinced: individuals will be hired for their algorithmic identity; the distilled pattern of taste, insight, judgment, and cultural acuity they encode into a model. Brands will license personal algorithms just like they license technology stacks; “work” becomes not what you do but what your algorithm consistently produces and how it orients complexity, surfaces signal, and shapes meaning at scale. This flips the old value curve: from labor to cognition as IP. For agencies, the shift is from service provider to algorithm orchestrator. For individuals, the opportunity is from skill holder to algorithm owner. And that’s not just a semantic twist, it’s a new economic architecture for talent, creativity, and strategic value creation. If agencies are becoming algorithms, people will too.

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The Astonishing Growth of Dividends at WPP, IPG and Omnicom highlights their Business Model Problem. Not only do holding companies have to liquidate talent through annual downsizings -- they must pay growing levels of dividends to shore up share prices. How long can this go on? Michael Farmer Jun 16 Mr. Farmer's language says it all, 'liquidate talent through downsizing.'

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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Most would agree with the perspective on the programmatic ecosystem shared by PubMatic's CEO, stating that it is “multifaceted, certainly complex.” Unfortunately for marketers, this is dramatically compounded by the lack of transparency, which allows intermediaries to siphon media dollars into fees, direct advertiser investment to “owned” solutions, and compounds the failure to constrain non-human traffic.

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Sooo... how can the same product, from the same company, with the same experience; suddenly grab market share from the market leader. No flashy launch, no innovation, no nothing. Change your brand positioning. How about if you are Anthropic (Claude), and you go up against a powerful government department like the DoW? Your intent was not brand position change; that'd be too pedestrian. There is of course, a lot of nuances in what happened; but the market does not care about the nuance - most of which I am most likely missing. The market cares about what they see and hear and feel. The Brand Positioning Deck on Amodei's laptop on never changed. Perceptions of the market changed of what Anthropic was. What it stood for, how far it will go for something as abstract, yet important as principles. As an aside: Amodei has re-engaged DoW and opened negotiations again as of late last week. Anthropic is still a business; and sometimes the market make a lot of assumptions, so you never know what is going on behind the scenes. But the users have made up their minds of what OpenAI and Anthropic stands for - rightly or wrongly. Both CEOs played a big role in this evolution. Speaking of CEOs and big companies and their 'products,'.... Nah, that'd be too easy. https://lnkd.in/gyfapkyF

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