I work at a media agency.

I love it.

But I think the way most agencies work is fundamentally broken.

Not the people. The system.

70% of ad spend is now digital. And most of that flows into three platforms. The work has become button-pressing. Efficient, measurable, and average.

We've built agencies as relay towers. Information goes in one end, gets passed along, loses context at every link, and comes out the other side as something nobody's proud of.

The original thinking is diluted into something safe enough for everyone to approve and boring enough for nobody to remember.

Meanwhile, the whole world is changing. Retail got disrupted. Taxis got disrupted. Banking got disrupted. Media agencies watched all of this and assumed they were spectating, not previewing.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking what the future of our industry looks like.

I could have kept this as an internal doc. Instead I've wrote 3,000 words and am sharing it as an open playbook.

Because the change is coming whether agencies want it or not.

And I'd rather the people inside agencies are the ones who build it, instead of being the ones it happens to.

Read it hereThe Last Brief: An Open Playbook for the Agency of the Future