In June, the finance chief of a listed software company told investors his team now makes content in hours rather than days. Then he said what that bought them: "we don't need external agencies."

Five words, on a routine earnings call, about a branding project. Vaibhav Agarwal of RingCentral was describing his own cost line. He was also describing the end of a business model that spent twenty years charging clients for the calendar.

I run a marketing business. Read the rest with that in mind, because it lands on me first.

The year the industry stopped pretending

The numbers are public and grim. Bloomberg Intelligence data has the S&P 500 media index finishing 2026 as the worst performing sector for earnings growth, dragged down by the advertising technology company Trade Desk. In Europe, the Stoxx Europe 600 media and entertainment benchmark is expected to post no earnings growth at all this year, while the broader market climbs 15 per cent.

The client side explains most of it. Marketing budgets are being trimmed across sectors that have nothing to do with each other, from music streaming to telehealth, and the cuts land in operating expense lines rather than in strategy documents. At the same time Meta and Google keep shipping self-serve tools that make cutting the agency line easier every quarter. The companies selling the ad inventory built the machine that removes the people who used to negotiate for you. That is a neat piece of business.

Everybody got the same tools in the same year.

The part the reporting walks past

This gets told as machines coming for creative work. Look at what actually got replaced at RingCentral. Days became hours. The thing that died there is turnaround time, and turnaround time is what a large share of the agency business was quietly selling.

Think about what used to fill those days. A brief the client already wrote, retyped by an account manager into a template. A kickoff call with four attendees, three of them taking notes. A status document nobody reads. A round of amends collected into an email, then a second round because the first went to the wrong person. Billed monthly, presented as process, described in the credentials deck as rigour.

That layer was expensive administration wearing a marketing job title. It survived because coordination genuinely took time and somebody had to do it. Software took the time away, and the job description went with it.

When everyone has AI, average becomes free

Here is why that matters to a business owner rather than to an agency. The tools are the same tools. Your competitor has them. Your intern has them. The platform selling you media has them and hands them over free, because it makes cutting your budget easier. One baseline now applies to everybody, and the baseline is fast, competent and completely generic.

A competent average used to be worth real money, because producing it took a team and a fortnight. It now takes a prompt. So the value moved to the two places the machine handles badly. The first is judgement, which means deciding what is worth making at all, and knowing what your business understands that nobody else does. The second is craft, which means being specific: the actual customer story, the number out of your own books, the joke only your industry gets, the shot that took three attempts to land.

Both of those need hands on the work. Somebody who can write the line, cut the film, read the data and argue with the client in the same week. The person whose contribution was convening a meeting about those things has run out of road, and the meeting is now a shared document.

Everyone in the industry is having a marvellous 2027

Watch where the optimism sits in every forecast for this sector. It is always the year after this one. Citi analyst Ciaran Donnelly credits WPP's progress and says uncertainty remains about the path back to growth. Berenberg analyst Anna Patrice argues the biggest problems are company specific rather than structural. Craig Huber of Huber Research Partners makes the point that companies already learned slashing advertising hurts revenue growth, which they are about to learn again.

Credit where it is earned. Omnicom raised its outlook after selling a wider range of services to existing clients, and Publicis keeps outperforming rivals with a data led approach. The pattern in both is the same as the pattern at RingCentral. Work a client cannot do from their own desk is growing. Work that consisted of coordination is being reorganised into four divisions and promised to shareholders for next year.

One caution before you act on any of this. Every figure here comes from American and European companies and analysts. Australian budgets run on their own timing, so treat the local read as inference rather than as reporting.

What to do about it this month

Read your retainer line by line and ask what each line made. Anything that produced coordination has been replaced by a shared calendar and a cheap subscription, and you should stop paying for it. Anything that produced a decision or a finished thing is worth more than the invoice says.

Put one person with taste in charge of what goes out. AI will hand you a competent draft in ninety seconds, and by Friday every competent draft in your category looks identical. Somebody has to delete the generic version, add the detail only your business knows, and hold the line when the fast option is the dull one.

Buy the things you cannot do at your desk. Strategy that argues back, craft you can see in the finished work, and specific knowledge of a market you sell into. Pay properly for those three, make the routine material yourself, and judge every supplier on what they produced rather than on how many of them turned up to the call.

Average went free this year. Charge for the rest, and make it worth the money.