What does the agency landscape actually look like behind closed doors right now? In this piece, Partner & Singapore Country Lead, Matt de Bakker, shares candid insights from recent conversations with fellow founders and enterprise clients, unpacking the quiet shift from tactical execution to high-value strategy and what it means for the future of agency growth.
I’ve spent the last few weeks in rooms with other agency heads and with clients, talking about where this industry is heading. A few things came up consistently enough to be worth writing down.
There is a clear shift in what clients want. Most can’t articulate it precisely yet, but the direction is unmistakable: a pull away from purely tactical execution toward higher-value, strategic work.
The appetite is real. Even clients who arrive with a narrow brief or a rigid RFP respond immediately when offered something more serious. The interest is there beneath the ask.
But two gaps are slowing everyone down.
First, budgets haven’t moved. Expectations are rising faster than the funding behind them. Clients want a strategic partner while still pricing for tactical delivery.
Second, clients struggle to sell the shift internally. Many don’t yet know how to frame higher-value work in conversations with their own leadership. Part of the agency’s job now is translation: turning “I know something needs to change” into a business case they can defend.
Underneath all of it sits AI. Clients are actively working out where it fits in their tech stack, and that raises harder questions about their own headcount and how they structure agency relationships. AI lowers the cost of execution, which is exactly why value is moving up the stack toward judgement, strategy and creativity. Agencies that only sell hours are the most exposed.
The market reflects this. Clients tend to fall into one of three camps: working with agencies that no longer meet their needs, mid-conversation with agencies still defining their own offer, or stuck in old ways of working themselves. Almost no one has fully landed on the new model yet, on either side of the table.
That’s the honest part. Agencies are mid-transition too. Right now positioning matters more than raw capability. The firms gaining ground aren’t always the most capable; they’re the ones who can clearly say what they are for in this new landscape.
My own view: the agencies that win the next few years will be the ones with a clear point of view and the discipline to price for value, not volume. The rest of the industry is still figuring it out in public.
Curious how others are seeing this develop. If you’re a client or an agency leader navigating the same questions, I’d welcome the comparison of notes.
mattdb@milkandhoneypr.com | LinkedIn
