What A Media Agency Actually Does Now
A decade of automation was supposed to make the media agency unnecessary. Platforms sell directly, buying runs through systems, and a brand can in principle do all of it itself.
Plenty have tried. What they discover is that a media agency was never mainly a buying function, and the parts that remain are the parts hardest to bring in.
What a media agency is for once buying is automated
Two things. Deciding what not to buy, which requires having seen enough categories to know which platform promises do not survive contact. And holding a number that nobody inside the brand is incentivised to hold honestly.
Every platform reports its own success. Someone has to sit across all of them and say what actually moved, which is structurally difficult for anyone whose bonus depends on the answer.
There is a third thing, less often stated. An agency absorbs the consequences of a bad call in a way an internal team cannot, and a good deal of what a brand is buying is somewhere for a decision to sit that is not a person it has to keep employing.
Why the in-house version keeps stalling
Because a brand sees one category and cannot benchmark itself, and because the team that plans the spend ends up marking its own work. It also loses the ability to walk away from a platform relationship, which is most of the negotiating position.
What has genuinely moved in-house
Execution, sensibly. Always-on search, ecommerce placements and retail media are operational and belong close to the business. The confusion begins when a brand assumes that because it can run the machine it no longer needs anyone to ask whether the machine is pointed anywhere useful.
The agencies that look secure are the ones paid for judgement. The ones paid per unit bought are being competed with by software, and that contest has already been decided.