From Agency to Agentsy

“We only have marketing because 1:1 sales for everything is too expensive”. I love this quote from Andrew Chen and the convergence of marketing and sales we are exploring today with Generative AI technologies.

Chen is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the author of The Cold Start Problem. He wrote the line in a May 2024 essay on how AI will reinvent marketing. His next sentence gives the mechanism: AI allows people to “convert $ to labor”. A salesperson for every customer never paid off. When the conversation itself gets cheap, that old trade-off moves.

§The trade-off behind marketing

A good salesperson listens, asks questions and adapts the pitch to one person. Marketing does the opposite. It writes one message, tunes it for a segment and sends it to many people. Brand, campaigns and media buying all grew around that constraint.

Chen’s argument is that AI can hold a very large number of one-to-one conversations at once. He expects “unique combinations of mass 1:1 sales with brand efforts”, with the brand work giving the “virtual salesforce air cover”. In that picture, the campaign and the sales call stop being separate departments.

I love this quote from Andrew Chen and the convergence of marketing and sales we are exploring today with Generative AI technologies.

For an agency, this changes part of the job. Some of the work moves from producing messages to setting up and supervising the agents that talk to customers. The shift from doing the work to directing it is the same one I described in how agent guidance reads like a CEO’s messaging. Cheap one-to-one content also has a cost, and people will learn to avoid the slop.

§Sofia, November 2024

The conference was IAB Bulgaria’s Digital Day 2024, themed “Generationally Speaking”, held on 14 November at Interpred WTC in Sofia. According to bTV’s report, 19 speakers addressed about 250 people from digital and advertising agencies, advertisers and media. Florin is Florin Ionescu, VP of Consumer Services at Tremend. The report summed up our message this way: generative AI should not scare communication specialists, who should bring it into their work to their own advantage. We walked through industry examples of teams already using it in their campaigns.

It was nice to talk about it as part of the transition from “From Agency to Agentsy” together with Florin at the recent IAB conference in Sofia.