The War Between Brand and Performance Is Over. Both Agencies Lost. AI Won.

Fall of the Giants. Giulio Romano, 1532-34. Fresco, Palazzo del Te, Mantua, Italy.

Last week, OpenAI launched AgentKit and apps inside ChatGPT. Developers can now build production-grade AI agents in ten minutes. Canva and Spotify appear naturally inside conversations, reaching ChatGPT’s 800 million users weekly. No media buy required.

Watch what happened: Canva didn’t choose between being a brand or a performance tool. They became a verb inside a conversation. Spotify didn’t buy media or create brand anthem films. They showed up exactly when someone asked about music. Both brand and performance in a single moment. No media budget. Just utility so elegant it feels like magic.

While agencies wage war between brand and performance, AI just unified distribution, creativity, and conversion into a single moment. The question isn’t whether you’re a brand agency or performance agency anymore. The question is what kind of company you’re becoming.

The smartest voices in advertising are all converging on the same truth from different angles so the old dichotomies are dying. While the industry has spent decades debating the separation of media and creative, AI just made the entire argument irrelevant. And while we’re still diagnosing why, AI is already showing us what comes next.

Yet we’re still having the wrong conversation. While the industry debates whether AI will kill agencies, CFOs are quietly dismantling marketing departments one ‘false choice’ at a time. Brand or performance. Art or algorithm. The sixty-second manifesto people skip after two seconds, or the banner ad that follows them to their grave.

As if Patagonia didn’t build a billion-dollar brand by telling people not to buy their jacket. ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ on Black Friday: sales up 30% because reverse psychology is just psychology if you actually believe it. Or Liquid Death turning water into a $1.4 billion brand by acting like a punk band. ‘Murder Your Thirst’ wasn’t brand or performance. It was both, because absurdity with purpose scales better than any algorithm. As if beauty and utility were ever actually enemies.

Patagonia didn’t need ChatGPT to reach 800 million people. They just needed conviction. But imagine Patagonia’s ethos built into an AI agent that helps you repair, recycle, and yes, occasionally buy. The same conviction, infinitely scalable, perpetually present. That’s not the death of brand. It’s brand that never sleeps.

The old model is already obsolete: billing hours for work that AI can do in seconds. When anyone can build an agent in ten minutes, agencies can’t charge for execution anymore. We have to charge for knowing which agent the world actually needs. The new model is already here: licensing fees for AI-powered solutions, outcome-based contracts tied to productivity gains, revenue from technology products we create, not just the people we deploy.

When your business model shifts from selling time to selling transformation, creative suddenly has permission to be brave instead of safe.

This isn’t theoretical. I’ve been building toward this convergence my entire career. The blueprint exists. The technology works. What we need now are builders who can navigate between creative, corporate, and consulting. Translating between all three languages to create something new.

We’re watching the demise of the grand campaign. That beautiful, expensive thing we’d unveil like a debutante at a cotillion, all promise and no follow-through. Meanwhile, the performance marketers retarget you into madness with ads for the thing you already bought, forever, like an NPC that only knows one line. Both camps are still fighting a war that AI already won.

We’re not here to do traditional marketing faster with AI. We’re building how marketing actually works in the AI age. The smartest agencies are already moving this direction, building AI capabilities alongside their creative departments. The question isn’t whether to transform, but how fast. To build systems that generate value continuously, not campaigns that launch and disappear. To create technology products that become part of our clients’ infrastructure, not just deliverables they file away.

When developers can build agents in minutes, the value isn’t in the coding and the production. It’s in knowing what problems are worth solving. When brands can reach everyone instantly, the challenge isn’t reach. It’s resonance. When AI can generate infinite variations, the scarcity isn’t content. It’s conviction.

The opportunity isn’t just to survive. It’s to finally become what clients actually need: unified partners who don’t split ourselves into warring factions of the brand poets versus the performance quants. The firms that already have the pieces: creative excellence, technical capability, global scale, just need the courage to assemble them differently. The CFO sees the attribution on your banner ads and nods. The CMO sees the Cannes Lion on your shelf and smiles. Neither sees the customer, who just wants something that works and makes them feel something at the same time. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

Remember when digital was a separate department? We laugh at that now. The ‘digital team’ in the basement, the ‘traditional team’ on the penthouse floor, different elevator banks and everything. But we’ve recreated the same dysfunction at scale: brand teams who’ve never talked to a customer, performance teams who think ‘craft’ is a type of cheese. The beautiful work no one sees. The ugly work everyone sees. The slow-motion car crash collapse of an industry that forgot its only job was to make things people actually want.

The firms that win won’t be the ones defending yesterday’s margins. The agencies that already have the pieces: creative excellence, technical capability, global scale, just need the courage to assemble them differently. They’ll be the ones creating tomorrow’s business models. Building technology that multiplies creative impact. Charging for outcomes, not outputs. Turning one-time campaigns into recurring revenue streams.

This is the moment where creative, corporate, and consulting converge. Where those who can translate between all three languages become invaluable. Where builders matter more than maintainers.

The future doesn’t belong to agencies or consultancies. It belongs to whoever perfects the new model first. The agencies that survive won’t be the ones defending yesterday’s margins. They’ll be the ones building tomorrow’s AI agents, with the taste of brand agencies and the precision of performance shops. Agents that write poetry while they optimize. Algorithms with conviction, not just conversion.

And maybe that’s the real evolution. Not the death of agencies but the death of the false choice. Not brand or performance but brand through performance. Not beauty or utility, but beauty as utility. Not campaigns that launch and disappear but systems that learn and evolve. Not the things no one sees or the things everyone sees but the things everyone sees and can’t forget.

When Patagonia told people not to buy their jacket, they weren’t choosing between brand and performance. They were choosing conviction. Which, awkwardly for everyone with a media budget, converts better than both. Turns out the best growth hack is actually giving a shit caring.

Is it the end of agencies as we knew them? Sure. But endings, like false choices, are usually just beginnings we’re brave enough to build. The agencies that survive won’t be the ones who choose sides in a war that’s already over. They’ll be the ones who realize the war was always a fiction, a convenient excuse for mediocrity dressed up as specialization. They’ll build AI agents that write poetry. They’ll create algorithms with taste. They’ll charge for transformation, not time, and they’ll make things that make things that make people feel things.

The revolution isn’t coming. It’s here. And it needs builders.