The way people find businesses online is changing very quickly. Pair that with the fact that digital marketing can now be done much more efficiently with the help of AI and it seems obvious, at least to me, that the way we do digital marketing is going to need a change very quickly.
However, from what I can see online, most digital marketing agencies are just making small tweaks here and there. They're looking for little ways that their SEO strategy can also help them rank in large language models and they might be having AI help them write blog posts or brainstorm strategy, but they have no plans to completely overhaul their systems. Now, it's too early to say for sure, but from my point of view, it looks like this is much too slow at change.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and make a prediction that in the next two years, most of these agencies are going to shrink dramatically, if not fail completely.
And what's gonna replace them are agencies that completely reinvent themselves or I think more commonly some Gen Z startups. Over the last few months, I've spoken with several Gen Z startup founders. I'm tempted to call them kids cause they're closer to my son's age than my age, but I'm talking about people in their 20s that are just learning how to do digital marketing.
They don't have all the biases that we have in the last 20 years to them, it's just obvious the answers to build all their systems with AI in the center. And I mean both using AI to help them do the work, but also realising that the ultimate goal is to get AI to recommend them or their clients.
I think most agencies don't recognise this moment for the paradigm shift that it is. This is akin to the shift from pre internet to post internet, only it's happening much faster. Agencies that plan to wait and see and make little shifts here and there are going to get left behind.
So if you're paying one of these agencies for your marketing, keep a close eye on them, but keep your other eye on Gen Z. There are a lot of scrappy kids out there right now learning how to do highly effective marketing at a much lower rate.