The SoDA Report On: New strategies for the modern agency

I look at what’s happening across the marketing landscape and it all feels new…and old at the same time. Here’s what I mean.

The efficiencies inherent in AI are shining a spotlight on the relevance of hourly billing, but didn’t we face the same issue when we spent a lot more money on a faster Mac…in order to do the same task quicker, and thus cheaper for the client? How many times must we fight the same battle, on different battlefields against the same enemy, before we rethink our approach? Maybe we should take a fresh look at productization, and Anshey Bhatia does just that for us. If AI doesn’t force us to reinvent how we charge, something else will, so why not get ahead of it. And no one has been beating this drum longer than Tim Williams, who also weighs in on a timeless present (pun intended).

Behind another door, what can we learn from an industry that got an unfair boost (the pandemic), but now has to earn every new inch of growth? SaaS companies may not be dominating the landscape like they did during the business pivot ushered in by the pandemic, but they are reinventing themselves through a “growth driven design” approach: listening intently to customers and thinking of sales in completely different ways. Leslie Bradshaw walks us through four relevant insights into how they are still thriving.

Let’s talk sales for a minute. A common refrain I hear from firms is that the pipelines are full…but moving very slowly. So what do they focus on to fix that? Dropping more opportunity in the top of the funnel, or better sales techniques at the bottom, seem to summarize the typical response.

Continuing that theme of being noticed by your potential clients, what’s happening with search, especially in a world where AI can generate more noise? What happens to the signal in that S/N ratio? And even more importantly, what happens to the “design for humans” mandate when humans aren’t the only ones reading our websites? AI bots are becoming judge, jury, and executioner in deciding what those humans even see in the first place, and Hamilton Jones tackles these questions as our heart rates rise. We’re still willing to do the work, but what work is worth doing?

Next is a fresh look at our basic assumptions of structure: do we keep building principal/employee teams that slowly grow to meet demand? That’s a traditional way of thinking, and as long as “most of your clients use most of your services most of the time,” everybody can finish the week happy, but what if the client-side needs more mature expertise, less predictably, and without any unnecessary overhead? There are many ways to solve this, but Chris Mele walks us through what worked for them. The stock market isn’t heaping praise on the holding co model, so maybe we should do less emulation and more innovation.

And finally, if 2025 brought us all the questions about the impact of AI, maybe 2026 can start answering those questions. Justin Lewis wonders what it’ll take, not just to regain the relevance agencies seem to have lost, but how do we lead the industry again? We probably have two or three years to figure this out, or the next generation will not want to salvage much of anything from what we are doing with AI.

I think it took us the early part of 2025 to realize that the calvary wasn’t coming to save us with a return to the seemingly glory days of the recent past. No, it became clear that this is the new normal and that it was time to adapt and lead, with courage and commitment. As an industry, we may be at the leading edge of seeing and then acting on trends, but sometimes we see those trends from the last car on the roller coaster. Andrea Bravo-Campbell and Tamara Hlava collaborate on what it means to bend and not break.

The questions we face as an industry are probably deeper than anything we’ve seen in a few years, but what a fantastic forcing function to see which firms, guided by strong leaders, can successfully listen to their clients while also ignoring the signals that they should. It’s a wonderful time to keep your head while (nearly everyone?) around you is losing theirs. We are all high-functioning, broken people who love challenges, and there’s no shortage of them these days.

After all is said and done, though, we will always have these four advantages:

• The remarkable people who want to work for us to make a difference rather than getting lost in corporate blandness.
• Our fearless willingness to pivot quickly and adapt.
• The pattern-matching at the heart of creativity, where we see things that others miss.
• The courage to say what needs to be said, in the client’s genuine interest, before we stop and think too long about whether we should say it in the first place.

We are these people, together. Keep showing up, my friends.

David C. Baker
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