In a recent address to a group of senior business leaders, I described the world we all came from that no longer is.
The consumer was consuming, so we built mass segmentation.
The audience was listening, so we built mass broadcast to target those segments with highly produced advertising. The shopper was shopping, so we built mass distribution to promote to them.
Digital and social commerce began to unwind that system. E-commerce went further. AI, with its capacity for hyperpersonalisation and agentic orchestration, is finishing the job.
The audience is not listening anymore, and the ad is disappearing, embedded directly into content and experiences. The shopper is no longer shopping: marketing, sales and customer service have merged, and the transaction now lives inside the conversation.
And the consumer is no longer consuming. Nobody wants to be ‘targeted’ (hate that word!) as a segment anymore.
They want to be understood as an individual, their needs read sometimes better than they read them themselves.
I spent decades in rooms where the campaign was the craft. The targeting, the buying, the optimising: that was the work. But today, the platforms are no longer selling marketers tools. They are selling us agentic workers.
TikTok launched a marketplace of ready-made AI agents that build campaigns, generate creative and manage catalogues. Meta's AI now buys media autonomously, and it is on track to overtake
Google in global ad revenue on the strength of it. Hand over the assets, the goal and the budget, and the machine does the rest.
Watching that work migrate into a loop that runs without us made me pause, not because the machine does it badly, but because it does it well.
So what remains? I keep coming back to the same answer. The machine can run the campaign. It cannot yet decide what the brand is, and who it is for.
Judgement about meaning, about what a brand should be, and who it should be for, moves from one job among many to the job.
The marketers who thrive in this next phase will not be the ones who operate the tools fastest. They will be the ones who know what to ask the agentic workers for.