Independent agencies are competing against holding companies that just spent years and billions building proprietary data infrastructure, and they’re also reckoning with AI tools that can automate workflows and generate creative or new audiences in a fraction of the time; all that cuts into margins based on traditional agency business models. In our recent Summer Series webinar, Jonathan Ricard, Chief Strategy Officer at Resonate, laid out five steps agencies can take to stay ahead of these challenges maintain their competitive edge.
Here are the three biggest takeaways from the session.
Takeaway 1: Your Data Doesn’t Compound Unless You Build One Layer for It
Most agencies are sitting on CRM data, site visitor data, ad exposure data, and their own internal engagement data. The problem is that all of it lives in separate places, used for separate one-off purposes. Ricard was direct about who’s already solved this: “Except for the hold cos who went out and spent billions of dollars buying it, [most agencies] don’t own a consumer data layer that is used to create products and create leverage for client data.”
Most agencies are sitting on CRM data, site visitor data, ad exposure data, and their own internal engagement data. The problem is that all of it lives in separate places, used for separate one-off purposes. Ricard was direct about who’s already solved this: “Except for the hold cos who went out and spent billions of dollars buying it, [most agencies] don’t own a consumer data layer that is used to create products and create leverage for client data.”
This isn’t an issue of requiring more data. It’s one identity layer that resolves the data you have into a single, reusable asset. This can include multi-ID matching that connects hashed emails, IP addresses, name and address, and whatever else a partner can bring, mapped to real outcomes like insight, audience activation, and measurement.
Ricard’s step-by-step version of this is straightforward:
- Inventory the first-party data you already have.
- Build or buy multi-ID matching.
- Map it to a specific use case for each client.
- Standardize permissioning at the agency level instead of negotiating it client by client.
- Identify one person who owns it.
That last step is where most agencies stall out. As Ricard put it, “This will die by committee.” Without one accountable owner, often a chief product officer or head of data solutions, the data layer stays a shared aspiration instead of a revenue line.
Takeaway 2: If Your Insight Isn’t Fast, It’s Already Wrong
Consumer behavior is moving faster than most campaign or reporting cycles can track. Gas prices, discretionary income, inflation: all of it shifts month to month, and a static segment built against last quarter’s data is already describing a customer who’s changed. “By the time you measure, the moment’s gone,” explains Ricard.
Ricard sites the work Resonate has done with the agency RPA. Their audience strategy work used to run on two-week-plus cycles. After rebuilding around agentic workflows, that same strategy work happens in a day, and generating multiple audience options from a plain-language brief takes seconds instead of a sprint.
Takeaway 3: Billable Hours Weren’t Built for What You Can Deliver Now
Agency pricing has always been sized around labor: the more custom work a deliverable takes, the more it costs. Agentic tools break that math, because they let agencies deliver repeatable, high-quality work without linear headcount growth. Clients have noticed. As Ricard puts it, “Clients are already asking, how much cheaper are my service bills gonna get, because you’re doing so much more with AI?”
That pressure is what Ricard calls business–model debt, and the way out of it is turning select deliverables into standardized products instead of rebuilding them from scratch for every client. Not everything qualifies. The candidates worth productizing are the ones that could sell across most of an agency’s client base, not just the one account they were built for. Once you have that list, decide the pricing philosophy before you build anything: subscription, license, or usage-based, and rank the candidates by how many accounts could realistically buy the same version.
Ricard also recommended launching new products as internal pilots first. Running a beta with one client generates a proof point other client teams can point to, and that internal word of mouth does more to drive adoption than any pitch deck.
The same principle applies to the pitch itself. Ricard says that “nobody buys a product from you as a company. They want to buy an outcome from you.”
Ricard also pointed to where the holding companies are already headed with this shift. Horizon is adding media buying agents to its Blue platform. WPP is opening its product set to both clients and internal teams. Both moves are aimed at the same target: getting out of billing for hours and into charging for outcomes.
Where to Start
Ricard’s advice for sequencing these three: start with whichever one is actually blocking growth. If your agency doesn’t have a defensible data asset yet, the data layer comes first, because everything else depends on it. If you already have that foundation but can’t move fast enough to act on what it tells you, agentic workflows are the next investment. And if speed isn’t the constraint but margin is, the business model shift, turning your best deliverables into priced products, is where the near-term revenue is.
Missed the live session? You can catch the whole thing on-demand. And if billable-hours pressure, slow-moving segments, or a fragmented data layer is the obstacle standing between your agency and its next pitch win, reach out and we can talk through which of these three steps solves it first.
