Industry veteran Matt Barash is Chief Commercial Officer at Nova and NDA’s monthly columnist.
More than ever, it feels like agencies and adtech are drifting apart. Not because either is failing, but because one is transforming faster than the other is recognising.
Agencies are no longer just services businesses. They’re becoming platforms.
The legacy agency model was built on labor: billable hours, scoped projects, retainer-based relationships. Value was tied to people and process. Scale meant hiring. Margins were a function of utilisation. That model is eroding.
Today’s leading agencies are building operating systems. They’re investing in proprietary data stacks. Standing up internal AI labs. Creating modular engines. Productising insights. Embedding automation into workflow. In many cases, they’re turning intellectual property into repeatable, scalable systems designed for differentiation and defensibility.
At the same time, consolidation is accelerating — across holding companies, independents, and the broader marketing ecosystem. Scale is no longer about acquiring more agencies to stack services; it’s about integrating capabilities into unified platforms.
These next-generation agency platforms will be designed to do more with fewer partners, not more partners with more complexity. Vendor sprawl is giving way to tightly curated stacks built for interoperability, margin control, and workflow ownership.
In short, agencies are shifting from services to systems. And that shift has massive implications for adtech. Legacy adtech was built to sell into service layers. Point solutions. Channel-specific tools. Optimisation dashboards. The pitch was: “We’ll make your buyers more efficient.”
But if agencies are becoming platforms themselves, they don’t need more tools. They need extensible architecture. They want APIs. Interoperability. Clean data pipelines. Customisable intelligence layers. Infrastructure that plugs into their proprietary stack, not competes with it.
Future-state adtech will look very different. It will be composable, not prescriptive. Embedded, not bolted on. Outcome-aligned, not impression-aligned. Creative-aware, not media-only. The winners won’t just optimise bids. They’ll optimise business models.
Because when agencies operate like platforms, they evaluate partners like platform architects, not vendors. They care about data ownership, workflow control, margin expansion, and how technology compounds their intellectual property over time. This is the real divergence happening in our industry.
Agencies are rebuilding themselves as scalable systems. If adtech continues to sell like a service enhancer instead of core infrastructure, the gap will widen. The next generation of adtech won’t just power campaigns. It will power the platforms agencies are becoming.
And make no mistake: this shift isn’t incremental. It’s existential. For many adtech companies, this transformation will force a fundamental reinvention of their value proposition. For others who fail to adapt, it won’t be disruption. It will be extinction.
