“Most founders I speak to have never sat down and deliberately decided what their marketing structure should look like. It just happened.”
An agency pitched well at the right moment. A marketing hire came recommended. A platform got added because a competitor was using it. A retainer got renewed because cancelling felt risky. And slowly, without anyone really choosing it, a marketing setup emerged.
That setup probably made sense at some point. But it has rarely been questioned since.
This is not a niche problem. Research consistently shows that marketing budgets across businesses of all sizes remain under pressure, yet spend patterns tend to persist long after the conditions that justified them have changed. Inertia is expensive.
AI is making it more expensive to ignore. Not because AI is replacing agencies wholesale, but because it has changed the economics of execution significantly enough that the assumptions behind many inherited setups no longer hold.
This article is not an argument for cutting agencies or bringing everything in-house. It is an argument for doing something most founders have never done: deliberately designing a marketing structure around what the business actually needs now, rather than what accumulated over time.
What this piece covers:
Why the original logic behind agency retainers is weakening
Where the real structural pressure is building
How to match your marketing setup to your commercial objectives
What to ask before renewing any retainer or making any structural change
Why the agency model made sense – and why that logic is weakening
Not long ago, running paid media at any meaningful scale required specialist knowledge that most small businesses could not justify building internally. SEO was opaque enough to warrant dedicated expertise. Analytics needed interpreting. Creative production was time-consuming and technically demanding. Agencies filled a genuine gap.
That model still makes sense in specific situations. A business running complex paid search across multiple markets, or managing SEO in a highly competitive category, or executing large-scale content production still benefits from dedicated specialist support. The logic has not disappeared entirely.
But the conditions that made broad agency retainers the default choice for most SMEs have shifted considerably.
| What was true then | What is true now |
|---|---|
| Platform management required specialist training | Most ad platforms are built for self-service use |
| Data interpretation needed dedicated analysts | AI surfaces insights directly within most platforms |
| Content production was slow and resource-intensive | AI tools have reduced production time and cost significantly |
| Reporting required manual compilation | Dashboards are built into most platforms and CRM tools |
| Junior staff provided cost-effective execution capacity | AI is automating the tasks that justified junior-heavy delivery models |
| Strategic oversight was bundled with execution | The two can now be separated and sourced differently |
The gap between what an agency team could do and what a capable founder or small in-house team can now access has narrowed materially. According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report, 79% of respondents now use generative AI in at least one business function, up from 55% the previous year.
The uncomfortable question that creates is not whether agencies are useful. It is whether the specific arrangement you currently have still reflects what you are actually buying.
The middle is getting squeezed
The agency model under the most pressure right now is not the deep specialist. It is the broad monthly retainer: the arrangement where an agency handles a mix of strategy, execution, reporting, and account management across multiple channels for a fixed fee.
That model made sense when execution was genuinely complex and strategic oversight was hard to find elsewhere. Both of those conditions are weakening simultaneously.
Duke University and Deloitte’s 2025 CMO Survey found that AI now accounts for 24.2% of marketing activities, up from 13.1% in 2024. That shift is not happening in isolation. It is compressing the tasks that broad retainers were structured around.
Three structural pressures are converging on that model:
Execution is becoming commoditised. Tasks that once justified agency headcount, including ad copy, basic campaign management, reporting, and content production, are now within reach of smaller teams using AI tooling. The cost of producing output has dropped. What remains is the question of whether the output is the right output.
Reporting is no longer a value-add. When Google Ads, Meta, HubSpot, and most CRM platforms surface their own performance data, a monthly PDF summarising what you can already see is not a deliverable. It is overhead. Clients are starting to notice.
Strategic and executional work are no longer bundled by necessity. For a long time, getting strategic input meant buying a retainer that included execution. That is no longer true. Fractional and advisory models have separated the two, which means businesses can now source strategic oversight independently, without paying for execution they do not need.
The result: many businesses are paying for a model built around the economics of 2018, inside a market that has moved on considerably. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that agencies account for 20.7% of total marketing budgets on average, yet marketing leaders report ongoing difficulty demonstrating the commercial return on that spend.
That difficulty is not a measurement problem. It is often a structural one.
This is not about cutting cost. It is about matching structure to need.
When founders start questioning their agency relationships, the instinct is usually binary: renew the retainer or cancel it. Keep things as they are, or try to bring everything in-house. That is the wrong frame.
The right question is not whether to keep the agency. It is what the business actually needs marketing to do right now, and whether the current structure is the best way to deliver that.
Two businesses in the same sector, at the same revenue stage, can need completely different marketing setups. One is consolidating its customer base and needs conversion-focused content and CRM support. The other is pushing into a new market and needs brand-building and demand generation. Same industry. Entirely different requirements. There is no benchmark that resolves this, and no competitor setup worth copying.
What determines the right structure is a clear understanding of the commercial objective and an honest assessment of what is and is not working.
| Business need | Best structural fit | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Complex paid search at scale | Specialist agency or senior in-house hire | Broad retainer that dilutes focus |
| SEO in a competitive category | Dedicated specialist, in-house or external | Bundling with unrelated channel work |
| Content production at volume | AI-augmented in-house team | Paying agency rates for AI-generated output |
| Strategic direction and commercial alignment | Fractional CMO or senior advisor | Expecting this from a junior-led retainer |
| CRM, lifecycle, and retention | In-house with specialist support | Leaving it inside a broad retainer without clear ownership |
| Brand positioning and creative | Specialist creative agency or freelance | Treating it as an add-on to a performance retainer |
The point is not that agencies are the wrong answer. In several of those scenarios, they are exactly the right answer. The point is that the answer depends on a specific diagnosis of what the business needs, not on inertia or the path of least resistance.
Most businesses have never had that conversation deliberately. And in a market where UK full-service agency retainers typically range from £3,500 to over £16,000 per month, the cost of not having it is substantial.
The strategic layer matters more now, not less
Here is the nuance that gets lost in most conversations about AI and agency economics.
Execution becoming cheaper does not make marketing simpler. It makes it easier to produce the wrong thing at scale.
When a small team can now generate content, run campaigns, and test channels at a volume that previously required a much larger operation, the question of what they should be doing becomes more consequential, not less. The cost of producing output has fallen. The cost of producing the wrong output has not.
The real risk for most SMEs is not under-execution. It is over-execution in the wrong direction, with no one clearly responsible for connecting marketing activity to commercial outcomes.
This is where many inherited setups have their most significant gap. Agencies typically own channel execution. Junior hires own task completion. Platforms own reporting. But no one owns the strategic layer: the decisions about which channels deserve investment, what success looks like in commercial terms, and whether the activity is actually moving the business forward.
For most SMEs, that gap is not filled by a retainer renewal or a new tool. It requires someone with the seniority and commercial context to ask the right questions and make the right calls.
What strategy still has to do, regardless of how much AI handles execution:
Decide which channels and audiences are worth investing in, and which are not, based on commercial evidence rather than channel familiarity
Connect marketing activity to pipeline, revenue, and retention outcomes, not just impressions, clicks, and reach
Own the prioritisation decisions that determine where limited budget and attention go, and revisit them as the business evolves
Research from the Duke/Deloitte CMO Survey found that while AI adoption in marketing has nearly doubled in a year, only a minority of organisations report that AI is delivering meaningful financial returns. The technology is being adopted. The strategic framework for deploying it is often still missing.
That is not an AI problem. It is an organisational design problem.
A practical framework for redesigning an inherited marketing setup
Redesigning a marketing structure does not require a full organisational overhaul. It requires a clear-headed audit of what currently exists, what it is actually delivering, and what the business needs it to do next.
A useful starting point is to work through four questions in sequence.
1. Start with the commercial objective
Before reviewing any supplier, channel, or tool, get clear on what marketing is supposed to be doing for the business in the next 12 months. Is the priority pipeline growth? Conversion rate improvement? Entry into a new market? Customer retention and expansion? Brand credibility in a new category?
The answer changes everything downstream. A business focused on retention needs a fundamentally different structure to one focused on acquisition. Neither can be resolved by asking whether the current agency is performing well on its own metrics.
2. Audit the current system honestly
Map what you currently have: which channels are active, what each external partner does, where decisions are made, and what reporting you actually use to make decisions. Then ask the harder question: which of these are contributing to the commercial objective, and which exist because they always have?
Most audits surface a version of the same finding. A handful of channels and relationships are doing real work. Several others are producing activity without producing outcomes. The reporting rarely makes this clear, which is often by design.
3. Identify the structural gaps
With the commercial objective clear and the current state mapped, the gaps become visible. Is there a channel that needs deeper specialist expertise? Is execution happening without strategic direction? Is there a reporting layer that tells you what happened but not what to do next? Is there work being done by an external partner that could now be handled in-house with the right tooling?
4. Rebuild around roles and outcomes, not legacy arrangements
Assign clear ownership to each function: what stays with a specialist external partner, what moves in-house, what AI can support, and where strategic oversight sits. Every element of the marketing setup should have a clear owner and a clear commercial rationale.
The goal is not a leaner version of what you have. It is a structure designed for where the business is going, not where it has been.
What to ask before renewing any retainer
If a retainer renewal is coming up, or if you are reviewing an existing agency relationship, these questions are worth working through before making a decision. A retainer should survive because it solves a defined problem, not because cancelling feels uncomfortable.
Can you directly attribute pipeline or revenue to this relationship? If not, is there a plausible reason why not, or has it simply never been measured?
Who owns the strategy? If the answer is the agency, ask whether they have sufficient context about your commercial objectives, sales model, and customer base to make good strategic decisions on your behalf.
Is the channel this agency manages genuinely contributing to growth? Or is it active because it has always been active?
What would you lose if you ended this tomorrow? If the honest answer is “not much”, that is important information.
Is the reporting you receive helping you make better decisions? Or does it describe activity without connecting it to outcomes?
Does the scope of the retainer match your current priorities? Businesses change. Retainers often do not.
Are you paying for execution you could now handle internally with the right tools or a part-time hire?
None of these questions are designed to produce a particular answer. Some retainers will survive this audit comfortably. Others will not. The point is to make the decision deliberately, based on what the business needs now, rather than defaulting to renewal because the process of change feels like more effort than it is worth.
That gap between what you have and what you would choose if you were designing from scratch is where most of the opportunity is.
Redesign the system. Do not just trim the spend.
The opportunity here is not simply to cut agency spend or adopt more AI tools. Both of those things might be right for your business. Neither of them is a strategy.
The opportunity is to build a marketing structure that is deliberately designed for the next stage of growth, rather than one that accumulated during a previous stage and was never properly questioned.
That looks different for every business. Two founders in the same sector, at the same size, with the same budget can need entirely different setups depending on their commercial objective, their sales model, and where the real constraint on growth actually sits. There is no template that resolves this.
What there is, is a process. Start with the commercial objective. Audit what you currently have against it. Identify the gaps. Rebuild around clear ownership and commercial outcomes.
Most founders who go through that process find the same thing: the marketing structure they have is not the one they would choose. And the distance between the two is costing them more than they realised.
Not sure where your current setup stands? A structured marketing audit is usually the clearest starting point. It maps what you have, identifies what is working, and surfaces the structural gaps before you make any changes. If you would find it useful to talk through what that looks like for your business, get in touch with the team at broden.ai.
