Panic at the Disco
How Adland’s Tech Anxiety Undermines Its Own Value
I’ve been in agency management a long time. I’ve owned agencies, built teams, and worked with a wide range of clients, from scrappy startups to established brands. I’ve watched the industry evolve, adapt, fragment, and reform. I’ve seen the pendulum swing from full-service models to hyper-specialist outfits, to in-house teams, and now back again toward integrated solutions.
What’s been consistent through it all, and worryingly so, is the industry's reflexive anxiety whenever new technology enters the conversation.
Every year I head to Cannes, and every year I hear the same quiet panic. Agency leaders questioning their relevance, debating their future, nervously scanning the horizon for the next platform or tool that might render them obsolete. The language changes. Once it was Web3, then the blockchain, then the Metaverse, now ChatGPT and agentic AI. But the underlying fear remains the same: "Is this the thing that provides opportunity and gives us hope or will it make us irrelevant?"
It’s a pattern. A new tech trend surfaces, often hyped by platforms or venture capital, or both and the industry begins to unravel in response. The narrative quickly shifts from opportunity to existential threat. Founders and CEOs wring their hands. Decks are rewritten. Capabilities are reshaped overnight, sometimes with no real strategy behind the pivot. The result is an industry in a perpetual state of reinvention, not out of strategic positioning or ambition, but out of fear.
And yet, despite all of this disruption theater, we’re still here. The world continues to turn. Creative work continues to be bought, sold, and valued. Supermarket shelves are stocked by real-world logistics, not metaverse avatars. No one is talking about NFTs anymore. Web3 quietly faded into the background. And while AI is certainly reshaping parts of our workflow, it hasn't yet dismantled the fundamentals of what we do: build brands, move people, and drive business.
So why is Adland so quick to surrender its confidence every time a new acronym trends?
Our industry has a strange, often self-sabotaging relationship with technology. Instead of strategically integrating innovation for competitive advantage, we rush to broadcast it, usually on LinkedInand the trade press, with the breathless energy of a doomsday prophet. We don’t pause to consider how tech can augment our offering or protect margin. Instead, we treat it as something to be externally validated, commodified, and prematurely revealed.
What other industry gives away its competitive edge as freely as advertising. Where else do professionals so willingly unpack their secret sauce in front of clients, peers, and competitors alike? We don’t just announce what’s coming. We declare it as the end of the old model, then invite clients to question our fees and our value in response.
It’s as if we want to be replaced, just to prove we were right about the threat.
Rather than doubling down on our strengths, including insight, creativity, and cultural intelligence, we keep resetting the table. We don’t price innovation in. We price ourselves down. We act as though every technological shift is a call to devalue what came before, rather than to enhance it.
And that’s the real loss. Not to AI. Not to automation. But to ourselves. Our unwillingness to defend the value we create. Our addiction to hype over application. Our failure to pause, assess, and use technology strategically before we surrender to it.
It’s time we changed that. Technology isn’t going to stop evolving. But neither should we. Let's stop being afraid of the future and start using it, on our own terms.
