Thinking
When execution becomes a commodity, the only moat left is the quality of thinking that directs it.
“Design used to be defensible. Now a junior can use Figma. Video used to be defensible. Now you can use Sora.”
Tom Salmon — Industry StrategistEp. 9
“Don’t spend half an hour re-reading the brief we gave you. Ask questions instead. Be curious.”
Marc Holland — Senior Marketing Leader — Lego, O2, Shark NinjaEp. 2
“Unless you have a marketer in a room, you’re at risk of doing things which are seriously fucking dumb.”
Rory Sutherland — Vice Chairman, Ogilvy
of talented people would leave an agency that isn’t embracing AI. It’s not a technology issue — it’s a recruitment and retention crisis.
Chris Devlin, Founding Partner, PivotalEp. 3The Space Between is the things people don’t say.
Across more than 5,000 business assessments, MSQ has observed a pattern so consistent it has become foundational: there is a persistent, measurable gap between what the C-suite intends and what marketing actually delivers. At each handoff, meaning is lost. Assumptions go unquestioned. Context evaporates.
“The winning move is collaborative — agency and client co-creating with AI.”
Roy Murphy — Co-founder, GenerateEp. 4Execution gets commoditised. Strategic thinking and co-creation are where the next decade of agency value lives.
“Agencies miss the space between what’s asked and what’s really needed. Listening for the unstated need is the highest-value activity.”
Remeny Armitage — Strategic PractitionerEp. 6
“Agencies systematically undervalue strategy by bundling it into execution fees. The result is a race to the bottom on the very work that should command premium.”
Aaron Hutchinson — Founder, The Hutch ConsultancyEp. 5
“The post-pandemic agency-client relationship has shifted from transactional to relational. Agencies that build relational intelligence command higher fees and longer tenure.”
Emma Kelly — Agency/Client StrategistEp. 8
Strategy can’t be commoditised.
“Agencies systematically undervalue strategy by bundling it into execution fees. The result is a race to the bottom on the very work that should command premium.”
Aaron Hutchinson — Founder, The Hutch ConsultancyEp. 5
A strategist sitting in a room with C-suite executives notices the CEO roll his eye when the CTO makes a comment. That’s a clear signal of misalignment — and AI can’t detect it. Not yet. The irreducibly human part of strategy is the part that matters most.
businesses assessed through the MSQ Index. Every one of them revealed gaps no one was talking about.
“The post-pandemic agency-client relationship has shifted from transactional to relational. Agencies that build relational intelligence command higher fees and longer tenure.”
Emma Kelly — Agency/Client StrategistEp. 8
The holding company era is ending. The independent era is beginning. The question is which independents will be ready.
“When you come with a thought-through, end-to-end idea — not just a creative asset — we take it to the board confident. That’s when we sign off.”
Marc Holland — Senior Marketing LeaderEp. 2
“Sector expertise is increasingly valuable. The generalist agency is losing to the specialist that owns a domain — and can advise at board level within it.”
Ben Flintoff — Senior Marketing StrategistEp. 7
If you’re still billing hourly for work that AI can do in minutes, you’re already losing.
“Brand visibility is shifting from keyword-based to concept-based. Agencies need to understand how AI search engines rank and surface information — it’s a fundamentally different discipline.”
Dan Reeves — AI & SEO SpecialistEp. 10
If you’re a marketer, don’t sell what you do. Sell how you think. The real value of marketers isn’t the marketing department or what the marketing department does. If you defend yourself on the basis of what you do, you’re effectively in a defensive position — endlessly in a kind of Stockholm syndrome relationship with the finance department. The real value of marketers and marketing is how they think. If you don’t have a marketer present in the room, engineers, utterly rational people, can make utterly stupid decisions because they’re not looking at it from the consumer’s point of view.
The moat isn’t defensible because it’s legally protected. It’s defensible because leaving it means becoming stupid.
of brands are planning media agency reviews in 2026. The window for well-positioned independents has never been wider.
“You can’t simply tell execution people to start thinking strategically. They need a system.”
Chris Devlin — Founding Partner, PivotalEp. 3
What independents have is something the holding companies have lost: the ability to be nimble, specialist, and relational. They can build genuine partnerships rather than managing accounts through layers of bureaucracy. They can own a sector, develop deep expertise, and become the advisor a client trusts at board level.
AI is a mixing bowl. The strategy itself comes from the human.
A brief is not a specification. It’s a conversation starter.
“The best client relationships happen when agencies are brought in early — as “let’s solve this together” not “here’s what we need, execute it.””
Aaron Hutchinson — Founder, The Hutch ConsultancyEp. 5
“The Space Between is about what goes unsaid — the unstated assumptions, unasked questions, and misaligned expectations that drive most agency-client dysfunction.”
Debbie Richardson — Co-founder, MSQEp. 1
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