The price floor of marketing is going to zero. So why am I building an agency?

An arms race where getting better buys you nothing, because the other side improves at the same rate. You run flat out to stay exactly where you are. That game is now marketing.

Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen changed how I thought about evolution in my twenties. His version of the mating game: the better men got at charming women into believing they were a good catch, the better women got at spotting the bullshit and holding out for signals that genuinely cost something. An arms race where getting better buys you nothing, because the other side improves at the same rate. You run flat out to stay exactly where you are.

That game is now marketing.

The ad that used to cost a million dollars fell to half a million, then a hundred thousand, then fifty. Now it is time plus credits. And here is the trap. As fast as you get better at producing it, the less the client values it at the old price. Your improvement does not accrue to you. It accrues to the buyer, who has worked out exactly what it now costs you to make.

So if your business is producing deliverables and pricing them, two moves remain. Get insanely good and play volume — more videos than anyone else. Or go niche, where something about the work is valuable enough that the arms race has not caught it yet. Play it out and the conclusion is hard to dodge: it is going to be very hard to be an agency. The millions of digital shops that shot up in two years already split into two camps — grew insanely fast, or quietly sold themselves out. An agency relies on people still paying for delivery.

But no client ever wanted the deliverable. They want more leads for the same spend, more sales from the same leads, more repeat business, less stress producing it. None of those is a deliverable. Every one is an outcome. Price the outcome, or take a share of it, and you are no longer competing with a twenty-dollar token.

Then the logic turns on you. If you are good enough to drive those outcomes for someone else, why give it away? Why not run flat out for yourself and keep the gain?

I have no tidy answer, and I distrust anyone who does. That’s where I am on the 4th of June 2026 at 8am. An old dog, delighted to be learning new tricks — the tools are new, the experience and judgment and connections doing the steering are not.

Ask me again at nine. The floor will have moved, and so will the answer.