Category: In the News

Yes, outcome-based pay is en vogue. But none of it matters if agencies aren’t using AI at the scale the economics require. And that only happens if clients are willing to pay for it. Most aren’t.

S4 Capital CEO Sir Martin Sorrell said as much on his marketing group’s latest earnings call yesterday — a cold dose of realism about the hype that comes after the billable hour. For S4, the answer is subscriptions: fixed annual fees bundling senior talent with agentic workflows, brand-specific knowledge bases and quarterly software-style upgrades. 

Sceptics call it the agency retainer rebranded. Believers see it as an on-ramp to a world beyond the billable hour. The truth is probably somewhere in between — at least for now. The reasons are outlined here and here, but Sorrell’s own framing cuts to it. 

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The surge in AI content licensing marketplaces has created a new wave of opportunities for publishers — just not much money yet.

“I think there’s a boom in companies who claim they will sell your content for money, and not yet a boom in the money from those deals. So there seems to be more of these marketplaces every minute. But not all of them are going to be meaningful,” Jon Roberts, chief innovation officer at People Inc., said onstage on Monday as the keynote speaker at the Digiday Publishing Summit in Vail, Colorado.

As tech companies develop AI licensing marketplaces for publishers’ content, the number of deals is climbing but the economics remain largely unproven. Roberts broke down the opportunities he’s seeing that could generate real revenue for People Inc. and publishers at scale – and how it could work in their favor.

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