Author: Seb Joseph

What if the agency holdcos have got it wrong?

Over the past month, the groups have settled on a familiar investor script when framing their financial fortunes: AI as margin defense, integration as operating leverage, scale as a moat and automation as productivity.

It’s a tidy frame — a way to signal that generative tools won’t hollow out the model and EBITA can be protected.

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Agencies have a compute problem. As AI takes over more of their day-to-day work, from writing copy to generating performance reports, it’s introducing a new and deeply unpredictable cost center. Every prompt, every output, every round of agentic back-and-forth costs tokens, and those tokens are variable in ways that neither agencies nor their clients know how to forecast yet.

The question of who bears that cost (and how) is the basis for the latest Digiday Bold Call, the live show where Digiday journalists put a stake in the ground on where the industry is headed, backed by their own reporting. The bold call this time: AI compute costs are the next frontier for the next upfront and the next iteration of principal media. Buy tokens in bulk from AI companies, absorb variable costs, wrap it into a client subscription. It’s a model that rhymes with how agencies have long handled TV inventory, and it carries the same transparency tension that has followed principal media for years. 

Sam Bradley, senior marketing reporter, and Seb Joseph, executive editor of news, joined Digiday’s executive editor of video and audio Tim Peterson to unpack where agencies actually are on this, covering token allotments, subscription experiments and the contract clauses marketers are quietly starting to demand.

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