u1492637478_picture_of_a_small_branding_or_creative_agency_wi_a39be852-64bb-471a-a3f9-7828ae222a53_3 Agency Growth The Old-School Tax: How Agencies Are Bleeding Margin in Plain Sight Summary: Most agencies are still paying the Old-School Tax—burning hours and profit on outdated processes—while their competitors finish faster, deliver sharper, and pocket the margins. Every wasted hour in your process isn’t neutral—it’s a donation to your competitors. Agencies don’t lose profit because they By Tobias Dahlberg • 6 min read
u1492637478_An_old_factory_filled_with_creative_directors_and_563b8377-9192-4ed4-a39e-89e1ee96a090_3 Agency Growth Running “Content Factories” for Clients High Volume. High Impact. Low Waste. CMO's and brand leaders have a problem: they need to act like media companies — but without media-company budgets. They’re under pressure to grow awareness, stay top of mind, and show up everywhere — while running on smaller teams, tighter budgets, and relentless By Tobias Dahlberg • 3 min read
u1492637478_A_simple_wheel_in_the_middle_of_the_frame_against_1ca4b7ed-9a3a-43f1-9a93-823cab5ba971_1 Agency Growth The Case for Radical Simplicity: Why Cutting 80% of Your Clients And Services Is How You Scale Profitably Most agencies and consultancies aren’t failing because they’re bad. They’re failing because they’re busy. Busy chasing revenue. Busy adding services. Busy saying yes to everything. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: growth doesn’t come from addition — it comes from subtraction. If you want to scale, By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read
u1492637478_A_group_on_junior_interns_at_a_creative_agency_in_a_e0bac7be-ed24-4f35-9c69-9abbc70e6563 Agency Growth The AI Creative Agency: What Survives the Sora 2 Era ⸻ The Signal Sora 2 just made your production department look like an antique. It can generate cinematic video, photorealistic motion, and campaign-ready visuals from a single prompt — no shoots, no crews, no retouching. Brands are already experimenting, skipping the agency middleman entirely. What Figma did to UX, Sora 2 will By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read
u1492637478_Two_creative_consultants_a_man_and_woman_shot_edito_3f8b3257-b5d9-4ddd-9f74-8fed0d9f0f20 Agency Growth The Imagination Economy: Creativity as Capital Why the Future Belongs to Those Who Can Conceive What Machines Can’t In Brief In an age when AI can do almost anything, the only thing that matters is what hasn’t been imagined yet. The industrial economy was built on muscle. The knowledge economy was built on memory. By Tobias Dahlberg • 4 min read
interns agency Agency Growth AI’s Effect on Junior Roles — Why Your “Cheap Labor” Model Just Died Executive Summary For years, agencies and marketing teams ran on a simple equation: hire young, bill high, burn fast. Juniors filled the decks, wrote the copy, built the reports — cheap labor feeding expensive machines. That model just hit a wall. AI now does 80% of what junior staff were hired By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read
agency people Agency Growth The Next Big Agency Is Not An Agency There’s a quiet revolution happening in the world of marketing, branding, and creative services. You can feel it in client conversations. You can see it in the org charts of lean startups and Fortune 500s alike. And if you’re paying attention, you can see what’s coming: And By Tobias Dahlberg • 2 min read
