June has been a busy month, with Cannes Festival of Creativity happening once again. We are sure you have all read the different summaries on LinkedIn so we will spare you the details. Check #Cannes if you need some more gossip and amazing stories.
Here in the Marketing Procurement world, we have seen the dollars promised in pitch decks, conversations and case studies actually become somewhat measurable. Are the savings your agency or content tech platform is claiming hard and bankable, or are they soft and theoretical? That question, and what to do with the answer, is at the center of this issue.
We also have a practitioner’s read on the new agency landscape from ten presentations in three days in New York, which confirmed something worth naming: the agency market is harder to navigate than ever, and your screening criteria may be filtering out the most interesting firms before a human ever looks at them.
Elsewhere this month, influencer governance is getting more complicated, not less. We have kind of gotten the feeling over the past few months that all things Creator is driving the marketing strategies. Now we see it in the agency groups too. Dentsu has struck a deal with Meta that puts the infrastructure for creator activation inside the agency stack.
Also, a bold brand, Dollar Shave Club, is using AI to make agencies optional for certain work. And brands are discovering that their PR and content agencies may be seeding Reddit with AI-generated posts to win the generative engine optimization race, with or without client knowledge.
Governance, ownership, and hard questions about where the money actually goes. That is what this issue is about.
As always, we have done the reading so you do not have to. But we would strongly suggest you click through on a few of these.
Enjoy the read!
- AI savings claims from agencies and content platforms come in three forms: hard avoided cost, media efficiency, and reclaimed capacity. Only the first is bankable. Ask which category each claim falls into before it reaches your CFO.
- The agency market has never been harder to navigate. If your screening criteria predate the AI era, you are likely filtering out some of the most capable firms before evaluation begins.
- Influencer infrastructure is moving inside agency stacks. When your agency controls creator discovery, contracting, and paid activation in one platform, your transparency rights need to be written into the contract, not assumed.
- GEO is ungoverned in most agency and PR contracts. If your agency is optimizing for AI citation, ask explicitly what that involves and what the guardrails are before you are associated with content you did not approve.
Hard Dollars or Soft Dollars? The Question Procurement Must Ask About AI Content Savings
Every AI content platform pitching your organization this year will lead with the same number: 50% savings, 10x content volume, 30% efficiency gains. Christine Moore, drawing on a Women in Marketing Procurement Summer Series panel with The Brandtech Group’s Karen Bennett, Matt Franceschi of Pencil, and Tamara Carvalho of Oliver, asks the question that should follow every one of those claims: how real are the dollars? The answer is that AI content savings fall into three distinct categories: avoided cost that is hard and bankable, media efficiency that lands in a different budget line entirely, and reclaimed capacity that is soft until you contract it into something hard.
Agencies and tech partners will quote you the sum of all three as one big number. Your CFO will not accept it as one number, and neither should you. This piece gives procurement the taxonomy, the questions, and the four practical moves needed to take an AI savings claim and make it reconcile.
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Needles, Haystacks and the New Agency Landscape
In May 2026, Christine Moore joined a group of search consultants through ten agency presentations in three days at the AdForum Summit in New York, visiting MSQ, Publicis Production, DEPT, Stagwell, Dentsu, WPP, Critical Mass, PMG, Media.Monks and others. Every agency had a platform with a name. Every agency gave the same sermon about humans. And one veteran consultant in the room admitted that a group managing billions in media was not on their radar. If the professionals who evaluate agencies all day can miss a firm at that scale, imagine what a procurement team juggling twelve categories is missing.
This piece is the unfiltered read on what the agencies sounded like side by side, where they genuinely differed, and how to tell the needles from the hay. Eight specific questions to ask any agency claiming an AI-enabled offering are included. Your screening criteria, if they were written more than a year or two ago, may be filtering out some of the most interesting firms before a human ever looks at them.
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When AI Changes the Work, the Fee Model Has to Follow
The 4As and Forrester have now put numbers on what procurement has been watching in real time: agencies are using AI to build margin, not to reinvest in talent, creativity, or client outcomes. Christine Moore argues that this moment demands a direct procurement response. If your agency’s output is faster, cheaper, and partially AI-generated, your fee model needs to reflect that reality. The question is not whether to renegotiate. It is how to structure the conversation so that AI-driven efficiency becomes a shared benefit, not a quiet windfall for the agency.
This piece lays out the framework for having that conversation now, before the next contract cycle locks in yesterday’s economics.
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Dollar Shave Club’s Bet: AI Makes Agencies Optional, Not Obsolete
Dollar Shave Club already makes 90% of its advertising in-house. Chief brand and innovation officer Laura Higgins wants AI to close the rest of the gap, not because she thinks agencies are heading for extinction, but because AI removes the capacity constraint that used to force work outside. The brand’s 4th of July campaign went from brief to launch in under a month. Higgins is clear-eyed about the limits: a military tribute was shot entirely with real service members because faking sacrifice would cheapen it. A racier product launch, by contrast, will be 100% AI for the opposite reason. Her rule is not a formula but a judgment call made campaign by campaign.
For marketing procurement, this is the practitioner version of the argument your agency should be ready to answer: if a lean in-house team using AI can outpace a fully resourced agency, what exactly is the agency fee buying?
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4As, Forrester: Agencies Using AI to Boost Margins, Sacrificing Growth
A joint report from the 4As and Forrester delivers a finding that procurement should take directly into its next agency review: agencies that are harvesting AI-driven productivity gains as margin rather than reinvesting them are already showing signs of stagnation in innovation and growth. Sixty-one percent of agency respondents describe AI as a cost of doing business rather than a competitive advantage. The data confirms what many procurement leaders have suspected: the efficiency gains from AI are not automatically flowing back to clients through better work or lower fees. They are being absorbed.
The report concludes that agencies that reinvest AI efficiency into creativity, talent, and performance will be the ones that survive the next wave of client consolidation. For procurement, this is the business case for asking your agency explicitly: where did the AI savings go?
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Recognising Agency Value
Charley Stoney, CEO of the European Association of Communications Agencies, makes a case that procurement leaders need to hear from the other side of the table. Agency rates have barely moved in twenty years. Volume discounts on the largest accounts have eroded margins to the point where agencies are making structural compromises that ultimately cost clients. Stoney is not arguing against procurement. She is arguing for a different kind of procurement: one that recognizes the IP agencies create, builds remuneration models around outcomes rather than hours, and treats the agency relationship as a partnership worth investing in. Her argument is that the AI era offers a genuine reset opportunity. A useful read before any compensation renegotiation.
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Dentsu Strikes Meta Deal to Build Plumbing for Mass Influencer Activation
Dentsu has struck an API partnership with Meta that integrates Creator Marketplace and Partnership Ads directly into its operating system Dentsu.connect. In practical terms, Dentsu clients can now manage creator discovery, selection, and paid activation inside a single agency-controlled dashboard that blends Dentsu data with Meta’s platform data. L’Oreal works with 500,000 influencers a year. Unilever deployed 50,000 for its World Cup campaign. Scale at that level requires infrastructure, and agencies that own that infrastructure own the relationship. For marketing procurement, the Dentsu-Meta deal is a governance question as much as a capability one. When your agency controls the pipes between your brand and your creators, what transparency rights are you entitled to, and are they written into your contract?
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The In-House vs. Agency Influencer Debate Is Asking the Wrong Question
The in-house versus agency debate misses the point when applied to influencer marketing. The more useful question is how a brand builds a system for working with creators at scale, regardless of where the management function sits. As micro and nano-influencers account for nearly half of US influencer investment, the challenge is infrastructure: how do you discover, contract, activate, measure, and govern thousands of creator relationships without losing control of quality, compliance, or cost? For marketing procurement, the primary question is whether your current governance framework is built for the scale of creator marketing you are actually running, or the scale you were running three years ago.
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Reddit Infiltrated by Stealth AI in Brand Citation Race
Brands and the agencies working on their behalf are now seeding Reddit with AI-generated fake posts designed to manipulate how ChatGPT and Google Gemini cite and recommend products. Reddit is catching 25,000 spammy posts per day using its own AI detection systems, and the scale of the problem reflects something procurement needs to understand: generative engine optimization has created a new and largely ungoverned category of agency activity. If your agency is engaged in content seeding or earned media strategies that include AI-generated posts on third-party platforms, your contracts almost certainly do not address it. This is the moment to ask your PR and content agencies directly what their GEO strategy involves and what guardrails are in place.
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GEO: What Procurement Experts Need to Know
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content and digital presence so that AI-powered platforms, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini, cite and recommend your brand in their responses. As traditional search traffic shifts to AI-generated answers, GEO is becoming as commercially significant as SEO was a decade ago. For marketing procurement, the implications are practical and immediate. GEO work is being commissioned in many cases without clear scope definitions, measurable KPIs, or audit rights.
Marketing Procurement iQ lays out what GEO is, why it matters to procurement specifically, and what questions belong in your next agency or PR supplier review. As the Reddit story in this issue makes clear, the line between legitimate GEO and reputationally risky content manipulation is not always obvious. Governance starts with understanding.
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