Agency Interrupted: The Authenticity Arms Race

Image source: Pixabay​

I don't know about you, but my feed to start 2026 off is 79% dudes promising me $10k, $90k, $120k a month if I just do this one thing. Niche AI faceless pages and content. The other 21% is making money off global events on Polymarket - but that’s a whole other thing.

Everything is about YouTube automation. Toolkits with five apps I've never heard of to make content using AI. Screenshots of YouTube Studio revenue charts that may or may not be real.

They promise me that 'there is no luck involved' and how easy it is to 'exactly copy me' and unlock incredible riches. Everyone's got a thread. Everyone's 20 years old and making more than your content creator parents ever did churning out the sloppiest of slop content.

The tell is always that as they start making these unbelievable riches churning out YouTube slop, the first thing you do is create a free course and then even better, a paid course.

It's the new drop shipping. The new crypto bro telling you he cracked the code while you were sleeping. Same grift, different decade. Just Retweet and Comment "YouTube" (must follow me to get it).

This is the gold rush pitch now: faceless, automated, algorithmic. No skill required. No luck involved. Just you, some AI tools and a revenue chart that goes up and to the right forever.

Merriam-Webster chose 'slop' as their 2025 word of the year. They described it as something that 'oozes into everything.' But don’t worry. CNN Business is already predicting 2026 will be 'the year of '100% human' marketing.'

This matters because it's not just your timeline. It's the content ecosystem where your clients' brands are trying to get noticed. When content creation costs approach zero, content volume approaches infinity. And most of it is going to stink like garbage.

The signal-to-noise ratio has collapsed. Your client's campaign isn't competing with other campaigns anymore. It's competing with an endless scroll of AI-generated slop, algorithmic filler and faceless content farms. That's the new context for everything.

Agencies are stuck in a negotiation where both sides want opposite things.

Procurement sees the efficiency numbers. WPP's stock collapsed 60%. Omnicom absorbed IPG and cut 4,000 jobs in the first week. The holding companies are promising AI-powered everything because that's the only story Wall Street wants to hear.

Meanwhile, CMOs watched audiences torch AI-generated holiday campaigns. Not thoughtful critique - raw disgust. Ads pulled. Apologies issued. Suddenly 'authentic' and 'craft' are back in the brief like it's 2012.

The CFO wants the machine. The CMO wants the magic. Agencies are in the middle, nodding at both.

You can't promise AI savings to procurement and human craft to the CMO. Or you can promise both, agencies are good at promising things, but you can't deliver both. Something has to give.

And now the platforms are coming for what's left. Google, Canva and WPP have all launched 'agency-in-a-box' AI tools aimed at small and mid-size businesses. As Rogier Vijverberg, founder of the creative shop SuperHeroes, put it to Digiday: "It's cynical almost because it's the agencies that have built the advertising business together with Meta and TikTok and Google. Now, they are competing with [advertisers] as well."

The likely outcome: human-made becomes a premium tier.

iHeartMedia recently rolled out a 'Guaranteed Human' campaign across all 850+ stations. Their research found that 90% of listeners - even those who use AI tools themselves, want their media created by humans. CEO Bob Pittman: "Consumers are not just looking for convenience - they're searching for meaning."

Think about what happened with food. When everything became processed and optimised, 'organic' became a label. 'No artificial ingredients' became a selling point. People paid more for things that felt real. Even if they were no better.

Advertising is hitting that same inflection. When everything in the feed has that uncanny Midjourney sheen, the stuff that doesn't starts to stand out. Scarcity flipped. Human-made went from baseline to differentiator.

As The Conversation noted in a recent piece on the backlash: "Advertising has never really just been about efficiency. It has always relied on a degree of emotional truth and creative mystery. That psychological anchor—a belief that human intention sits behind what we are looking at - turns out to matter more than we like to admit."

But unlike food, there's no certification. No inspectors. Did a human write that script or just edit what the AI spit out? Where's the line between AI-assisted and AI-generated? Nobody knows.

That ambiguity will be exploited. Call it human washing. Big shops will claim craft while automating the backend. They'll put a human face on AI-generated work. Words like 'AI-assisted' and 'human-directed' will sound meaningful but won't be.

So who wins?

In theory, smaller agencies. The ones who can credibly point to their process and say: people made this. The shops that never scaled to where AI became a financial necessity.

The cost pressures crushing holding companies should be a moat for independents. If you're a twelve-person shop charging craft prices and delivering craft work, the Omnicom-IPG merger isn't your problem. You're playing a different game.

But only if clients value the difference. And that's the open question.

Dan Murphy, SVP of marketing at Liquid Death, told Digiday his team uses AI for efficiency stuff - resizes, code optimisation - but added: "We're not in the market for a 'Liquid-Death-Idea-o-Matic.'"

That's the bet. Some clients will want the Idea-o-Matic. Some will pay for the opposite. The market is splitting.

Do audiences actually care if something was made by humans? Or do they just care if it's good?

The backlash might be a permanent shift. Or it might be a blip while people adjust. Autotune was controversial once. CGI felt fake. Those technologies got absorbed. Maybe AI content just needs to get 10% better and nobody will care.

Or maybe there's something durable here. Vinyl came back. Film came back. Not as the default, but as a premium alternative for people who wanted something different.

Here's what I keep coming back to: those guys promising $90k a month from faceless pages aren't wrong about the economics. The arbitrage is real.

But they're also telling on themselves. The move is always to sell the course, not run the pages. The real money is convincing other people the gold rush is real. That's every gold rush in history - the winners sold shovels.

The question for agencies is whether you're in the shovel business or the gold business. Whether you're selling the promise of AI efficiency or delivering something that stands out from the flood.

The flood is here. The feeds are full of slop. And somewhere in that mess, there's an opportunity for work that feels unmistakably human.

Scarcity creates value. It always has. The question is whether anyone's willing to pay for it - and whether you're set up to deliver it when they are.