Google “the future of advertising” and you’ll likely get a plethora of articles on the death of the AOR (or why the AOR model will never die), ad-blocking, cord cutting, the rise of crowdsourcing content, ego killed the advertising star/creative director, or how traditional agencies have reconciled (on paper at least) with crowdsourced content providers and other programmatic / content-at-scale platforms - among other things. Private conversations with ex-agency types who have jumped the fence and come over to the client/brand side (and current agency friends in confidence) have all told me a similar story: the brand advertising model is changing (fast) and not all big box agencies (or clients) are ready/willing to embrace the change...to their own demise.