Future of Marketing Briefing: AI feels friendlier, agency holdcos act tighter

In the race to build brands around AI assistants, the stakes are higher than empathy. 

This week’s debut brand marketing campaigns from OpenAI and Anthropic made that clear, and in retrospect, cast Perplexity’s earlier campaign in a sharper light. These aren’t brands trying to be relatable. They’re trying to normalize a seismic shift in human-machine interaction.

As Neil Barrie, co-founder and global CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, put it: “All of them are building brands around weapons grade power.”

So far, that power has been wrapped in what amounts to high-gloss product demos — slick, scripted and carefully designed to make the unfamiliar feel familiar. But that’s where the overlap ends. Each AI company has taken a distinct approach to how it wants to market around agents, shaped by its own worldview and ambitions. 

OpenAI isn’t settling disruption — it’s selling reassurance. Its U.S., U.K. and Ireland campaign features short films where ChatGPT gives a gentle nudge: helping plan a trip, refine a workout, solve a daily snag. Prompts from real users appear onscreen as each scene builds to a cinematic payoff, triumphant score and all. The moment belongs to the person, not the product. 

Anthropic plays it brainier. Its spot, made with Mother, targets problem-solvers, from chess players to deep-sea researchers, quietly supported by Claude. The tech stays offstage. The focus is human ingenuity. The message: the tool matters, but the person leads. 

Then there’s Perplexity. In its ad, Squid Game’s Lee Jung-jae escapes a high-stakes trap thanks to Perplexity. It’s part thriller, part demo, part absurdist comedy. If OpenAI whispers and Anthropic explains, Perplexity winks.

The rationale behind these moves is clear: drive attention, convert it into users, and turn that into investor momentum. But marketing AI through emotion isn’t without risk. To sell the effect is to court ambiguity. 

“Remember the Mechanical Turk?” asked Jon Williams, CEO of the Liberty Guild, a global network of more than 500 creatives and strategists to Digiday. Everyone thought the chess-playing machine was a technological marvel, powered by wires and machines, said Williams. But it was just someone crouched inside, moving the knight, setting up the mate, he added.

Now flip it.

Today’s AI tools — OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity et al — can really “think” — or at least have the processing power to grind through patterns faster than any grandmaster, said Williams. But the people selling don’t lead with that. Instead, they wrap the machine in a soft-focus filter: The human face on the call. The smiling email signature. The chat that feels personal but isn’t. The trick, Williams argued, hasn’t disappeared — it’s just inverted.

And that’s what these AI brand campaigns are really selling: not just utility, not just trust but continuity. The sense we’re still the protagonist in the story. That the machines are helpful to us, and not, eventually, the other way around. 

Because in campaign after campaign, we don’t see the machine in its raw form. We see a curated projection of ourselves: empathetic, witty, attentive. A version of humanity so hyper-optimized it only reinforces the illusion that someone like us must still be in charge. That the assistant is still an assistant. That we remain the masters. 

But every time we ask it to write an email, summarize a meeting, generate an idea, or direct a purchase, we hand off more agency. We offload cognition. We transfer judgment. Slowly, subtly, we trade decision-making for convenience — until the interface doesn’t just reflect our choices. It starts to shape them. And if the rise of social media and smartphones taught us anything, it’s that by the time we understand the trade-offs, they’ve already reshaped the culture. 

“It’s the Peter Parker thing — ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ — that these campaigns put a focus on,” said Barrie. “Can all brands, but especially Anthropic with Claude because it’s a challenge, own that narrative? They’re not just showing how the tech empowers people in a slick ad but they’re actively pushing for it, through their work with lobbyists, academic research and so on.”

That’s why these early campaigns carry more weight than they seem. If they don’t begin to resolve the ambiguity they rely on — if they don’t clarify not just what AI is for, but who it is for — then the category will calcify around power, not progress. The real test for these brands is whether they can build a belief in a future where these tools serve something larger than their creators.

When the client becomes an opco, so does the holdco

Horizon and Havas were the subject for this week’s musings on “the death of the agency holdco” but it was what Bayer did with its agency model that was arguably the most instructive as to where things are headed. 

The pharmaceutical company consolidated global creative, production and media duties for its health business into one holdco — IPG. Not a bespoke collective of agencies, Not a purpose-built in-house team, just good old-fashioned consolidation under one roof. 

Plenty of advertisers have gone down this path before, usually under the familiar  banners of integration and efficiency. But Bayer’s version lands differently. That’s partly because the company itself has changed. It’s far more centralized than it was in 2021, when EssenceMediacom was hired to manage its ad dollars. 

“This is about creating more consistency across markets and putting more money behind what we know will drive results,” said one global marketer at Bayer, who spoke anonymously because they weren’t authorized to discuss the account. 

In other words, the global team is calling more of the shots now. And Bayer in turn is operating less like a portfolio of local fiefdoms and more like a single company, with a single agency partner expected to behave accordingly.

“Clients are becoming more of an operating company,” said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of media management firm Ebiquity, which managed the commercial part of Bayern’s pitch. “When they make that change to their organizational shape they need their agency partners to change theirs too.”

Agencies, to their credit, are adjusting. One subplot in the current wave of transformation is the quiet phase-out of long-standing agency CEO titles in favor of more centralized leadership at the holdco level. The agency of record is giving way to the holdco of record. 

Rates and rebates and procurement gymnastics still matter. But increasingly, it’s executives — not platforms or tech stacks — who will determine how dollars flow. Whether it’s a bet on data strategy or creator partnerships, the decision-making is consolidating right alongside the structure. 

“I was talking to a client a few weeks ago who said they were fed up with the holdco model and the lack of choice they had,” said Jay Wilson, a vp analyst at Gartner. “They then wondered as to whether they should burn it all down and start over.” 

The fact that they’re even thinking about it says a lot about where the industry is — and what’ s quietly replacing the old ways of doing things. Maybe, the Horizon and Havas headlines were more instructive than they looked.

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