Despite the ubiquity of artificial intelligence in marketing materials over the past three years, its application within advertising is arguably much more established than many industry observers realize.
However, what has changed is not the existence of AI itself, but the prominence of the language surrounding it (you may have noticed).
Since the early 2020s, terms such as “AI-powered,” “end-to-end,” “transparent,” “open ecosystem,” and, more recently, “agentic” have become near-universal fixtures in agency marketing — almost to the point where the use of the term “AI” in a pitch or conference stage has become meaningless.
Currently, almost every major agency holding company, or scaled independent, has a platform story to tell, whether it is Omnicom’s Omni, WPP Open, Publicis Groupe’s Marcel, PMG Alli, Stagwell’s STAGE/The Machine, Dentsu.Connect with a growing number of similar offerings across the market.
Ahead of this month’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, a team of technology and product experts at 3C Ventures examined many of those platforms and published a paper concluding that while the language has become increasingly standardized, the underlying capabilities remain far harder to assess.
The report argues that while advertisers are frequently presented with remarkably similar claims, there are significant differences across platforms in architecture, maturity, and operational realities.
The accountability gap
The paper’s most pointed criticism centers on accountability. According to its authors, agency platforms routinely position themselves as AI-enabled engines for planning, optimization, and decision-making, yet marketers are often left without a clear understanding of where automation begins and human intervention ends.
3C Ventures contends that agencies have yet to establish widely accepted proof standards that demonstrate the extent to which AI contributes to campaign outcomes, independent of the strategists, analysts, and traders who operate the systems. In many cases, performance claims reflect the combined output of technology and people rather than the platform itself.
Such concerns are increasingly important as holding companies seek to position their proprietary systems as strategic differentiators. If AI is being marketed as a source of competitive advantage, advertisers are beginning to ask whether agencies can demonstrate precisely how that advantage is created and measured.
“The language is so uniform that, stripped of branding, it would be nearly impossible to attribute a platform description to its source agency,” reads the report. “The underlying capabilities, however, vary dramatically.”
Data ownership and platform lock-in
Beyond questions of performance, the report identifies data ownership as perhaps the most consequential long-term issue facing marketers.
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Agency platforms increasingly serve as the environment in which first-party data is ingested, audience segments are built, and measurement frameworks are established. Over time, those assets can become deeply embedded within proprietary systems.
For advertisers, the concern is not simply where data resides today, but what happens if an agency relationship ends tomorrow. The report argues that marketers should pay closer attention to the portability of audience definitions, attribution models, and campaign learnings developed within agency-controlled environments.
Such concerns arise as more brands continue to expand in-house capabilities while simultaneously relying on agencies for execution and specialist expertise. As a result, questions surrounding ownership, access rights, and portability are moving from procurement discussions into broader governance conversations.
Following the money
No commercially rational organization reduces its revenue base without a corresponding upside.
3C Ventures
The report also points to a growing tension between AI-driven efficiency gains and agency compensation models.
As generative AI reduces the amount of labor required for activities such as reporting, planning, creative production, and audience analysis, advertisers naturally expect some of those efficiencies to translate into lower costs, but this assumption would be naïve.
“No commercially rational organization reduces its revenue base without a corresponding upside, whether that is a new revenue stream, an R&D return on platform investment, or a restructured commercial model that captures the efficiency gain rather than surrendering it,” reads the report.
Agencies, meanwhile, have increasingly positioned proprietary platforms as premium products in their own right. According to 3C Ventures, platform fees may allow holding companies to preserve or even expand revenue as traditional labor requirements decline.
The issue is not necessarily the existence of platform fees, but the lack of transparency around how those fees relate to underlying service costs. Marketers are increasingly seeking clarity on whether technology charges are replacing labor costs, supplementing them, or creating entirely new layers of commercial complexity.
Governance issues
For 3C Ventures, agency-owned AI platforms raise more questions about governance than about technology, and the report recommends, at a minimum, due diligence efforts focusing on the following three areas:
- Contractualize the framework
- Require a proof of concept
- Audit existing engagements
Experts at the consultancy recommend that marketers move beyond platform demonstrations and marketing presentations and require proof-of-concept exercises, written portability commitments, disclosure of technology partnerships, and contractual clarity around AI governance.
Additionally, they argue that advertisers should seek detailed explanations of where AI is making autonomous decisions versus generating recommendations, how agency and client data are separated, and what safeguards exist to prevent inaccurate or hallucinated outputs from influencing planning, targeting, or measurement.
The next phase of AI adoption may be defined by demands for greater evidence
Likewise, marketers are encouraged to establish clear contractual definitions around ownership of data, derived insights, and content created within AI-enabled workflows, while understanding what happens to those assets if an agency engagement comes to an end.
Taken together, the recommendations reflect a broader shift underway in the market. For years, agencies have encouraged clients to evaluate the sophistication of their technology platforms. Increasingly, however, advertisers appear ready to evaluate the claims themselves.
As AI becomes central to how agencies position their value, the questions facing those platforms are becoming more familiar to software vendors and technology providers: What is genuinely proprietary? How is performance measured? Who owns the resulting data and intelligence? And can any of those claims be independently verified?
So, while the report authors are at pains to point out that agency platforms do not lack value, 3C Ventures experts maintain that the industry’s platform race has outpaced the standards needed to evaluate them.
For marketers, that means the next phase of AI adoption may be defined less by new capabilities than by demands for greater evidence, transparency, and accountability.