AI Agents in China: Reshaping Marketing Agencies – Quality, Aggregation, and a Split Future

This episode dives deep into a question making waves in China's marketing circles: “If AI Agents can do what advertising agencies do, what will be left for you?”. This isn't just a humorous remark; it reflects a widespread anxiety and a genuine turning point in how marketing services are understood, particularly in the unique and rapidly changing Chinese context.

We'll explore how this anxiety isn’t merely about automation, but also a confusion over the very word “agent” itself. In China’s highly volatile business climate, brand marketers spend significant energy mediating competing internal interests, navigating resource constraints, and balancing department politics. Ironically, their in-house marketing teams lack the bandwidth for strategic research, which is where consultancies and agencies traditionally found their value. However, agencies—especially the creative and media ones—have largely become "executors," while consultancies get to "think". Much of agency value in China has shifted from raising the marketing quality to maximising aggregation: buying media in bulk, leveraging cross-client scale, and driving prices down. Aggregation is often seen as easier, less risky, and more scalable than investing in real expertise.

But what if AI is ill-suited to these aggregation functions? Our discussion will reveal how AI’s true promise lies in making solutions more rigorous, reports more granular, and data analysis more accurate—effectively returning marketing to a discipline of quality, not just quantity. This raises a new dilemma in China: should AI amplify the capabilities of agencies, or should brands internalise them? We'll unpack why AI Agents won’t simply replace the full function of agencies but will dramatically improve the quality and thoroughness of certain outputs, while aggregation remains a stubbornly human, relationship-driven game. Many Chinese agencies are already rushing to build and resell AI-powered tools, attempting to rebrand as technology vendors.

Ultimately, we’ll look at the disruption brought by AI Agents not as simple replacement, but as polarisation, leading to a "split future" in China’s marketing landscape. It's a future where one camp is rooted in AI-driven quality—“the quality tribe”—and the other entrenched in aggregation and quantity—“the direct tribe”. This isn’t the end of advertising agencies in China, but a crucial moment for them, and their clients, to redefine value. The industry faces an urgent need to redefine what is truly valuable in the age of AI.

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