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Good morning - Michael here, writing from the frontlines of Massif & Kroo: Here's what you need to pay attention to in media today:

That's the standard agency commission on a creator brand deal. And right now, every trend in media is working to make that number harder to justify.

This isn't the familiar "agencies are under pressure" story. That's been true for a decade and it's become consensus — which means it's useless as signal. The sharper read is this: the agency bundle is unbundling. The three things an agency used to sell as one package — representation, production, and distribution — are separating into independent services. And the pieces the agency is left holding are the lowest-value ones.

Here's how the unbundling works.

You needed a team to shoot, edit, and deliver brand content at a professional level. Now creators handle production themselves — or use AI tools that automate editing, clipping, captioning, and versioning at a fraction of the cost. Billion Dollar Boy's research found 77% of marketers plan to shift budget toward AI-generated creator content in 2026.

That number overstates the reality — what brands actually want is to use AI to make working with human creators cheaper, not to replace humans with avatars. But the direction is clear: production cost is compressing, and the agency's role in managing that cost is shrinking.

Distribution used to require the agency's relationships. You needed someone who knew which platforms to target, how to optimize, and who to call. Now platforms handle distribution natively — YouTube's algorithm does the targeting, TikTok's feed does the discovery, and the creator's own audience does the amplification.

The new YouTube tools that let creators swap old sponsor reads across their entire back catalog are a perfect example: the platform is building monetization infrastructure that used to require an agent to negotiate. Every feature like this removes one more reason to pay someone 15%.

As creator tools, direct brand relationships, and platform monetization improve, the question every agency faces is simple: what do you actually do that the creator can't do themselves?

Introductions are a one-time value. Negotiation is a commodity skill that gets easier as rate benchmarks become transparent. Deal structure matters, but only at scale. For a creator doing $50K in annual brand deals, 15% to an agent for an introduction and a contract review is an increasingly hard sell.

The agencies that survive this will be the ones that prove they add operating value beyond the transaction. Strategy. Casting. Measurement. Packaging multiple creators into a campaign architecture. Building always-on programs instead of one-off posts.

Those are services brands will pay for. But they require the agency to operate more like a consultancy or a studio than a talent shop. Most agencies haven't made that transition — and the ones that try often find their margins worse, not better, because consultative work is more labor-intensive than deal-brokering.

The buyers who were enthusiastic about "creator economy infrastructure" deals in 2024 are asking harder questions about durability and margin. The businesses that are holding value are the ones that look more like production companies or media companies than matchmaking services. Same machine as old Hollywood talent agencies becoming studios — packaging, production, distribution under one roof. The agencies that don't make that leap are capped at the economics of a staffing firm.

We see this from both sides of the table. On the creator management side, the conversations with brands have shifted. They used to ask "who do you represent?" Now they ask "what's the measurement framework?" and "can you build a 90-day program, not a one-off post?" The agencies that can answer those questions are getting bigger deals. The ones that can't are watching their creators go direct.

On the production side, we've watched AI compress turnaround times on clipping, captioning, and versioning by 60-70% in the last year. That's not theoretical — that's our actual workflow. When a $500/month AI tool does what a $3,000/month editor used to do, the margin structure of every content business changes. And the agency that was marking up production services just lost its spread.

The real question for the next 18 months isn't whether agencies survive. It's which ones transform into something more valuable — and which ones get stuck holding the lowest-value piece of a bundle that no longer exists.

The information warfare angle — AI-generated fakes, state propaganda, platform incentive failures — has been well-covered. The media business angle hasn't: Iran is a live demonstration of what happens when audience access gets severed overnight. If you don't own a direct relationship with your audience — email, SMS, owned platform — you are renting your distribution from someone who can turn it off. That's not a hypothetical. It's happening right now to an entire country.

"One Battle After Another" has the DGA and PGA. The WGA Awards split the screenplay prizes again — Coogler took Original, Anderson took Adapted. Every precursor model says coin flip. But the precursor models were built for a market with more independent studios. In a consolidated market, the statistical models break because the underlying competition structure has changed.

YOUR NEXT MOVE: If you're an agency, audit your revenue by service line. How much comes from introductions and negotiation versus strategy, production, and measurement? If the majority is the former, you have a structural problem that won't be solved by hiring more sales reps. If you're a creator, ask yourself: what is my agent doing for me that I couldn't do with a good CRM, rate transparency tools, and a contract template? If the answer is uncomfortable, that's the signal.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you on tomorrow.

Feedback, thoughts, suggestions? Hit the reply!

Michael Wildes is the founder and CEO of Drive Phase Holding Company, a permanent-capital firm focused on building category-defining companies across business, media (owner of Massif & Kroo), aviation, and impact. After leaving a career as a professional pilot, he spent a year as Business Editor at FLYING Magazine writing 330+ articles on aviation's transformation. Now he builds permanent-capital companies focused on long-term trends that compound over decades. Based in Arlington, Virginia.

Connect: mikewildes.com | [email protected]

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