Scaling Agencies: What Still Works, What Doesn’t, and What’s Next @ Digital Marketing Europe Lisbon 2026

0:00Okay. Welcome back everyone. It's great to have you here for the next 45 minutes, which is very short period of time. We're going to be talking about the reality of the agency world in 2026 and 2027. If you're working with agencies here because we have six of the brightest minds in the agency world digital marketing here with us today. And we are going to be talking about what we need to do as agencies to stay relevant and to be able to help our clients more and more in the future. If you're an agency owner listen to this because this is about survival basically. It's a very short period of time. There's basically seven of us here in the panel and we will answer questions be able to take questions. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask everyone just for 20 seconds short introduction so that you understand who the person is and what their experience is with the agency world. And I'll set the base. I'm Stefan 16 years of experience in e-commerce. I own e-commerce stores in Europe and US. Agency owner for the last six years, full service agency, 33 [clears throat] human employees and a couple of AI agents in the mix right now. And yeah, that's pretty

1:23Much [clears throat] me. Let's go with Hello, my name is Sa from the for 19 years and 17 years old. Aspect of the agency side. So I grow two agencies from five people to 100 five people to 45 people and work with many clients for long time and I'm lecture Alexander from Sweden had an agency for 10 years with 15 employees and five agents. Cool. I'm Alex Melen. I'm the co-founder of SmartSites. We actually just celebrated our 15th anniversary yesterday. So in business 15 years. We have 400 employees, one of the largest digital marketing companies in the US. I'm [clears throat] Martin. I'm marketing director of digital. So the marketing director for marketing agency. Yeah, we have 401 multilingual [clears throat] Hi, my name is Dennis. I'm founder of ST platform that we do server side tracking and we're currently more than 100 people and our business is pretty new for but we grow 100 business.

2:55My name is W. I'm co-founder of Fre. I'm a digital market for 26 years. Never been an agency except free but always often work [clears throat] with them both the customer as traffic provider as service provider. So I have quite an outside perspective of what's going on with the agency world this media. Thank you so much everyone. Now that we understand what everybody's doing and we know each other the first question which is basically on everybody's mind for the last couple of years now is will agencies provide AI agents. So basically in a world where our clients can basically deploy campaigns, they can audits, they can actually execute, write copy, manage bids, will traditional agencies even have a place in the world and I'm going to address this question to two people number one is going to be Alexander you are in the space dice first and second sai how do you sell consulting when the client has an AI agent that can do Alexander. No, [laughter] no, no. But I honestly don't think so. If you speaking about

4:20Agencies as they are today, I think 95 something% of all agencies will probably cease to exist in their capacity they're operating at today. Because and this is just trying to be like have a good imagination of how the future will look like. And if agents and it's looking like it will be able to do ads, do optimization, do setting up campaigns, create videos, create pictures at an exceptional level. It's going to be very hard promoted. Like there's no nostalgic features in a capitalistic society. Coca-Cola will not choose to pay 100,000 euro a month to an agency when they can pay €1,000 for the for the even if it's not the same results, even it's like 90% the same result, but it's going to be the same. So I think it's going to be hard. I think we're going to see like an uprising of like this one man agencies where there is like one person or maybe two or something that has 20 agents instead or 400 agents that are the employees. Those agencies are going to thrive because the agents work in a different pace and are more cost efficient and will be more adjustable to how the thank you.

5:50I can I can put this as a consulting perspective actually this is my opinion this is more important in the you have expert in the AI agent space is what I feel is of course I'm save this for today maybe it will be all different but now at least especially the area that we working in we need to use different tools connect AI with different tools so we're lucky because we cannot get we can answer hey do me a something we'll just make no so it's not that so you still need to know which tools you need to use for what and how you guide the agent how you create the problems. That's why I think for consulting if you have expertise and a very valuable number especially when I'm coming here I see a startup which they make something like agents will hire humans experts so they're calling for hiring they say hey I this is it okay so if you see some bad parts so I think that's why this is this becomes more important I don't know I cannot human validation for LLMs and AI agents. That's interesting. So basically AI is not going to be killing agency

7:20Agencies, but it's going to force agencies to adapt and adjust. It's going to remove a lot of that noise what agencies were doing in the past. It's going to assist them with that. My only question the question that I don't have an answer for just yet is any one of us here we can have one of those oneman agencies with like 20 agents that are helping us do the work but we are humans and everybody here in the room is a human everybody here in the room understands that when you're the only employee you're like you're your biggest liability or your biggest bottleneck you get sick the only reason Why you move from a oneman agency where you have a large team structure is because you want to be able the bottom line. And that part I still don't understand just yet because people are not hiring juniors anymore that much. We're still in the process of hiring juniors. So my next question is not going to be addressed to someone. Was just the very first one of you would raise their hand and talk about it. Are you still hiring or and training them? I could talk about it. So, we do we do a ton of hiring. So, that's a that's a good question. We still are we still are. I think I think AI and

8:50Agentic AI brings the bottom up, It actually I know there's a in the maybe programming space there's a lot of discussions where there's no place for junior people at all anymore. It's making seniors more valuable. But I think in the digital space, I think we're still we're still hiring juniors, the right people, not just let's hire everyone. We're still hiring aggressively. We hire in the US where it's very expensive, But there's still value. I think with agentic AI, it brings the juniors up by giving them by empowering them with processes and AI and training them and all that stuff. They're not truly juniors anymore. Even if they're junior starting at junior level with no experience with the power of the processes and systems we have in place we rise them up to a very senior level very quickly within months so I think that's the power of AI and agentic AI and where everything's moving now where it really for the people who lean into it they could become very effective and very senior very quickly even though they're still juniors that's how we're seeing as a company we've always hired at a junior level and trained people we've found them to be a lot more effective than hiring senior people that come with a lot of baggage and have done something a certain way for 20 years. It's a lot harder to change. So that's what we're seeing. I don't know if anyone else really quickly has agree. I think I see more like people skipping the junior stage like I see 16y old 17y old getting paid as a senior because they understand

10:18Entering and understand coding and AI in a different way and people want to invest in those people. So handle it. [clears throat] Yeah. I just want to say we do the same guy for a smaller company but the first intern years and I this new generation basically work the guy studed on the AI faculty for the last four years on AI. So now he intention and there is like two courses we learn from him he learns from us. So it's perfect to have people who can bring skills and different so clients shouldn't be worried anymore about working with a major working with a junior in fact juniors but they actually know a lot more about than the seniors of yesterday because they have this superpower they are agents which is understanding how to use them. I personally when I did like my first app. I don't know how to code. I talk to developers for 20 years now, but I don't know how to code. When I took my first app, I felt my I literally felt my brain get rewired and I was "Wow." Okay. Next question is niche versus full service. That's the topic. And,

11:41There's a massive debate for many years in the agency world. The hot topic was you have to be niche. Have to be super specialized in order to be good at something. Some agencies were on one side, other agencies were on another side where they wanted to go full service. And, today with AI, that question becomes more and more relevant, more and more important. We go niche or we go full service. Alex, you've built a massive agency going across the board. Martin, your team goes to incredible depth in verticals. Alex, what is your opinion on this topic? Yeah, good question. Very debated topic for a long time. So for us as an agency, we've been trying to do both. Generally we've always been more general, meaning we take on every industry. There's no there's no industry that's more than 5% of what we do. And we're literally across every industry. I think for a long time it really helped to be specialized in niche because you develop an expertise spec in a very specific area and you're very good at that area. We tried to do internally. So we have channel specific divisions and we have people who specialize in certain things. So even though we take on all the business we have experts in every single line and that takes scale that takes growing that takes processes. It took it's not easy in smaller size to be able to

13:11Do that. If you're an agency of 20 people, you can't have specialists in every single industry. But as we've grown, that's helped. I had I've had this debate in other conference recently where the person still said it helps to specialize in everything. But my counterargument would be that now with Agentic AI, we have access to more data and I think that's going to be the huge advantage. I think for there's a lot of discussions, oh, agencies won't be relevant. AI could do agency work. I think data becomes the most valuable thing. So for us, we have I don't know 3,000 active clients right now, And all the others before that never took us off their Google Analytics and everything else. When our AI makes decisions, we have a better data set and bigger data set. I think that's going to become valuable. But that's the way I see it. But I think for sure this debate will continue forever. The niche versus general, I don't think it's going to be solved this year. I don't think I don't think AI is going to change you that much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think for me it's worth thinking about what are the reasons behind clients choosing agencies in the first place. Like why do you bother? I don't think it is always a case of survival or even I guess in your example to start if Coca-Cola can save $100,000 but well maybe they want to maybe they don't care maybe because they're selling sugar water and it's make so much money they don't care more of a preference than survival. There's so many preferential reasons to choose the agency. I think part of that is sector expertise. And it's where events like this are pretty

14:40Useful because you can hear how other people are doing things and get the reassurance that people are doing things when you're doing it or get the inspiration that some people are doing things differently. And I think that's one of the reasons people see why people with actual sector expertise and also potentially channel expertise and channel expertise might be getting eroded a little bit but I think sector expertise is probably the biggest mo as an agency and I say that we specialize in very highly regulated industries where if you get things wrong there are legal criminal [snorts] ethics or business implications. So things like health, law, finance, gambling, pharmaceuticals, all that stuff. That's where you can't really like code your way to success because you might end up doing something get you in trouble with the I don't know policies, but then more seriously like the regulatory body. I think the biggest is sector equity rather than general equity. Good. So that's like client vertical related. How do you guys feel about agencies that do just performance marketing versus agencies that focus on growth and they do performance marketing, SEO, NGO, email automation and all of these client? Because growth

16:07Honestly I'm going to be talking about this a bit later on which is pro and everything else and tracking but growth for a client actually means money in the bank. So if you just focus on your on performance marketing, you may be missing the particular picture whereas some other people are saying that no I want to do marketing really well. I don't care about email. I don't care about SEO. Does any one of you want to address this? I'll go very quick and then I can pass it off. That is also a very good question. So for us what's interesting is we've learned ourselves throughout the 15 years and with all our clients our best relationships both for us and for our clients is when we do everything when it's literally we become the digital partner and the works best for the client. They don't have to like we'll do the email marketing SEO search we'll make them the website fix things on the website make them the business cards do the billboard for them works better for them that they don't have to have lots of different companies to manage. It's so much better for us because then we could be growthminded. We could say that this month email marketing is now working better. Let's move more budget here. That's across the board has been the best relationships, best retentions, clients are the happiest. So for sure that's for us at least that's been the most successful. I don't know if anyone else wanted. No, I don't think there's

17:29Like a recipe like I think the most important thing is people do what they like to do and if you enjoy what you're doing then you probably become more creative and put better work. So some I guess some agencies like to only do like do whatever right however so but that's just my personal take on it. What I've seen is like it's easier to niche down on a platform than to niche down on either performance or content because that's very it's a very blurry line nowadays. It's not like used to be. Now performance is literally about content and content is about performance. So I find it hard. I have never had an agency that only does performance. Try to understand more how that works because I find it hard to sometimes we are forced to only the content and we have another agency performance and I think it never goes very hard because I think first we need to agree with what growth is because growth start when it starts speaking it's like an SEO because it gets nonpaid traffic for some time. Then we start speaking broad about optimizing channels aggressively doing some growth tactics that no one not just optimizing the account then

18:58Product involves in it because you have to do some changes in product. Well, I think the first thing is because there are different people in the company or agency first you need to decide that but what I what I feel world is clients get paid money to you drive results when it comes from the growth. So naming is important but that's also important because you cannot do only SEO paid marketing whatever to make grow first you need to understand persona and then you need to match their intent into the lending so that's the roles need to be set true define expectations which is which is something that agents doing from number zero which is client qualification. But sometimes that step gets missed. One thing we kept seeing in the last couple of years, maybe you guys, is clients reaching out to us saying that they're switching agency because the reports they're getting are all green. They're apparently billionaires, but they don't know it. But actually, the problem is money in the bank is going down. So, in the end, their profitability is not good because of different platforms want to show that

20:25They have the best results. If you add up the money that Meta is saying you're making, TikTok is saying you're saying you're making Google Ads is saying you're making, you're always going to be making millions and millions and billions of dollars versus what's actually in the bank account, much lower than that. So tracking nowadays is getting trickier and trickier because we have all sorts of privacy laws and limitations getting more and more aggressive in terms of being actually able to actually track people and it's not just tracking but when you do track what are you tracking for and traditionally companies and performance marketing agency agencies have been tracking for return on ad spend ROAS test whereas that's not necessarily the measure of success profit on ad spend may actually be something that's more relevant that clients have been asking for more and more the last couple of years at least for us. So this question is basically for Dennis [clears throat] and Black because you guys understand tracking better than everybody else is combined I think and the industry is obsessed with this right now. So first of all that what is the new source of truth? How can we be sure? Where can where can an e-commerce business look? What does it have to do

21:55Be able to look at a platform and be like okay these are my true numbers. This is my and Dennis how does server side tracking save us in all this weeks. So then I'll start and you just ask the question that was my previous topic separate from about so there is a deck on our website and I can share with you download it but it's starts way before the tracking is that you need to define what actually data means for specific business and then is that business is actually owning and leveraging data Simple example for e-commerce where is the record of the sale in chified for example but then who manages that this record is up and with all the data and then being properly sent back to all the platforms that we reporting and running and this starts the whole set of questions. One who captures the data, who owns the data, but who manages how the data is being routed and how the data has been leveraged across all other platforms and [clears throat] tracking is basically just part of it because tracking the most basic thing is the ability to capture and store this data.

23:22Let's track what happens regressions when comes attribution when comes routing this data back to platform then comes leveraging whether it's reports dashboards automation tools everything else so I think this hot topic of tracking will be solved basically by two either people just jumping on the tools without understanding why they do it and then alleg tools will do the job of explaining them or they will build it up from the fundamental approach. Okay, in my business this is the data I need to track. Leverage what tools I will use to capture normalized process the data I want to track and all the difference with that like state truck they all but they address different types different types of business problems under the same label So get down to find the data and how you use tracking as a tool comes after that. Yeah, overall I'm a quick but our initial recommendation to agencies always gather all data you have on

24:51Website and store on your private datab and [clears throat] then you will think what exactly you will send to which platform how and so my recommendation gather everything from everybody what you can and then see this First recommendation on the day zero we give advice to everybody. This allows you later optimize your tracking and later send data that you previously met whatever you want because if we start project they always oh what I should track which you have what go blah but don't think just track everything just g data now we have this ID whatever they do all the things for you don't need to think anymore actually just grab all poss possible data then decide and then send to all platforms, Google, TikTok they already better know how to optimize actually and in one two years they training models even work even better what we miss now or what like not the Google they miss data [clears throat] about your customers that's it they don't care about anything else so just start ging data store like in your private storage not

26:17Compa whatever other rules very compressive other countries so this is I think the most important advice that we know really good if you want to go yeah really briefly I think that's a really good piece of advice when you're dealing with [snorts] performance side and the operational side and tools they will function best when they are fed relevant meaningful data. On the, on the topic of the scaling agencies, my favorite clients are the ones that are on a personal level, not that granular about reporting because they understand that sometimes if you focus too much on reporting from the bank perspective, you end up managing things for the sake of the report rather than the actual health of the account. So that's where people end up physically measuring column inches of PR coverage and this type of thing and they say well we think this has an assisted value of X and it's a madeup financial value that to me sounds like a tough client and when we're talking about scaling agencies my favorite clients [clears throat] are the ones I'm not so bothered with that type of stuff but they're actually I hate this word there's a holistic element to this where sales should be working together and sometimes the more time that you grasp focus on the reporting, the more you're distracted from actually doing stuff. So obviously

27:46That should mean you let your agency off the hook, but there's definitely ways to make the agency relationship better when you're focusing on outcomes, not the granularity of I think tools and platforms because they're not going to have agency take you away from work. That's really good. And talking about scaling agencies,

29:14Anyone here know like a work chart, traditional work chart like an octopus, a tree, with jobs and roles and positions. To me, it's amazing that there's there are still clients today that are against agencies. I would personally if I were if I owned another e-commerce business right now the first thing I would ask the agency that I wanted to hire would be how are you using AI how well are you using it find that and there's this new concept right now used to have human resources HR but now you're starting to have AI resources AI and that is actually changing organizational charts themselves and creating relationships within humans and agents defining those relationships. Curious to see we're going to start talking about like resource problems what problems between that work hopefully not too [clears throat] many but you never know. So what is the or chart going to look like in 2028? It used to be a permit few senior strategists and then people implementing army of juniors and experienced people.

30:40Now this question is for [clears throat] Alex and for both Alex Melen and Alex Morat. First of all, Alex, how is SmartSites new structuring or structuring your work chart and how is that changing [clears throat] from like 2020? Have there been any changes in the last five years? And what changes do you expect to make by 2030? And for Alex Morat, you have a much leaner operation which is much easier for you to take on AI and adjust because you don't need to change the way 400 people are working. So from your point of view, how is this AI first agency model going looking like next year? Not in 2030, but next year. I'll go. [clears throat and cough] it hasn't really changed for us honestly. And I know there's a lot of smaller agencies that it has changed like one person shops, two person companies. I think that they're it's a little different for us. Hasn't really changed. We're using AI to empower our employees at every single level to be more efficient and more effective. That's literally what it's doing. And to me, it's a little bit like the '9s revolution from typewriters to computers, There's a lot of people that use typewriters to do everything. They would anytime you made a mistake, you would have to get the

32:04White out and print it and start retyping it. And then people moved to PCs and became more efficient. And there's a lot of people that refused to move. There's literally people quit their jobs. I'm not using a computer ever. There's entire industries created to train companies to use computers. IBM got very big in the '90s, not on making computers, but on training people to use computers, And that's a part of their business that still left. They sold off the PC making to Lenovo. They're literally consultants. That's the way I see it. I see the implementation of AI making everyone in my company more efficient. It's on us at the leadership level to create the systems, to train people on the systems, make sure they use it. But for us, it's not changing the work chart. It's making everyone more effective and more efficient across the board and allows us to deliver better results. That's the way I see it. In the future, it might be a little different, five 10 years down the road maybe some positions get fully replaced by AI but for now the move for us is to make [clears throat] everyone more efficient and more effective I don't know I might be the wrong person I have no interest in scaling I don't know why I'm in this panel but I don't really believe that capacity but I mean like I said earlier I think AI would have a huge part in there will be more agents like we're using a couple of agents now in

33:29The agency. I think next year we probably have quit agents using and they are they're super good at what they like using [clears throat] it a lot now for SEO and Google and they're doing it way more better results than some of the best ones in Sweden right now. So it's working very well and probably going to continue to do that. I think I try to use AI and empower my employees to have a better lifestyle so they don't have to work that many hours and enjoy work more and have more fun do the things that they enjoy to do. And not every task in when you're working is something you like to do. Some people love to do research but they to write. They use AI for writing and then they do research themselves. So I think in the future it's going to be harder and harder to get a get a job. And I think more, business owners should focus on making sure that their employees are enjoying their job, and not burning them out or stuff like that because we are not on this earth work. We're here to enjoy life and have fun. And that is work as well. But I think agencies is that business that burns out

34:52The most people in the world and it's which is crazy because it's all the business that always has to justify their existence. So I think we are in a transformative era and I'm looking forward pretty good. Anyone else want to question So I think what we see and what we do as a company as other business is that for us there are two types of work which is processing and cognitive and processing is where agents well can do work fast and better than cognitive is very questionable and so what we do as a company basically learning how to switch from just using pages for prompting to actually have AI as part of workflows. That means for us defining the workflows and then that workflow is defining the processing part of the work and the co part of work and then actually building the agent that you first can do the processing part then they can initiate the processing part. So like actually will give the results and tells maybe they can do the whole

36:15Part of the work. So it's like empowering people to do better job but for the last three years we're doing experiments. Hey everybody just do a job better and now we're switching to our structured process. So this is the tools we're using. This is the types of expertise with the tools [clears throat] like you do intentional prompting. You connect your LLMs to data sources. You actually create workflows. You actually have agents. Then we for define people who are in the company of teams at different stages like for example me I do intentional front end. Our developers they already have the agent that drive feature from start to finish. So we then make the transition of everybody else in becomes like a structured process. So that I assume by the end of the year everybody will be on the stage between like prompting with data and workflows. Somebody will be actual managing agency. Yeah, very quickly. I think one of the things yourself as an agency is conflating the type of things that people want to use AI for and what they need to use AI for because it's very convenient if there something people find quite tedious but actually that task really does benefit from human oversight and I'm usually see

37:43Like mundane things like really intense QA ballistic checks and sometimes like brand guidelines change the voice. Yes, you can pray in the eyes to do this, but you might this might be what the client is paying you for to like really make sure that you're getting this right. I'm paying for a human to not really enjoy this job and make sure that it's right. I think that's where, again, we were talking about scaling agencies. If there's a mismatch between what people clients want from agencies in terms of, yeah, you do you do need to suck up some mundane stuff because that's why you're doing it and not me. I think that's where, AI can be assistive, but I think there can be a temptation to use AI for the products that people prefer not to do. And I think that's where we need to get back into thinking what are people paying us for? What does where do you need human attention that humanists particularly love? I saw you. Yeah, because I don't agree like I don't think any company paid you to do hard work just to do it. They pay you for results. And the result doesn't matter if you did it or you employ someone to do it or whatever. And I think you're thinking about AI from its current existence and not from like we're talking about the future.

39:07And AI would definitely be sometimes better than any human to make sure quality check we're following the regulations and everything like that. I don't see why a human would do that better at all to be honest. So, while I agree that sometimes you have to do mundane things, that's not what people pay for. This whole agency thing would like paint by the hour and then we add hours and pretend things longer and stuff like that. They pay for results. It doesn't matter two minutes or it took you 10 hours. So yeah, you want some mic back? A really quick comments. So I don't want to miss I don't think like they're paying us to punish us. I don't think you don't want to like measure how many liters of sweat we go through. But I do think there's a certain thing even in the far future I think there'll be certain elements where they're paying the money because you want that up to the minute human understanding and nuance where no matter what the data sources like what is drawing upon there'll be nuance and personal preferences and relationship based stuff and again that comes back to scale agency you don't necessarily want talking to the void you want actual human beings you enjoy working with you getting back to your point around the purpose of living and working collaboration I think that's where that type of human understanding and reading between the lines and yes maybe I will get better at certain aspects of that but I think there's certain aspects

40:35Are really going to be persistent for quite a long time and I just very finely as a as an agency that translation there are so many hilarious accurate but obscene machine translations going on around it. So there's lots of things where human UIs where AI are not trained on something and there isn't body to train on but that intervention is around it's funny it was actually very interesting to be honest the reason I put this question here is because I'm actually working on redesigning our chart for us AI hasn't cut jobs it basically doubled our size from 30 close to 35 people now the last two years. So I'm not into that AI is taking our jobs model. More like what Alex was saying that AI is able to allow us allow our teams to work smarter not harder work more creative to have more passion back into the agency work that has turned into more of a grind agencies or people in the room that own one or people work with one have one of the highest turnover rates of resources is

42:01Tory but I'm really thinking that is about to change that is within an agency also get something that you don't get anywhere else which is variety diversity is the option to learn like you can learn in one agency in one year more than you learn in 20 years working just one so I think AI is going to make working in much more interesting couple of years. Yeah. One small thing I think redefine redefining the roles, So people need to be more go back to traditional marketing. So because we are we become crazy about technical marketer. I read that term. I love that. Harvard business review was many years ago. Marketers become technical marketers. But now with the AI is doing some technical stuff but we need to be again creative because if everyone doing the same thing they all have access everyone using the same even the big giants using OpenAI rather than platform so we are using so then we need to define the roles in the organization to give that job to AI but they need to find a little more creative and think about maybe speak the customers understand what they

43:27Really they needs and do some workshop with customers to understand much better they what they need [clears throat] how can I help them so I think this would change and also one small thing from one previous question so in my second agency I'm mostly hired new graduates and also because I'm lecturing I'm getting people from first grade second grade so why I'm not choosing the ones who in the industry like four years because yeah definitely they're empty brain so that's I think applies today because if you learn something from someone continue that you cannot change your mind but you have a fresh mind who can speak learn newly so be more creative I think thank you so it's much easier to when it comes to the AI part understanding how to use AI tools. Much easier to get like interns or juniors that know how to use these [snorts] tools and don't know marketing and have them apply those concepts over to marketing. And I can definitely attest to that. I've seen this happen. I was amazed at one person that started out as junior and I'm already like mind blown. I think the small answers here is I think the in

44:52This world important thing is how do you learn how do you adapt so for example one thing I did a lot for the new graduate so they come and they have nothing about don't know nothing about a marketing is whatever I'm giving let's say 100 young people applying so I gave them a case that they know okay so it's like a creating campaign doing some suggestion whatever so and half of it saying hey I don't know that so they eliminate the others they discover in just two days they come back with a saying oh this is my job this is my career I love that I'm not looking the right role there so that's why actually fresh minds quickly adapt and learn things quickly I think you have to pour that passion into the traditional marketing as well and help them to find this find this part. Again, before I ask the final question, we basically end the panel. I wanted to see if there's any question the room anyone raise your hand. I'll come here.

46:11So final question daily agencies in 2020 what's one thing that you would do and one thing that you wouldn't do just 10 20 second answer and who wants to start them I going to point fingers since I don't care about scaling I can stop [laughter] [clears throat] if you want to keep your clients now and in the future I think the agency that hosts the best parties for their clients are the ones they're going to keep most because the longer you go the more like you said everyone has access to the same things we are seeing that more and more interesting the results it's not that big of a difference and CMOS just like the public and so if you host good things like that they would probably stay with you brilliant parties equals agencies I'll go I think for us what we're seeing if I had to give one tip to anyone out there trying to scale their agencies I think inst invest in your people. I think a lot of agency owners forget that they don't make anything. You don't produce a widget. You don't build a car. Your product is literally your employees doing a service for your clients. So, I think investing in your people and that means training them, empowering them. For us specifically, we give a $1,500 travel credit every year to every employee to travel somewhere and learn something, You want to invest in your people because ultimately that's your product.

47:35So, that would be that would be mine. I couldn't agree more. We've got loads of like initiatives that we're really trying to make sure that there is that freedom and pleasure in work but I think it also does reflect on how people do scale things up and that does come from sity of opinions and different perspectives. I'm really conscious is there more people called Alex on this panel than there are women. That's pretty striking. So this is another thing to think about when you're scaling an agency where does the knowledge coming from? More perspectives, how does that then tie into plans and all this type of stuff? No. Just to complement everything you said because I agree and want to add what you can do also which work fast and practical and I test this from experience all the notions but the SAS company research what is AI manifesto and then write one for your company. This may be an eye openening experience. That's really good. Okay. Manifesto, parties, invest in your people. Anyone else want to add anything? No. Perfect. Great panel. Thank you so much for sharing all of these insights for everyone in the room. Thank you so much for attending and have a wonderful rest of the conference.