The agency fee is about to become ad spend

The question: What happens to agencies when advertisers can build campaigns just by describing them to the ad platform?

A while ago I was talking to an SEO from Andalusia. One of the best in Spain. I asked him how AI had changed his business. Were his clients doing SEO themselves now? Was he losing work?

His answer floored me:

"Since AI arrived, I charge more and I work more. Not because AI does my job. Because whoever comes to me has already tried fifty prompts and it didn't work. I fix it. And I can't charge AI prices for that."

That's going to happen to all of us. Human work is becoming the premium option. It will be paid as such, and in some cases it will have a better return than the AI. Not in all of them.

So what does that mean for marketing? Here's what happened when I went back to running ads.

I asked Claude before I asked an agency

I hadn't touched an ad account in years. Facebook Ads had become Meta Ads; AdWords had become Google Ads. I can still find my way around Google Ads. Meta's interface, honestly, lost me.

So after creating my first campaign by hand, the first thing I did was ask Claude whether Meta had an official MCP: a connector that lets an AI assistant work directly inside the ad account.

It does.

Every campaign after that, I built by describing it. One prompt, a few rounds of edits until it was exactly what I wanted, a final review, publish. I didn't open the ads manager again.

The new path for a new advertiser

Now picture a business advertising for the first time:

1. It creates its ad accounts.
2. It connects them to an AI assistant through the platform's MCP.
3. It gives the assistant context: landing pages, prices, products, competitors, value proposition, business plan, analytics.
4. It describes the campaign it needs, in plain language.
5. It reviews and publishes.

Nobody in that flow charged a fee.