One in Five Agencies Will Be Squeezed Out Next Year. Better Tech Won't Save Them.

Key takeaways

• Forrester predicts 20% of the world’s estimated 50,000 independent agencies will be acquired, downsized, or closed in 2027.
• The agencies that win won’t be the ones with the best-connected tech. They’ll be the ones connecting marketing to the rest of the business.
• When AI makes execution cheap, the costliest mistake is a bad brief.

Forrester’s 2027 Marketing Agency Predictions report comes with a number built for headlines: one in five independent agencies will be acquired, downsized, or closed in 2027. In Forrester’s telling, the market splits between agencies that execute and agencies that orchestrate.

I agree with the premise. Agencies that exist to take orders and produce assets are running out of road. When AI makes content faster and cheaper, and brands are pulling production in-house, an agency whose value is volume has a problem. Production still matters. It just won’t keep an agency alive on its own.

So if orchestration is what separates the agencies that win from the ones that don’t, it’s worth being clear about what it means. Forrester describes it as coordinating people, data, technology, and organizational change to deliver impact a CFO would recognize. That’s the right direction. But in practice, orchestration can easily shrink down to wiring together tech, data, and AI agents. That’s plumbing. It’s necessary, it’s getting cheaper every quarter, and it’s not what a CEO worries about. Real orchestration starts with the growth decisions the business is trying to make.

What a CEO worries about is growth they can’t find. In Lūquire’s C-Suite Growth Friction Study, a 2026 survey of 150 C-suite leaders at middle-market companies, 59% said they’re unclear where their untapped growth is. These aren’t leaders short on tools or dashboards. They’re short on someone who connects what the business needs to what marketing does about it.

Orchestration that finds the growth

Every agency calls itself a growth partner. Few can show what that means in practice. For growth-minded companies, orchestration should mean three things.

It should mean developing models and mining data to decide which customers to focus on, where to reach them, and which products or offerings to lead with across every marketing activity. That’s not a media plan. It’s a capital allocation decision, and it deserves that level of rigor.

It should mean helping to create alignment in how marketing works with operations, technology, finance, and the rest of the business, not just how marketing’s own channels talk to each other. Growth decisions don’t happen inside the marketing department. Pricing, product mix, which markets to prioritize: these calls get made across the C-suite, often without anyone in the room who understands the customer as well as marketing should.

And yes, it should mean breakthrough creative ideas. But it should also mean working with a client’s other partners, especially those shaping the earned narrative that AI tools increasingly draw from, so the brand shows up consistently across every channel, and every dollar works harder because it’s part of one compelling idea rather than ten disconnected ones.

AI raises the cost of a bad brief

This is where AI changes the math, in a direction most people miss. When execution is cheap, a wrong decision gets executed faster and at greater scale. And if Forrester is right that AI will soon cost more than the talent it was meant to replace, efficiency isn’t even a lasting advantage. If it isn’t cheap, it can’t be a moat. The real advantage moves upstream, to getting the decision right before anything gets made.

None of this depends on size. A 60-person shop can work upstream of the CEO’s agenda, and a 4,000-person network can be a very efficient brief-taker. The split Forrester describes is real. It just runs between agencies that orchestrate the business and agencies that orchestrate the tech stack.

So for CEOs and CMOs choosing an agency partner, the question isn’t how much AI an agency uses. It’s whether that agency can sit with your CFO and your head of operations and help decide where growth will come from, then make sure every channel acts on that decision.

Forrester’s 20% may well be right. I’d bet the agencies still standing won’t be the ones with the best-connected tools. They’ll be the ones connecting marketing to the rest of the business.