Aqumena Review

Ashoke Agarrwal

August 6, 2026 12:47 pm

Abstract: As Artificial Intelligence steadily hollows out the traditional economics of dvertising, research and consulting, a new kind of organisation could emerge-one that does not merely advise or execute, but assumes responsibility for marketing outcomes.

Ashoke Agarrwal

The traditional marketing-services business is headed for progressively slimmer pickings.

Advertising agencies, consumer-research companies and even management consultancies face a future in which many of the activities for which they have historically charged handsome fees will become faster, cheaper and more widely available. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will accelerate this process dramatically.

Research synthesis, consumer segmentation, concept development, campaign creation, media optimisation, content adaptation, performance reporting and strategic analysis are all becoming increasingly automated. AI will not eliminate human judgment, imagination or intuition. But it will reduce the number of people-and the number of billable hours-required to perform a growing proportion of marketing work. This matters because much of the marketing-services establishment still operates on an essentially industrial-era model: deploy people, charge for their time and protect the resulting margins.

The industry’s initial response has been integration. Advertising groups have added data, technology, commerce, production and consulting. Research companies have added analytics and advisory services. Management consultancies have acquired design, creative, digital and customer-experience businesses. Sir Martin Sorrell’s S4Capital represents one attempt to create a more integrated, digitally native alternative to the traditional advertising holding company. Accenture Song brings together product innovation, experience, marketing, sales and commerce. WPP increasingly presents itself as a technology- and AI-enabled marketing partner rather than simply an owner of agency networks. These are significant moves. But they may not go far enough.

They integrate capabilities while largely preserving the conventional division of responsibility: the service provider supplies advice, ideas, campaigns, technologies or execution; the client remains responsible for making the entire commercial system work.

The next disruption could come from transferring not merely activities but responsibility. I would call the resulting entity a Contract Marketing Services company—or COMS.

Contract Manufacturing offers the conceptual starting point. A brand owner need not own every factory that makes its products. It can specify the product, appoint a specialist manufacturing organisation and hold that organisation accountable for producing the agreed output at the required cost, quality and scale. Could a comparable model emerge in marketing?

The analogy is not exact. Manufacturing generally works towards a reasonably specifiable physical output. Marketing operates within a far less controllable system of consumers, competitors, channels, culture and chance. A marketing partner cannot simply be handed a brand blueprint and asked to manufacture market share.

Nevertheless, the underlying principle is powerful. A company could transfer a defined portion of its marketing and commercialisation function to an external organisation with the capabilities, authority and incentives to operate it as one system.

A COMS company would not sell the client an advertising campaign, a market- research study, a consulting project, a media plan or a salesforce separately. It would accept a larger mandate: develop and launch a product, improve an existing one, enter a market, revive an underperforming brand or deliver profitable growth from a portfolio.

Its defining characteristic would not be the number of services displayed on its website. It would be the responsibility it accepts for the result. A full-service agency supplies numerous activities. An integrated holding company coordinates them. A consultancy recommends what should change. A COMS company would design, build, operate and continually improve the commercial system—and be compensated substantially according to what that system achieves. The agency of the future, in other words, may be paid less for what it produces and more for what its client’s product accomplishes.

At the highest level, COMS would offer four connected services:

• Develop new products.
• Fine-tune existing products.
• determine the optimal marketing mix and budget for a product.
• Actualise that marketing mix within the agreed budget.

Delivering those promises would require six integrated capability engines.

The first would be an intelligence engine comprising proprietary and purchased datasets, consumer research, market sensing, social and behavioural signals, competitive intelligence, experimentation and forecasting. Data would not merely support the business; it could become one of its most valuable assets. Every assignment would add to the organisation’s understanding of categories, consumers, channels, price elasticities and response patterns.

The second would address product and proposition: identifying unmet needs, developing concepts, configuring the market-facing product, refining features, determining packaging, pricing, positioning and portfolio roles. COMS would not necessarily formulate a drug, engineer an automobile or operate a factory. But it would connect consumer demand to product decisions far more directly than most advertising agencies or research companies do today.

The third engine would manage demand creation: brand strategy, creative development, content, media, promotions, influencers, customer relationships and personalisation. Some of this would remain people-driven; a rapidly increasing proportion would be created, adapted and optimised through AI.

The third engine would manage demand creation: brand strategy, creative development, content, media, promotions, influencers, customer relationships and personalisation. Some of this would remain people-driven; a rapidly increasing proportion would be created, adapted and optimised through AI.

The fifth would provide governance and regulatory management: product claims, privacy, consent, brand safety, contractual controls, approval systems and audit trails. As AI creates and distributes vastly more marketing material, governance will cease to be back-office administration and become a core operating capability.

The sixth would deliver measurement and continuous adaptation through marketing- mix modelling, controlled experimentation, incrementality assessment, profit tracking and the continual reallocation of resources. Measurement would no longer arrive as a report explaining what happened last quarter. It would operate as the nervous system through which COMS learns and acts.

The result would be a self-contained marketing entity, connected where necessary to the client’s product development, manufacturing, finance and corporate leadership—but capable of running the commercialisation process from consumer insight to marketplace outcome.

The COMS business model would combine a base fee with a substantial outcome- linked payment. That would immediately distinguish COMS from service businesses that speak the language of partnership while continuing to charge primarily for people and time. But the arrangement would require refinement. A marketing organisation does not control product quality, manufacturing capacity, economic conditions, competitor behaviour, retailer acceptance or sudden changes in regulation. Even within the client organisation, delayed approvals and contradictory decisions can derail performance. If most of the provider’s revenue were placed at risk, COMS might become financially unstable—or optimise what can be measured quickly at the expense of what creates enduring value. A more viable formulation may be for the base fee to cover the essential cost of people, data, technology and operations, while 60–70 per cent of COMS’s potential profit comes from performance.

The contract would need a metric hierarchy agreed in advance. Depending on the mandate, this might include incremental revenue, contribution margin, market share, customer acquisition cost, repeat purchase, distribution gains and measures of brand health.

It would also require an agreed baseline, a counterfactual method and rules governing events outside COMS’s control. Otherwise, every successful year would produce a dispute over who deserved the credit, and every unsuccessful one a quarrel over who caused the failure. At its most ambitious, COMS could put some of its fees or capital at risk in return for revenue share, royalties, equity or an earn-out. It would then begin to resemble a combination of agency, consultancy, commercial operator and investment company. Such a model would be harder to operate—but far more difficult for conventional agencies to imitate.

Who will build the first COMS giant. Each of the major contenders possesses part of the answer. Advertising groups have creative capabilities, media expertise and longstanding client relationships. But most remain culturally organised around campaigns, specialist disciplines and fee income. They seldom possess deep product-development, sales-distribution or commercial-operations capabilities. Consumer-research companies possess data, category knowledge and an understanding of demand. Yet they have historically observed and advised rather than executed and operated. Management consultancies have access to corporate leadership, experience in transformation and formidable technological resources. Their weaknesses are a project-centred culture, high costs and, in many cases, limited experience of continuous brand stewardship. Commerce platforms and technology companies possess data, infrastructure and proximity to transactions. Their difficulty is neutrality. A client may hesitate to transfer its marketing system to an organisation that also owns the marketplace, advertising inventory or technological environment within which decisions are made.

The closest existing precedent may be found in healthcare, where organisations such as IQVIA already combine data, analytics, launch support, regulatory expertise and contract sales. What currently exists within particular industries could foreshadow a much broader contract-commercialisation model.

Incumbents certainly have the resources to construct COMS. Whether they can overcome their internal silos and abandon comfortable compensation structures is another question.

That leaves room for a new generation of AI-native challengers. A startup could build around shared data, automated operations and outcome accountability from its first day. But it would also require patient capital: accepting commercial risk while funding people, technology and execution creates a significant working-capital burden. The eventual COMS leader may therefore be assembled rather than born—a platform with research and data at its centre, creative and commerce capabilities around it, and an operational layer capable of influencing what actually happens in the market.

COMS does not necessarily herald the disappearance of the corporate marketer. It would, however, change the division of labour. The client should continue to own the brand, the product intellectual property, corporate purpose and major capital- allocation decisions. It must also retain ultimate authority over the risks it is unwilling or legally unable to transfer.

COMS would receive an operating mandate within those strategic and financial guardrails. The internal marketing team could consequently become smaller, more senior and more focused on stewardship. Its job would be to define ambition, choose the outcomes that matter, protect the organisation’s long-term interests and govern the COMS relationship.

That relationship would require radical transparency. The client would need visibility into data use, algorithmic decisions, media pricing, commissions, automated content and conflicts of interest. Data and learning generated during the engagement would need clearly defined ownership and portability. Without such safeguards, integration could become opacity and accountability could become dependence.

COMS will therefore not suit every organisation or every brand. Companies with exceptional internal marketing capabilities may continue to regard marketing as too strategically important to externalise. But many organisations do not possess such capabilities. Their real alternative is not a legendary in-house marketing department. It is an overstretched team attempting to coordinate a collection of agencies,researchers, consultants, technology vendors, distributors and platforms. For them, COMS could replace fragmented assistance with coherent responsibility.

COMS is unlikely to begin by replacing the entire global marketing organisation of a Coca-Cola or a Unilever. More plausible early customers include mid-sized companies without comprehensive marketing capabilities; digital-native brands moving into physical retail; private-equity portfolios in need of a shared growth platform; foreign businesses entering an unfamiliar market; large companies launching products outside their core categories; and neglected “tail brands” that cannot command sufficient internal attention. The initial unit of engagement would probably be a product, brand, geography or portfolio rather than the whole corporation.

India could be an especially fertile proving ground. It combines rapid market development with extraordinary diversity, complex distribution, proliferating digital channels and a vast population of ambitious mid-sized businesses. Many possess manufacturing and entrepreneurial strengths but lack an integrated, world-class commercialisation system. A COMS provider could allow such companies to acquire that system contractually rather than spend years assembling it internally.

India also offers substantial pools of technology, analytics, research, creative and commercial talent. Just as the country became an important base for outsourced technology and business processes, it could potentially incubate a new kind of outsourced marketing enterprise—although COMS would need to be far closer to markets and senior decision-making than traditional offshore-services models.

The opportunity, therefore, may be considerably larger than rescuing advertising agencies from shrinking fees. AI will make many individual marketing activities cheap and abundant. But abundance creates a new scarcity: the ability to integrate those activities, make consequential choices and accept responsibility for the outcome.

That is the space COMS could occupy. The advertising groups, research giants and consultancies can all see parts of this future. They are adding data, technology, creativity, commerce and AI to their existing businesses. The unanswered question is whether they can change the proposition at the centre of those businesses-from selling expertise and output to accepting commercial accountability. If they cannot, a new species of enterprise may do it for them.