It’s not about timing the feed. It’s about time in the feed

Lately, I’ve realised this exact financial principle has found its way into the advertising world. For decades, we operated on a 'timing' model. Brands would hoard their budgets, launch a massive quarterly campaign spike, and pray they hit the cultural zeitgeist perfectly.

But notice where our audiences actually live day to day. They’re scrolling Instagram, watching YouTube, and listening to Spotify. These platforms are governed by algorithmic feeds that reward novelty and continuous, hyper-localised content. If your brand drops out of the feed for even a week, your visibility gets penalised by the algorithm, and your customer acquisition cost (CAC) goes through the roof.

To build real, compounding brand equity today, you need constant time in the market. It’s no longer merely about being 'always on' for hygiene; it’s about being 'always in' for relevance. The pressure is to constantly be part of the conversation, which means showing up in reviews, trends, feeds, threads, Discords, and group chats.

Here’s the paradox, though: just as brands need an unprecedented volume and velocity of content to stay visible, procurement departments are aggressively killing off the traditional agency retainer in favour of project-based work.

According to data from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the migration from predictable retainers to cutthroat, project-by-project contracts has accelerated over the last three years. This leaves agencies scrambling to maximise profits on isolated projects, often running heavy losses on some just to keep the lights on.

By 2027, this friction will have completely broken the traditional agency model, fracturing our industry into a two-tier landscape:

• The mega tier: A consolidated duopoly of global agencies operating as automated marketing utilities. They use generative tech to scale production and make regional adaptation much cheaper. Holding companies like WPP and Omnicom are fully invested in this direction.

• The agile tier: Nimble independent agencies and highly specialised boutique studios driving high-margin cultural strategy and craft. Forge by Brave is our play in this direction.

Whether you are steering a multinational brand, running an independent agency, or growing a local business, the old playbook is outdated. Let’s break down exactly what we’re walking into from three distinct perspectives.

1. For the multinational CMO: Stop buying headcount, start buying infrastructure

If you’re a CMO managing a brand across multiple borders, your biggest headache in 2027 isn't going to be finding a 'big creative idea'. It’s going to be the exhausting operational nightmare of global distribution and local adaptation. Managing 40 different local boutique agencies just to keep your social feeds alive across different territories is an overwhelming balancing act.

How to start planning:

• Look for complexity reduction: Stop evaluating agency pitches based on how many creative directors they have or the trophies on their shelves. Evaluate their creative system. You need a partner whose operating system can construct an evidence-based campaign concept and swiftly spin out thousands of brand-aligned, localised variants across dozens of markets simultaneously.

• Balance efficiency: Your main job is to drive down customer acquisition cost (CAC) while expanding customer lifetime value (CLV). Venture capital benchmarks recommend that a healthy business requires a CLV: CAC ratio of at least 3:1. To hit that sweet spot, you can't afford to pay legacy production costs for every single asset. Lean into automated content pipelines, continuous measurement, and real-time optimisation. Your audience and competitors are not waiting for your big brand campaign later in the year; buyers make purchases when they are ready, and you need to be top of mind at that exact moment.

• Build a performance retainer: Move away from constant project-based hustling, as it destroys brand continuity. Instead, negotiate a better framework with your agency. In an age of accurate measurement and advanced attribution modelling, brands and agencies can easily align on a hybrid commercial model. Push for a predictable base fee that covers the baseline cost of a global distribution infrastructure, paired with a variable performance kicker tied directly to your customer acquisition targets. If you hit your CLV: CAC targets, the agency shares in the upside.

2. For the independent agency CEO: Don’t get commoditised

If your agency’s business model still relies on charging markups for social media calendars, basic asset versioning, or linear execution, your runway ends very soon. The argument for specialised creative talent and billable hours is a losing one when brands are convinced that AI can do the job in a fraction of the time.

As we’ve seen with WPP’s recent corporate restructuring, global holding companies are aggressively consolidating their legacy production hubs into centralised, AI-driven engines to drive asset costs to the floor. It’s unsustainable to compete directly at that scale.

But this consolidation creates a massive, high-margin playground for independents who know how to pivot.

How to compete:

• Sell 'ready-to-go' proactive ideas: The global automated networks will be entirely focused on optimising what is already in the market to protect margins. But where will truly original ideas come from? The opportunity to sell original ideas (not just as static presentation decks, but as assets that are 90% ready to deploy) is greater today than ever. Your value lies in radical creative originalism and hyper-local cultural intelligence. Look through your archive of past ideas that were turned down due to budget constraints, use AI tools to generate the necessary assets in advance, and make the greenlight an easy choice for the client.

• Be the 'intel inside': Don’t waste capital trying to build a massive global distribution network to match the giants. Instead, position your agency as an elite strategic partner for in-house creative studios or businesses without a formal marketing department. By defining a clear operational framework, you can use AI tools to produce standard creative assets and campaigns highly efficiently. Teach them your quality control processes while keeping your team on hand to handle their most complex, high-impact creative tasks.

• Ditch the billable hour: Charging by the hour means you are actively penalising your own efficiency. Shift to value-based pricing or output-linked fees. When you decouple your revenue from human headcount and anchor it to the business value of your intellectual property, your profit margins can actually scale. We know which assets a campaign requires and the value those assets generate when executed well. Let’s align on the actual cost and benefit, not the hours it took to make them.

3. For the SME owner: Ruthless agility

For small- and medium-enterprise owners, especially in a nuanced market like South Africa, the modern landscape can be intimidating. You’re competing on ad platforms where global enterprises are running automated, continuous optimisation loops backed by massive budgets. Trying to outspend them on broad ad auctions is a fast way to burn through your capital.

Your competitive advantage is simple: you don't have corporate bureaucracy. You can move with a level of cultural agility and raw authenticity that a multinational enterprise can't touch.

Your best options for advertising:

• Focus on zero-click content: Major social and search algorithms are increasingly penalising links that take users off-platform. A recent analysis by SparkToro confirms that 'zero-click' searches and native platform content are dominant. Focus your limited resources on creating high-value, native content that builds authority directly within the feed (like short-form educational videos or sharp audio snippets) rather than trying to force users back to a cold website. It’s effortless for the consumer to seek out your product or service once they feel a connection to your brand. They can even make the purchase decision in the feed.

• Leverage localised AI tools: You don't need a multi-million-dollar enterprise system to access automated scale. Use accessible, mid-market AI production platforms to handle your own content versioning. A sharp in-house marketer utilising modern creative tools can produce a variety of assets required to test different audience segments without needing an expensive agency. Have an agile independent agency on hand to arm you with the right tools, processes, and specialised creative assistance when needed. That’s Forge, by the way.

• Own a community: Because acquiring a new customer via paid ads is more expensive than ever, your survival hinges on retention. Double down on creating and managing communities. Modern buyers leverage reviews and recommendations from both humans and AI. Focus on driving genuine advocacy through WhatsApp, Reddit, and e-commerce review platforms. Your ads make your brand recognisable, but your advocates drive the actual conversions. Encourage and incentivise customers to leave reviews so every single customer acquisition becomes long-term, compounded value.

The bottom line

Advertising is no longer a game of buying attention through campaign bursts. It is a discipline of constant algorithmic presence and optimisation. The winners ensure they’re always in the market by staying in the feed and the conversation.