The Agency Model Is Resetting - why I am hiring more client side leaders

Phil Clark. Former Global Director of Digital Performance at Canada Goose. He's now my Managing Partner at Rise at Seven.

And he's not alone.

Matt Holmes, the marketing brain behind brands like PrettyLittleThing, British Gas and Emirates, has just joined us too.

This isn't random. It's not me hiring impressive CVs because it looks good on a press release. It's the fourth major strategic shift I've been quietly building toward, and honestly, it's the one I'm most excited about. Because it changes the fundamental shape of what an agency should actually look like.

This isn’t random hiring. It’s deliberate.

It’s part of the fourth major strategic shift I’ve been building behind the scenes - and it changes the shape of what an agency should look like.

Here's what I've been noticing

There's a conversation happening at board level and it's been getting louder. Senior marketers are starting to say out loud what they've been thinking for years: that agencies staffed almost entirely with "career agency people" struggle to truly operate at their level. They're great at delivery. But do they understand the pressure of a quarterly review? The politics of getting sign-off on a budget? What it actually feels like when performance targets are your problem to carry?

I think they're right.

And I say that as someone who has spent their entire career agency side. Stickyeyes. Branded3. And now here, building Rise at Seven from the ground up. I'm not sitting on some high horse here, I know my own gaps. But that's exactly the point. Knowing where your gaps are is how you close them.

If agencies want to survive the next decade, and I mean genuinely survive, not just pivot the website copy and hope for the best, we need to stop behaving like service providers and start behaving like embedded strategic partners. People who've lived the consequences of strategy, not just delivered it and sent the invoice.

What AI is actually doing to agency models

Right. Let's talk about the elephant in the room.

Job ads across agencies are down 41%. More than half of UK agencies didn't hire a single graduate in 2025. And everyone's panicking about AI taking jobs, which, fine, it's not an unreasonable panic. But I think most people are panicking about the wrong thing.

AI can draft copy. It can iterate designs. It can synthesise research, build reports, automate production workflows. Things junior teams were historically hired for, a significant chunk of that can now be automated faster and cheaper than before.

But that's not the threat. That was never the threat.

The threat is commoditised execution. If your agency's value is built on volume of output, on doing more, that model is in trouble. It was probably already in trouble before AI turned up.

The future agency doesn't win by doing more. It wins by thinking better.

That's the shift. And it's why the people I'm bringing into Rise right now look very different to the hires I've made before.

Read my blog post about the internet being flooded with USELESS content and what actually marketing directors should care about

So. Matt Holmes.

I'm genuinely proud of this one.

Matt has spent over a decade in senior brand-side roles. PrettyLittleThing, British Gas, Card Factory, Thomas Cook, Emirates. He's managed full multi-channel marketing ecosystems under real commercial pressure. He's presented to boards and had to justify marketing investment in actual business terms. Not "here's our DA score" terms. Real terms.

And here's the bit I love most about this hire.

He's hired Rise at Seven as his agency. More than once.

At BrightonSEO with Matt, Rise at Seven team and RedBull team. 

He knows what we do and how we do it. He's seen it from the other side of the table. And he still chose to come in. That says something. To me it says everything, honestly.

His job isn't to change who we are. Rise was built on executional brilliance, 80+ awards, campaigns the industry copies a couple of years later, and that's not going anywhere. Matt's role is to make sure all of that brilliance is consistently connected to commercial strategy. That the creativity is powered by insight. That the insight translates into growth.

Read Matts words about why he's gone from some of the biggest brands in the world to joining Rise at Seven

What I wrote down in my iPhone notes late last year

I know, very professional. But honestly, this is how I think. I'll be somewhere, a thought will land, and I'll dump it in my notes before it disappears.

Late last year I wrote down three words. The three things I think the best marketing agencies of the future will have non-negotiably baked into everything they do.

Insight. Not just data, context. Human behaviour. Understanding why people do what they do, not just that they do it. At Rise, this is search intent. What people are typing into Google, TikTok, Amazon, ChatGPT every day, millions of times. That's unfiltered human truth. And it sits at the heart of everything we build.

Empathy. Knowing what people actually care about. Why they'd choose one brand over another. When to jump on a cultural moment and when to lead one yourself. It's the difference between content that lands and content that just disappears.

Strategy. Where to invest. Where to cut. How marketing decisions translate into measurable business growth. And, critically, how to connect owned, earned, paid and shared media into one coherent system that drives both demand and discovery. Not four separate briefs to four separate agencies. One system.

Those three things. That's what I'm building toward.

The four shifts, since you're probably wondering how we got here

This hire isn't the start of something. It's the fourth move in a sequence I've been running for the past year or so.

First, we repositioned. We stopped calling ourselves a creative SEO agency and defined ourselves as a search-first content marketing partner. Because search isn't a channel anymore. It's a behaviour. And content marketing sits at the centre of modern growth, connecting channels instead of competing within them.

Full post on LinkedIn

Second, we moved from service-led to outcome-led. We stopped leading with SEO, PR, and content as outputs. We started leading with what we actually build: category leaders. That's not marketing fluff, it's a value positioning shift. What do clients get from working with us? That.

Third, I expanded the arena. I reframed search from Google-only to behaviour-driven discovery. TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, Pinterest, AI search, TikTok Shop. We redefined the playing field we're operating in. Because consumers don't think in channels. They think in questions, curiosity, problems, inspiration. And they're finding answers everywhere.

Fourth is a new look. A rebrand. 

and fifth, is this. The leadership shift. Bringing in people who've sat in the client chair.

And here's what's actually happening as a result

In under 12 months, the percentage of our clients buying multi-channel strategy from us has grown from 38% to over 70%. Red Bull and Birkenstock have joined the portfolio. We've expanded into the US and hit $3m in revenue there.

That's not an upsell. That's a mindset shift, from brands and from us.

Brands are asking for integrated thinking, not siloed delivery. And the agencies that thrive in that environment won't be the busiest ones. They'll be the ones whose people are genuinely indispensable.

That's the model I'm building.

Rise started as an executional powerhouse. We're evolving into something bigger, a strategic, multi-channel growth partner built around human intent, led by people who've actually sat in the room where the hard decisions get made.

And honestly? I think we're just getting started.

Behind the scenes