Stagwell: AI and the Future of Marketing

In early 2025, Mark Penn, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Stagwell, a global marketing company with a network of over 70+ agencies that served over 4000 blue-chip customers across 40 countries, was looking at ways that marketers should navigate the disruption emanating from technological advances, in particular, the advent of artificial intelligence. AI technology was enabling marketers to reach consumers through new, highly targeted and personalized experiences. Marketing agencies were adding tech-enabled creative tools to their toolkit to meet changing client demands. As the kind of infrastructure and skills needed was changing fast, agencies were undertaking significant internal digital transformation and change management. The nature and role of creativity in advertising and marketing was undergoing transformation. Stagwell’s network of agencies were rapidly incorporating AI into their activities. Stagwell Marketing Cloud, new company’s SaaS platform was helping the business build a new model of service delivery to its clients. An agentic AI framework, combined with AI-driven functionalities in market research, audience insight generation, creative output generation, optimization, and brand tracking could significantly augment the capabilities of human teams. How could SMC create a more powerful agency model where AI and human expertise worked together? Could there be a fully autonomous advertising agency that could manage the end-to-end of a campaign? Stagwell needed to make the right strategic investments to ensure it kept abreast of global technological developments and ensure that the quality of creative output moved in lock-step alongside technology adoption.