In this op-ed, Bench co-founder Shai Luft explains why an agency’s proximity to a client, which is often overlooked, is vital when helping them navigate innovations and scale at pace.
The Lunar calendar has turned to the Year of the Horse, a symbol of speed, endurance and forward momentum. Those traits feel particularly relevant in marketing right now, because if there’s one thing advertisers and agencies would probably agree on, it’s that the pace of the industry has accelerated dramatically.
New channels appear, platforms evolve, attribution models shift and technologies like AI are reshaping how people discover brands almost overnight. What once felt like multi-year industry shifts now seem to happen in months. Marketing has undoubtedly entered the era of speed.
Part of that acceleration comes from the fragmentation of media itself. Consumers move fluidly between streaming platforms, social feeds, podcasts, outdoor environments and traditional broadcast media. For marketing teams, that means strategies need to adapt faster than ever.
AI is another major driver of that acceleration.
Tools that once required analysts and hours of manual work can now process enormous volumes of data in seconds. Campaign insights that previously might have taken days to uncover, can now appear almost instantly. Optimisation decisions can happen faster, testing cycles are shorter and the gap between insight and action continues to shrink.
In many ways, AI is compressing the time between knowing something and doing something about it, which naturally raises expectations.
Clients now ask their marketing and agency teams to react more quickly, test more ideas and adapt campaigns in shorter cycles than ever before.
Which makes the relationship between advertisers and their agencies even more important.
The strongest partnerships aren’t built around agencies racing ahead with the latest trends while clients try to catch up. In practice, the best work usually happens when agencies run alongside advertisers, understanding the commercial realities of the business and helping teams navigate change at a pace that makes sense.
For me, that’s been one of the biggest lessons from building an agency over the past decade. The best work rarely comes from pushing the newest idea in the room. More often it comes from properly understanding the client’s business and solving the problem that actually needs solving.
Which often means focusing a little less on what’s new, and a little more on what works.
Take AI again as an example. It’s clearly reshaping parts of the media ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean every brand suddenly needs to rebuild its entire media strategy overnight. In practice, the smarter approach is usually to test, learn and adapt at a pace that fits the business.
Helping clients navigate that kind of change requires something that often gets overlooked in conversations about innovation or scale: proximity.
The closer an agency sits to the client’s business, the easier it becomes to make faster and more confident decisions. When communication is direct and decision-making layers are fewer, campaigns can move from ideas to execution far more quickly.
That dynamic is one reason independent agencies often find themselves well suited to the current fast-evolving marketing environment. In many cases, speed of thinking and closeness to the client matter more than the size of the network behind the agency.
From my own experience building an independent agency, independence creates a very different mindset. When you don’t have the safety net of a global network, every client relationship matters deeply. You stay closer to the strategy, closer to performance and closer to outcomes.
One thing you learn fairly quickly when operating an independent agency is that running isn’t something you suddenly start doing when conditions get tough. It’s simply how the business operates every day.
Of course, speed alone has never been the full answer in marketing; endurance matters too.
The brands that grow consistently are usually the ones that balance short-term responsiveness with long-term discipline. They invest in building memory structures with consumers, maintain consistency in their messaging and resist the urge to reinvent themselves every time a new platform emerges.
Perhaps that’s the most useful takeaway from the symbolism of the Year of the Horse. Speed and agility matter, but so too does instinct, stamina and judgement.
In modern marketing, the challenge isn’t simply running faster. It’s knowing when to accelerate, when to stay disciplined and when the moment is right to make a bold move ahead.
