Following on from my previous post: Anthropic just proved that in a category built on infrastructure, the brand that wins is the one with a point of view, not the biggest spec sheet. Mother London's Cannes Grand Prix for Claude was built entirely on a values decision, not a technical one.
That raises a question closer to home: who in our industry is actually positioned to sell AI that way?
My instinct says creative agencies, not media agencies. And I know that sounds backwards, because it's media that has moved fastest on AI. Programmatic, automation, optimisation — media agencies have built their entire operating model around adopting new technology as fast as possible. They've been "AI-first" in practice for years, often before anyone called it that.
But moving fastest on the technology isn't the same as having something distinctive to say about it.
Media has largely sold itself on efficiency, scale and performance, which, fairly or not, starts to sound like selling AI itself: infrastructure, a utility, a resource. Useful, necessary, and not very differentiating — because everyone is racing to the same capability.
Creative agencies have historically been slower, more sceptical, sometimes openly reluctant about AI. But that caution comes from decades spent asking "what do we believe, and what do we stand for" before "what can this do." That's not a coincidence. Creative agencies have simply had more practice building an identity around values rather than capability, because craft and point of view were the product.
Which means the caution may turn into a second-mover advantage. Creative agencies that take the time to build genuine in-house AI expertise — not just a tool bolted on top, but real fluency — will arrive at the AI conversation able to do something media never had to learn: sell a point of view, not just a capability.
To be clear, this isn't a knock on media. It's an observation about which starting position translates better into the Anthropic playbook. Media has the speed. Creative may have the point of view. In a market where the underlying models are converging fast, that point of view is what will differentiate, and sell.
The third possibility
There's a third possibility worth naming. Agencies that have actually integrated creative and media. To be clear, that means those that have not just merged the org chart, but built teams where the two disciplines work together day to day. They inherit the technical fluency media spent the last decade building, and if the integration is real, they also inherit some of the soul creative spent decades building before that.
Most agencies that call themselves integrated still run creative and media as separate operations under one roof, so this group is smaller than the industry's messaging suggests. But the ones where it's genuine have a case no single-discipline agency can make: technical credibility and soul, together.
That combination is closer to what Anthropic have been using to grow their share. Speed plus values. Infrastructure plus identity. Both at once.
Which agencies do you think are nailing it?