History Is Repeating Itself. Are You Paying Attention?

In 2011, Modernista, a world-class 8-figure advertising agency with Fortune 500 clients, died.

They weren’t small, sloppy, or struggling to land clients.

They were elite.

By early-2000s standards, they had won.

• Iconic brands like automotive giants and global consumer names
  

• Roughly 50 full-time U.S. employees
  

• Award-winning creative across TV, print, and billboards

From the outside, it was the ‘American Dream’ agency.

And then it was gone.

Not because the work wasn’t good, or because clients stopped spending, or even because demand dried up.

They died for a much simpler reason:

They ignored a technology shift.

As digital and social media began siphoning ad budgets away from traditional channels, they stayed anchored to what had always worked.

They waited, watched, and told themselves they’d adapt once things stabilized.

By the time they decided to move, the market had already moved on without them.

By 2011, the doors were closed.

And here’s the important part:

They weren’t the exception.

This exact pattern wiped out millions of agencies and media businesses:

• Print-first shops
  

• TV-only agencies
  

• Billboard firms
  

• Newspaper empires

Every time, the same sequence played out:

Success → comfort → denial → extinction

Why This Story Is Blowing My Mind

I’m seeing the exact same behavior again right now, just with custom AI workflows instead of digital media.

Every week, I hear some version of this:

• “I’m waiting to see how things unfold.”
  

• “There’s too much changing to commit to a strategy.”
  

• “We use GPT and a few AI tools already.”
  

• “I don’t want to hard-code anything because it’ll change again.”

I get the instinct. It feels prudent.

But history is crystal clear on this point:

Waiting is the losing strategy.

The agencies that disappeared in the 2000s weren’t stupid. They were cautious. They weren’t lazy–in fact, they were successful. They just waited one cycle too long.

And the same thing will happen to agencies that treat custom AI development as something to “monitor” instead of something to own.

If your agency’s current “AI strategy” looks like this:

• A few off-the-shelf tools
  

• Some prompts saved in Notion
  

• No owned data pipelines
  

• No custom AI workflows embedded into ops
  

• No internal leverage created

You’re not adapting, you’re spectating.

If you want to talk through what an owned, future-proof AI workflow actually looks like inside an agency, let’s chat. This is exactly what I help founders map out before the window closes.

The Brutal Truth Most Agencies Avoid

Markets don’t care how good you were.
They don’t care how long you’ve been around.
They don’t care how many awards you won.

They reward the businesses that rebuild themselves before they’re forced to.

The agencies that win the next decade won’t be the ones with the best prompts.

They’ll be the ones who:

• Build custom AI workflows into delivery
  

• Own their data instead of renting it
  

• Replace fragile human bottlenecks with reliable systems
  

• Use AI to expand capacity, margin, and decision-making speed

Everyone else will disappear the same way the last generation did:

Quietly at first. Then all at once.

History doesn’t repeat because people are stupid. It repeats because people are comfortable.

Three Things You Can Do Today to Start Adapting

1. Identify one mission-critical workflow that breaks when a human makes a mistake. Invoicing, reporting, QA, client updates, etc. Start where failure is expensive.
   

2. Ask yourself: “Do we own this system, or are we renting it?” If the answer is “renting,” you’re exposed to platform risk and margin compression.
   

3. Design for permanence, not novelty. Custom AI workflows don’t need to be flashy;  they need to be reliable, documented, and embedded into operations.

Final Thought

The agencies that ignored digital didn’t think they were making a mistake. They thought they were being smart by waiting.

Don’t be remembered as someone who saw the shift and hesitated.

If you want help building custom AI infrastructure that your agency actually owns, let’s talk.

👉 Book a strategy call here, and let’s make sure history doesn’t repeat itself with your business.

Want us to run a diagnostics on which of the following systems you need the most help with and put together an easy-to-implement action plan to improve them? So you can finally escape agency prison and build your dream agency? Book a demo here!

Whatever you do, do not click this; it’s a trap to catch bot clicks here.