Exclusive: The future of creative agencies as platforms

A quiet revolution is under way in the world of brand and marketing services. And this time, the shift is not simply about new tools, but about the shape of the agency itself.

"Agencies are trying to reinvent themselves," said Joe Karp, Director of Strategy and Product Marketing for Firefly Enterprise at Adobe. "They want to be technology players as well."

Karp's view, shared during an interview at Adobe Max, is that generative AI is ushering in a new operational model for creating content. Where once agencies centred on designers, art directors and production teams working inside creative suites, the future looks increasingly modular, automated and, importantly, "headless".

The term, borrowed from software architecture, describes experiences and workflows that do not rely on a single interface. Instead, creative work is built through APIs, automated pipelines and configurable workflows that operate independently of any one tool.

"We really want to help an enterprise do all of their content creation and production in one place," he said. Adobe's Firefly Enterprise solutions are its attempt to be that place. These tools allow organisations to generate images and video, automate production tasks and scale content across multiple platforms and formats.

Workflow orchestration magic

Karp outlined how Adobe has been expanding its Firefly offering to serve large­scale content operations. Custom models allow brands or agencies to generate assets in a specific proprietary style. Firefly Foundry then goes deeper, letting companies train models on characters or brand worlds, much like entertainment studios controlling visual identity across franchises.

But the most disruptive change is happening in production – the part of the workflow that has historically required hours of repetitive manual effort. Cutting backgrounds, resizing assets, colour grading and adapting content for multiple channels are now being automated at scale.

"There are these very tedious tasks that are required of artists and designers," he said. "A lot of those things can be automated."

Firefly's API-based services enable enterprises and agencies to create custom pipelines that generate, resize and deploy content for different formats automatically. Instead of producing dozens or hundreds of versions of a single campaign visual, teams can transform one "hero" image into all required variations across social platforms, regions or personalised audience profiles.

This shift, he suggested, means agencies are beginning to look less like studios and more like software companies.

The agency becomes a platform

"Agencies are already creating their own platforms," Karp noted. These proprietary systems increasingly mix and match models: Firefly for brand-safe production-ready output, OpenAI or Google for rapid ideation, and other specialist models depending on the job."

The result is a hybrid structure that looks very different to traditional creative teams.

Karp described how enterprise clients want to "go to one place" to generate content in different forms. But rather than Adobe insisting only its own models be used, the company is positioning itself as the connective infrastructure. "Different models are good for different use cases," he said. Firefly's advantage, he argued, is that it is designed for commercial use and enterprise-grade safety.

As such, Adobe is shifting from being a suite of tools to becoming a platform layer. "We should be the ones that are there to help and support them as they build that vision out," he said.

The rise of the "headless" creative function

Asked what this means for agency structures, Karp pointed to a new hybrid role emerging inside marketing organisations: part creative, part technologist, part workflow strategist. These individuals may not consider themselves designers at all.

This evolution aligns with how major holding companies are repositioning themselves. "If you look at the bigger ones, like Omnicom, Dentsu, WPP, they all have a platform," he said. Their aim is to offer "model choice" while plugging Adobe's creative APIs into orchestration systems that allow clients to assemble and publish content quickly.

In this landscape, the creative task shifts from making assets to shaping systems. Brand identity becomes a set of rules that guide automated workflows. And automation, in turn, becomes the engine of personalisation and localisation.

"Karp highlighted Adobe's work on culturally adaptive creative: "A street scene here in LA is going to look a lot different than a street scene in Prague." In the past, this would require shooting or building different assets for different regions. Now, workflows can swap backdrops, languages and contextual cues automatically, preserving brand consistency while reflecting local texture." This, he said, is where the foundational change lies: "We're allowing AI to take all that grunt work off their shoulders and really accelerate production."

An initial example

Reflecting on real-world adoption, Karp pointed to the example of the in-house agency OLIVER - a division of Brandtech Group that used Adobe's Firefly Services together with its own generative-AI platform, Pencil, to supercharge content creation. The result: creative production "10 times faster" and double the return on ad spend, according to an Adobe blog.

OLIVER used Firefly's Composition Reference capability to generate variations of its own "Pizza Slice" icon across culturally rich backdrops - a wicker chair evoking a Parisian café among them. "Firefly enables us to work through more iterations and come up with more compelling ideas," said Brian Eagle, group head of design at OLIVER. "For instance, Firefly suggested using a wicker chair to illustrate the icon. … It's easy to create an image that matches or exceeds the one in their mind."

The blog emphasised how the integration of Pencil and Firefly allowed OLIVER's global in-house teams to meet client ambitions quickly, no matter what size or location. "Having Firefly Services is like a superpower," Eagle said.

This kind of case study underlines how agencies embedded inside brands are evolving. In effect, they become high-volume, low-latency content factories - or "headless" agencies: unburdened by the traditional creative studio, hooked into automated pipelines, and operating at speed.

The new agency era begins

Perhaps the most striking point Karp made was that this is not a replacement for creativity, but a reallocation of where it lives. Craft remains essential, but it is applied earlier – in defining tone, styles and systems – not in manually producing every output.

For those willing to adapt, the opportunity is vast. For those who don't, the risk is clear.

"The agency landscape is changing," he said. "It used to be based on media. Right now it's really creating technology platforms." He added: "That's where the clients are taking them."