RM20 a Video.
Nobody Left to Bill.

What the ad admits

For twenty years the agency model billed for standing between the business and the tools: the boss can’t shoot, can’t edit, can’t write — pay us monthly. That gap was the product. Now the tool does the editing, the writing and the planning, and the agency’s own promo prices the gap at RM20. Next year a competitor prices it at RM5. The year after, the platform builds it into the ads manager free — because platforms always absorb whatever increases their own ad spend. Selling the operation of a public tool is a countdown business.

And don’t read this as a small-agency problem at the bottom of the market. In China, MediaStorm (影视飓风) — one of the country’s top video production teams — has pivoted to selling classes — reportedly moving over five million renminbi of course sales, more than most production houses clear in a year of actual production. Think about what that pivot admits: when the people at the very top of the craft start selling the knowledge instead of the output, they are telling you where the output’s margin went. Their own verdict, in their own video: “AI has flattened the windfall era.” The best producers in the market read the roadmap and switched from mining to selling maps.

The media buyer went first

Here’s the example that should worry every agency more than the video one. Last cycle, every serious seller needed a media buyer — the expert with bid strategies, audience splits, A/B discipline. It was a real skill and a real salary. Then TikTok shipped GMV Max: feed it creatives and a budget, and the machine runs targeting, bidding and placements, optimizing straight for GMV. No structures to build, no bids to tune. Shopee is moving the same direction. The expertise didn’t get cheaper — the interface that required the expertise was deleted. The platform doesn’t want a professional standing between the seller and the spend button; the whole point of the machine is to remove the person whose job was hesitating over the budget.

That’s the pattern to memorize: the expert premium of the last decade was mostly interface complexity. When the platform automates its own interface, the job attached to that complexity evaporates in one product release.

What’s actually left

Strip the agency stack honestly. Operating tools — gone, as above. Craft premium — compressed to “one in-house person with taste,” because the tools carry them now. What the tool cannot own is only this: judgment tied to the business (not “is the video nice” but “should this shop even be making videos, or fixing its offer”) and accountability for outcomes — because the customer never wanted 100 videos; he wanted sales. And the moment you take outcome risk while AI does the execution, the honest question arrives: why carry that risk for someone else’s brand?

So the endgame has two exits. Move up — become the principal: own brands, own outcomes, own risk. Or move down — become the infrastructure the survivors run on. The middle, billing monthly to operate what the customer could operate himself, is the phone-case wholesaler of the service industry: real effort, real costs, and a reason to exist the platforms are deleting from both sides.

To be fair about the transition

There’s real money in the changeover itself — setup, migration, training the boss’s team on the tools. But be honest about the shape of it: those are projects, not retainers. A transition fee is a farewell fee. Price it like one.

What an SME should do

Stop buying operation. Anyone quoting you monthly to run tools you could subscribe to for RM100 is renting you their countdown. Buy outcomes — or buy nothing and learn the tool; the subscription costs less than one month of any retainer. And when an agency shows you “unlimited revisions,” read it the way I did: the machine works for free. You can hire the same machine.

Published by IMA AI — August 2026. Written by an operator who left the agency model and became the principal — this is the exit map, drawn from inside.