Adlands’ Triple Threat:
Founders’ Circle Insights on: Brains in a Jar, Client Mediocrity and the New C-Word
At the latest Blutui Founders’ Circle, three truths surfaced that agencies can’t afford to dodge. Each one on its own is a threat. Together, they form a triple punch that can flatten even strong shops if leaders don’t pay attention.
Call it Adland’s Triple Threat: the hollowing effect of over-leaning on AI, the epidemic of client mediocrity, and the silent killer inside agencies, the all new C-word: comfort.
Threat #1: Brains in a Jar
On March 7, 2025, TechCrunch ran a piece quoting Meredith Whittaker of Signal saying, “So we can just put our brain in a jar because the thing is doing that and we don’t have to touch it, right?”
That image stuck. Because that’s exactly where the danger lies when agencies rush to adopt AI: the outsourcing of not just tasks, but judgment.
Agencies don’t win clients by producing outputs. Tools can do that. Subscriptions can do that. The agencies that thrive are the ones that embody four things clients can’t get from software:
Human creativity — the leap that imagines what isn’t obvious, sees patterns others miss, creates ideas that feel alive.
Craft — the discipline to refine work until it resonates, until it feels polished, until it’s unmistakably right.
Experience — the hard-earned wisdom of having seen what backfires, what breaks through, and what builds trust.
Critical thinking — the ability to weigh trade-offs, to balance ambition with reality, to decide when restraint matters more than noise.
Strip those away and what’s left is a hollowed-out agency indistinguishable from a SaaS tool.
Clients may cheer “faster” and “cheaper” in the short run. But in the long run, what they actually pay for is trust, originality, and judgment. AI can be a phenomenal assistant—automating the boring, scaling what already works. But AI cannot and should not make the calls that define your agency’s value.
The Circle closed on one sharp question: are you using AI to sharpen your team’s creativity, craft, experience, and judgment, or are you letting it do the thinking for you?
That answer will decide who thrives and who gets quietly replaced by a subscription service.
Threat #2: Client Mediocrity
The Circle then turned its gaze outward. And it hit a nerve: clients who quietly demand mediocrity.
Safe strategies. Safe campaigns. Safe spending. For too many brands, “good enough” is the goal. They don’t say it outright, but their behaviors show it. They reward agencies that play safe, not agencies that take them somewhere new.
This mediocrity is contagious. When clients set the bar low, agencies face an ugly choice: lower themselves to meet it, or risk friction by pushing back.
The Circle’s message was clear: agencies that survive and thrive do not collude with mediocrity. They refuse to be passengers on a client’s comfort cruise. They educate, they push, they argue when needed. They make the case for boldness, for originality, for investment in creativity and craft.
Because when agencies settle for client mediocrity, they don’t just fail the brand, they fail themselves.
Of course, this requires courage. It means being willing to say no, to challenge, to risk losing a client who refuses to grow. But the alternative is worse: a portfolio of bland work, a demoralized team, and a reputation for forgettable thinking.
As one Circle participant put it, “Our industry isn’t in trouble because of brave ideas, it’s in trouble because of all the safe ones.”
Threat #3: The New C-Word . . . Comfort
Finally, the Circle turned inward. And it landed on a truth that was as uncomfortable as it was undeniable: comfort is killing agencies.
Here’s the pattern. Owners lean on internal advisors, heads of department, long-tenured managers, rising stars. Those advisors are human. They don’t want to rock the boat, they do want to keep their teams intact and happy, avoid disruption, and dodge extra work, it gets political quickly. In other words: they strive for a comfortable outcome.
That instinct isn’t evil, if it was simply a matter of preserving culture and creativity it wouldn’t even be a problem, but it is lethal when it comes to the pursuit of operational excellence. Because decisions made to protect comfort create agencies that are slow, predictable, and mediocre.
The Circle put it plainly: when self-preservation beats ambition, agencies rot from the inside. Read the full story
Final Word
Brains in a jar. Client mediocrity. Comfort. That’s the triple threat.
Each one chips away at agency value. Together, they form the perfect storm: agencies leaning too heavily on automation, clients rewarding “good enough,” and staff clinging to the illusion of safety.
But the antidote is equally clear. Agencies that:
Use AI as assistant, not overlord.
Refuse to collaborate with mediocrity.
Smash comfort when it shows up in decisions.
Those are the agencies that will thrive, define the next era of Adland, and prove that creativity, craft, and judgment still matter more than ever.
The question that remains: which side of the line will your agency choose?
Join the Conversation
The Founders’ Circle is where these tough truths are aired without spin. It’s where agency leaders step out of comfort zones, debate the hard questions, and leave sharper than they arrived.
If you’re ready to confront the conversations that matter, and to stand with leaders who are reshaping Adland, then it’s time to join us in the Blutui Founders’ Circle.
