Justin Thomas-Copeland hit the ground running at the end of May in his new role as CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, taking over after Mara Kaplowitz’s active eight years at the helm of the trade organization. Justin recently paused from his active schedule to talk with SmartBrief for a Q&A. Below is the bulk of our talk, with part two – taking a look at where the industry and the 4As are trending — on Thursday.
Notes: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. To listen and watch the full interview, scroll to the bottom for the video.
How have the first few months gone? Has anything changed or changed your plans or submitted your vision for the 4As?
4As Justin Thomas-Copeland:
My feet are touching the ground and it’s been great. Our vision is really to help and to reimagine the value of marketing and advertising to brands and business, and that’s through partnering with our members.
Everything is in such a flux. There’s so much change to what is marketing, how do you market, where do you market, who do you market to, what tools do you use? The reimagination is almost like a given. And so our vision is to help our members to do that, and then by doing so driving new value to their clients,
I think that vision is unaffected, but there’s a lot of nuance to that. There’s a lot of speed that comes with that and a lot of expectations. I’m a big believer in being a practitioner of marketing; whether you are an agency, a client or an association, if you’re in the ecosystem, you should be a practitioner. And so there’s definitely going to be a focus on us at the 4As to really walk the walk, really bring in new ways of marketing to what we do as an organization ourselves so our members and potential new members can see that we’re walking the walk.
I think that’s something that’s really been crystallized. I’ve just been talking to and listening to a lot of CMOs, a lot of agency leaders and a lot of clients at different levels. I’ve spent 60% of my days just talking, reading, validating, taking incoming calls, people reaching out to understand what I’m focused on and also to give me their view of what I need to focus on. People have not been shy in telling me what they think I need to do.
It’s been an amalgamation of bringing all of that. And now we’re to the point where we have to set down exactly what we’re going to do to help that reimagination hit the ground, to help our members be in a stronger position with their clients and to help them be in a healthy place. It’s been a great couple of months and a lot of inputs and a lot of directions, a lot of opportunity I believe that we have ahead of us.
You talked about the evolution of the 4As and the organization has developed a number of guidelines in the past several months around operations and talent development. Can you talk more about how the 4As is evolving to meet the needs of the industry?
Justin Thomas-Copeland:
We’re always listening and observing and taking note of what agencies, and as I said, the community, the marketing industry, community or ecosystem, what they want, what’s a hot topic, what’s important to their business. Probably one of the examples I’d give is a recent Forrester report on the uptake of AI within US agencies. And that was looking at everything from sort of pilot programs to real-world, broad generative AI applications. And it’s looking at things like the shift in investment. It’s looking at ROI, it’s looking at adoption barriers. It looked at emerging opportunities. It’s also looked a little bit at monetization. One of the stats that came to me that is stuck in my head is that only 6% of agencies feel that they’re fully monetizing the opportunity of AI.
That’s obviously stated data, so it’s a real figure, but it’s a low figure. It’s good to understand that situation because what it means is that the agency community is taking on investment and the adoption of AI almost as a cost of doing business. And the question that you have to ask is, if you move forward 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years, is that a sustainable business model?
If I put my agency CEO hat on, and I’ve run a few agencies, I would be saying to my team and my CFO: Can we run the numbers? Can we do a forward planning view of what that looks like? Everyone is still, to a large extent, focused on the opportunity of the technology and we understand that, but we are the 4As and we always have to have a cold view on helping our members. Understanding how AI helps them run their business is equally, if not more, important.
So that’s one activity in which we’ve given a lot of back to our members and giving them food for thought.
We also did research with Understood.org and Havas to release a study on neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is not new in the agency world, but there were some surprising stats that came out of it.
I think nearly half of professionals in advertising consider themselves neurodivergent. That’s a big figure. Now, back in the day, you would talk about agencies, a field of A Types, but now you’re actually getting quite specific as to, OK, what are we talking about here?
We’re talking about people who think differently, feel differently. They have to be in a certain type of environment to do their best work. We saw that there could be productivity gains of up to 30% if you can put those on your teams who are neurodivergent in an environment where they can do their best work. Those things are massive insights to agencies to really look at their teams differently and to check that they’re providing that type of environment, enabling people to do their best work – which means the agency is doing great work, which hopefully should mean that the agency is in a much stronger position commercially.
Those are just some of the things that we will do from a study standpoint to make sure that our members are getting the types of insights that can help their business.
In this study, one of the other stats that I marveled at – and I’m a parent of three children, two of whom are Gen Z – is that 50% of Gen Z identify themselves as neurodivergent. As you think about agencies going into the marketplace [for talent] and as you think about clients as well, it just gives you food for thought that maybe you wouldn’t have thought about to any great extent. There’s an estimated $2 trillion of spending power with Gen Z, and if you want to unlock that or some of that for your brand, then you need to be providing the conditions for the best work to be coming out and to be presented to those audiences.
Again, studies like that really help our members. They give them different types of insights that go beyond the headlines and really help them get their businesses in the right shape for success.
That’s the 4As mantra and that’s what we try to do.
Looking outside of your core members to the global advertising industry, what is the 4As role?
Justin Thomas-Copeland:
First of all, we’re an association that is US-based. So we’re focused on our US members first and foremost. For the foreseeable future, that will continue to be the case. But what I will say is that you’ve got to look at the larger context of the advertising industry. Several reports say that the ad industry is going to hit over a trillion dollars of spend for the first time in history. And 40% of that, give or take, is emanating from the US. So we’re nearly half of the industry, which means that the scale is here.
Obviously, AI is on everyone’s list, but if you look at AI globally as a technology that’s being developed, a lot of that is happening outside of the US, such as Asia.
But there’s a big belief that AI’s momentum is from the US. Obviously, many of the world’s leading platforms emanate from the US. So when you think about the 4As, yes, we’re US-focused, but just by being here, you have an automatic voice of the world of advertising.
We want to make sure that we are helping members in the US but we also know that, by default, many of our members are global companies. They have offices around the world, so we know that our guidance travels.
If we give guidance, for example, on neurodiversity and a team of a member is based in the US but they’re servicing a client from another hub, they may go to the other hub and say, “Look, we are looking at this to make sure we’ve got the right team set up to do the best work. Do you guys want to do this as well?”
Our impact is global, our voice is global and our mindset is definitely global because a lot of what we do affects culture, and it doesn’t just affect culture in the US, but it affects culture way beyond our borders. You also have to think about the effect of what our members do and how that carries in everyday life.
It’s all positive, but it comes with the responsibility of being in the seat that I’m privileged to be in. And the team that I’ve got around me—we’ve all got a very clear responsibility to understand the impact of the work we do and how far it travels. Ultimately, we need to ensure that our members are future-ready to ensure that they are set up for success as this world continues to turn and change.
You’ve talked about the commercialization of AI and how 4As is involved in the helping agency operations … looking at your crystal ball five to eight years down the road, how different or how similar will agencies look like in that time frame?
Justin Thomas-Copeland:
Let’s go back 10, 15 years. Digital was still a side thing. 15 years definitely. It was kind of pure play. With digital agencies, people were asking, “Are those guys even going to be in business?” Digital wasn’t a thing yet, no commerce agencies. The platforms were still maturing, so why would you have a commerce agency? Creative agencies were continuing to drive big ideas, but there was, at that time, a feeling of, OK the world is probably going to become more digital. So how does that work?
There have always been questions, right?
Agencies will definitely exist. I think there’s a very healthy role and need for agencies 5 and 20 years from now. I do believe that, but I do believe that they’re going to be different on a number of fronts. The commercial model will be different. Clients will buy differently. There’ll be a more project-based world than long-term AORs, probably.
There will still be long-term AOR relationships because you’re still going to have multi-billion-dollar brands that want to operate at huge scale, and they are not going to want to bring in creative services and marketing services internally to satisfy their need to drive marketing.
There’ll just probably be fewer of them. They may even be as big as they are now, to be honest. Arguably even bigger.
The brand ecosystem versus just the brand and the brand management system is going to be a shift. And that means that brands will continue to get into content rather than commerce and personalization context. Whereas for years, we were talking about first-party data, third-party data, then it was sort of zero-party data. Contextual data is, with the right permissions again and ethics and opt-in all being taken care of, where you’re going to have new types of agencies that will be great at that.
The 4As Justin Thomas-Copeland talks about the evolving agency type and capabilities.
And then obviously we can’t talk about new types of agencies without talking about the creator economy and social media and influencers, whether it’s nano-, micro- or macroinfluencers.
All of those agencies and systems are growing as we sit here today in 2025, but in five to eight years, those will be grown-up, mature parts of the ecosystem and clients who want to buy direct.
We want to make sure that we’re part of the ecosystem and we want to make sure that we’re helping our members who are on those journeys. The 4As is where you will get the deepest and most actionable peer-to-peer insights in the industry. We have this superpower of being able to bring peers together and create environments where they share and learn together. And I think that’s hugely powerful, even more powerful in times where things are shifting and changing and agencies are really trying to figure it out.
The 4As pitch: This is the best place where you will get the deepest and most actionable peer-to-peer insights because we can bring people together. We want to learn together, we want to go through these challenges together and give each other a vote of confidence.
We give that stamp of integrity, of responsibility and, ultimately, we’re trying to bring up the industry.
That doesn’t mean that we’re sort of vanilla and we don’t have a point of view. We have a point of view on things, but we are able to share that point of view or use that to give rise to conversations that our members can really get into some of the weeds and get into some of the detail to really feel their learning and they’re growing as organizations themselves.
You won’t get that peer-to-peer deep actionable insight that we provide from anywhere else. And so that’s why we believe that we’re special. We’ve got a superpower and we’ve got a lot to offer the industry.
Full 31:16-interview with 4As Justin Thomas-Copeland is below.
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