A stake in the ground for the future of Fourteen10

This is about to happen to media agencies. In the (near) future, agencies reliant on arbitraging junior talent to complete commoditised work will soon be replaced by a new wave of AI first agencies. This new breed of agency will be technology lead, pairing exceptional talent with agentic systems that both increase and scale their capability. Today, we’re making an investment into that future with the hiring of Wesley Hamburger as our Head of Engineering. 

We started Fourteen10 on the belief that advertising was getting harder and that we could provide a compelling solution to help companies outcompete and grow. 

We had spent years debating whether we should bother. The first line of our launch memo was “media agencies are bad businesses and the world doesn’t need more of them”. This hasn’t made us particularly popular in the industry but we stand by it and accept the contradiction. 

Anyone who has started a business knows well the existential angst that comes with going all in. For most founders it’s the fear of going under, of your idea not working and 100 hour weeks of grind coming to nothing. All businesses face that possibility and we are certainly not immune from it, but our existential angst takes a different form. 

Our biggest fear is we become another ‘milk run’ agency doing mediocre work, caught in the hamster wheel of saying yes to things we know we should say no to, chasing every dollar while pushing our team (and ourselves) to breaking point. I’ve been at the bottom of that food chain and it's a bleak place. 

This fear kept me from leaving Google for years. We loved advertising but could not see a way around the race to the bottom business model of most media agencies. Then technological progress did its thing and created a rare ‘moment in time’ opportunity to do something that hadn’t previously been possible - take the shot at rebuilding the media agency business model with a clean piece of paper, refocussed on expertise.

While the infrastructure that underpins so much of advertising has advanced dramatically in the last decade, the way in which you plan, book, buy, optimise and report on advertising is still incredibly labour-intensive. Most of the work (and fees) in media agencies goes to completing tactical workflows, not thinking deeply about how to help solve problems. 

We are committed to inverting this model by building a technology system that amplifies the capability of great talent. Less automating a layer of junior co-ordinators, more taking an expert and scaling them using automated decision making engines. 

We still hold true to our founding belief that great people focussed on solving problems and providing exceptional service is a winning strategy. But the game on the field has changed and winning in this new world requires a different approach.

To the best of our knowledge, Wes will be the only software engineer in the country working at an independent media agency. He’s also not just any software engineer, bringing experience from silicon valley based unicorn, Okta, Afterpay, as well as high growth startup, Tessian, an early player in AI driven email security. His experience in software engineering and applied AI will help us bring our vision to life.

For agencies to have utility in the future, they need to help their customers grow and navigate this increasingly complex playing field. 

We believe our new approach will dramatically improve our ability to do so.