📶 Media Buying to Media Building
FILTER/4: The Next Frontier
Welcome to CO/SIGNALS[FILTER] - In this series, we filter the noise across the industry, culture, and creative partnerships to make sense of the signals that matter.
For decades, media agencies sat at the centre of the advertising ecosystem. They connected brands to audiences, turned budgets into plans and converted access into advantage. Their value came from knowing where to buy, when to buy, and how to buy efficiently.
That model is now being reshaped from multiple directions.
What used to be a relatively stable system of relationships, inventory, and negotiation has become a far more fragmented and opaque environment. The old logic of media buying is still alive, but it is no longer enough.
The next frontier isn’t just about buying media better. It is about building media that people actually want to engage with.
What is a media agency anyway?
At its simplest, a media agency is the bridge between brands and the media ecosystem. Today this means planning campaigns, securing inventory, and optimising spend across channels. Media agencies were the translators of the market: they knew how to turn business objectives into media outcomes.
But that role was built for a world where access mattered more than architecture. If you had the relationships, the scale, and the buying power; you could unlock reach. The agency was the broker between advertisers and the outlets, platforms, or publishers that held attention.
Today, that is changing. Media agencies are still central, but the nature of the centre is shifting. They are no longer just buying access to audiences. Increasingly, they are being asked to navigate platforms, algorithms, fragmented formats, and disappearing signals. Margins are tight, and winning new business increasingly means taking on commercial losses, which serves no one.
The job isn’t getting easier, it’s getting harder.
The scale of the market makes that shift especially important. Media buying remains one of the largest pools of capital in marketing, and media agencies now account for roughly 30% of global holding company revenue, as well as around two-thirds of large agency group growth over the past decade (source).
The three forces reshaping media
Three structural forces are putting pressure on the traditional agency model: economics, platforms, and fragmentation.
Economics
Advertising is being squeezed by consumer behaviour. More people are paying to avoid ads altogether, through subscription models and ad-free tiers across streaming, music, and content platforms. The better digital advertising gets at targeting people, the more it seems to accelerate the desire to escape it.
There is also a darker economic issue: waste. The industry is not just dealing with declining attention, but with ad fraud, opaque supply chains, and weak visibility into where money actually goes. Recent reporting put global losses from invalid traffic at $63 billion last year - a reminder that digital media is often less transparent than it appears. In other words, the market is not only harder to reach, but also harder to trust.
Platforms
The second force is platform automation. Media buying is increasingly mediated by self-serve interfaces, machine learning, and black-box optimisation systems. The platforms own the inventory, the data and much of the logic that determines what works.
Like trading floors to algorithmic markets: once it was access and instinct, now its shared systems running the same playbook. The edge no longer comes from access, but from what you build on top.
That shifts power away from agencies and toward the infrastructure providers themselves. The agency no longer controls the process in the same way. It operates inside systems it does not own, using tools it cannot fully inspect. The result is a world where buying becomes less relational and more algorithmic.
Fragmentation
The third force is fragmentation. Audiences are spread across walled gardens, retail media networks, creator ecosystems, streaming environments, apps, communities and emerging interfaces like LLMs. There is no single map anymore, only overlapping surfaces and shifting signals.
At the same time, signal loss, privacy changes, and ad blockers make it harder to know what is actually working. The result is a market that is more distributed but less legible.
Commodification and consolidation
Put those forces together and a clear pattern emerges: media buying is being commodified.
When platforms automate the process, when supply is fragmented, and when transparency declines, the traditional value of the agency compresses. The work becomes more interchangeable. The moat gets thinner.
That also creates a deeper power shift. Agencies increasingly look like tenants inside someone else’s operating system. The platforms control the inventory, the rules and the feedback loop. The agency operates within it.
That creates a strange paradox. The more the industry pursues efficiency, the more it risks becoming interchangeable. The more it automates, the more it standardises. And when everyone has access to the same tools, the same bidding logic, and the same optimisation layers, the advantage migrates away from execution and toward strategy, creativity and design.
From media buying to media building
But there is still one advantage platforms cannot neatly scale: creativity in where and how brands show up. The remaining edge is taste, relationships, and the ability to connect the dots so brands feel alive in culture. That is the craft.
If media buying used to be about building plans from available inventory, media building starts with a more ambitious question: what if the best media strategy is not to buy more media, but to build something people choose to engage with?
It’s the difference between renting billboards on a road and building the destination people choose to travel to. One is exposure. The other is gravity.
That shift changes the job entirely. Instead of renting attention, brands start creating surfaces for it to gather around. Instead of stitching together placements, they build ecosystems. Instead of treating media as a cost, they treat it as a capability.
This is a return to fundamentals, but in a new form. The future is more strategic and more architectural in nature.
We’re already seeing the first signs of this in work that refuses to stay in a single lane. It blurs content and branding, sponsorship and IP, licensing and distribution, social and creators, audience and community.
When a brand creates a red thread across touch-points and builds experiences people genuinely want to step into - whether that’s taking part in unique real world events, listening to a co-created podcast with Monocle, taking a deep-dive with Bloomberg, watching a show with ITV, or hitting a new goal on Strava, it stops looking like media buying, and starts looking like media building…
What media building looks like
Media building is less about line items and more about systems. It combines owned assets, partnerships, and designed distribution into something more durable than a campaign.
Owned surfaces
Brands are already investing more in media surfaces they control directly: newsletters, podcasts, video channels, communities, apps, and utility-driven products. These are not just content vehicles; they are assets that compound over time.
A campaign expires. A media surface can keep growing.
Partnership ecosystems
Media building also means orchestrating partnerships with domain experts, creators, publishers, and cultural operators. The agency role shifts from buyer to ecosystem designer. The question is no longer just which media owner to buy from, but which collaborators to bring together and how to make them stronger as a network.
This is a more strategic, more creative, and more collaborative model. It values alignment over arbitrage.
Designed distribution
Distribution still matters, but it becomes something you design rather than simply purchase. Good media building considers how content travels, where it is seeded, who amplifies it, and what makes it valuable enough to spread.
Paid media still has a role, but it becomes one layer in a broader system. It is the accelerant, not the architecture.
The new role of the agency
The agency of the future will not be defined by how efficiently it can buy impressions. It will be defined by how well it can design attention systems.
That means a different set of capabilities:
Editorial and creative thinking
Partnership orchestration
Product and platform awareness
Data fluency across fragmented environments
The ability to connect brand strategy with cultural momentum
In this model, the agency is less like a broker and more like an architect. It does not just place messages into the market. It helps shape the environments in which those messages become meaningful.
Campaigns to systems
The traditional campaign model is built for bursts. It assumes attention can be won, activated and then moved on from.
But the modern media environment rewards persistence, utility, and repeated engagement. Systems compound. Campaigns fade.
That is why the next frontier matters. The industry is moving from campaigns by algorithm to impact by design. From buying access to building relevance. From renting attention to creating new surfaces for it to gather around.
The brands and agencies that understand this shift early will not just perform better in the existing system. They will help define the next one.
Thanks for reading. What do you think? Drop a comment and let’s talk about it.