A former colleague sent me his agency's new positioning line on Thursday. I checked the shop's site against what I remembered from January. Two months ago they were a brand-led creative collective. As of last week they are an AI-native strategy partner. Same eleven people. Same three case studies. New verbs.
He is not the only one. I counted six repositionings in my feed in seven days, all of them in the window after GPT-4 shipped on March 14, all of them written as though this had been the plan all along.
Nobody hired anybody. Nobody built anything. Everybody rewrote page four.
I say this with affection, because I have written page four. I have sat in the room at eight at night deciding which of our existing habits could be described using this quarter's vocabulary, and it never felt like lying. It felt like translation.
An agency capabilities deck is not a description of what a shop can do, it is a description of what the shop believes clients are currently afraid of.
Which makes the last week genuinely useful as a document. Read the new decks as a fear index. One, the fear that clients will ask a question about this and the room will go quiet. Two, the fear of the consultancies, who have been eating agency lunch on transformation work for a decade and now have a much better story. Three, the oldest one, that creative labor is about to get priced against something that does a rough version instantly and does not have opinions about the brief.
None of those fears are stupid. The problem is the response. If your positioning changed in nine days, it was never positioning, it was a wardrobe. Clients can tell. The procurement people especially can tell, because they read forty of these a year and they have watched the same shops be social-first, then video-first, then purpose-led, then performance-obsessed, then brand-led again when performance got expensive.
The shops I would actually bet on right now are the ones saying something narrower and less flattering. We are testing this on internal work. We do not know what it does to concepting yet. Here is one thing we tried that failed. That is a harder deck to write and a much better one to receive, and it is the only version that survives the first client who asks a follow-up question.
If your positioning changed in nine days, it was never positioning, it was a wardrobe.
I sang Total Eclipse of the Heart on Tuesday, badly, and the host called me baby and told me I had really grown. I have not grown. I have simply sung it eleven times. There is a difference, and everyone in the room knew it.