If you’ve noticed that Newfangled has been unusually quiet for the past few years, you noticed correctly. We didn’t go anywhere. Things were just evolving so rapidly, we weren’t exactly sure what our stance was, and what to say. I only feel comfortable going on record for things I personally understand and wholly believe in. Our lack of presence and voice nagged at me daily.
The agencies we’ve worked with for decades have been under real pressure the past three years — budgets shrinking, headcount down, clients harder to land and harder to keep. We watched it happen to firms we genuinely care about. And we kept waiting for the moment when we’d have something worth saying. Something we’d actually done, not just something we believed.
That moment is now.
Three years ago, in January 2023, we started rebuilding Newfangled from the inside out. Not because we had to, and we sure as hell didn’t want to. But, we saw what was coming, and we knew we had to change. From those earliest days we had the sense that once we cracked this we might be able to help the agency community we serve do the same, but we weren’t willing to ask our clients to do something we hadn’t done ourselves first, something we didn’t know how to do. But then we did it.
We’ve completely rebuilt how we work. How we manage accounts. How we do business development, run reports, analyze performance, develop strategy, create content, create…everything. We built agents that know every detail about every client relationship — every meeting, every deliverable, every decision — and they don’t forget any of it. We built a business intelligence tool that understands our finances better than I do (and I love that stuff!) We rebuilt our entire operation around AI, not by bolting tools onto existing processes, but by asking what each process should actually look like if we were starting today, from scratch, as if we were a brand new agency.
And then, somewhat to my surprise, we became a brand new agency.
The result: our team does more than we used to do with a much larger team. The work is better. The margins are better. And we have a clear, specific picture of exactly how we got here. Which brings me to why I’m writing.
As has always been the case with Newfangled, we’re now doing for other agencies what we did for ourselves. We call it Newfangled Frontier. It starts with an audit. It’s a four week, deep look at how your firm actually operates, and a dollar-quantified roadmap showing you where AI can best create real leverage for your firm. Not a generic framework. Not a vendor pitch. A specific plan built from your systems, your financials, your departments, and your people.
We’re opening five initial slots. The first five are $5,000. $10,000 after that. Honestly, this is a lot of work — we already have real interest, and we need to be thoughtful about where we focus. We want to work with the firms we can have the most impact on.
I’ve been doing this for decades. The pattern I’ve seen in our industry is that the firms that figure out the next transition first are the ones that survive, and thrive. It’s not the biggest firms, and not the ones with the most resources. It’s always the ones that move with intention while others are still deciding whether to move at all. We’re in one of those moments right now. I think we all know and feel this.
— Mark O’Brien