Franchise Industry · April 2026
We pointed the AI lens at franchise consultants. Then recruitment agencies. Now it’s time to point it at the people spending your marketing budget — including us.
This isn’t another “AI is coming for your job” piece. We’ve done that. Twice. The consultants got upset. The recruiters got nervous. The comment sections were entertaining.
This one is different. This one is about where your money actually goes when you hire a marketing agency. And why the gap between a good agency and a lazy one has never been wider.
Because AI hasn’t just changed what agencies can do. It’s exposed what they’ve been charging you for all along.
The Retainer Problem
Most franchise brands pay their agency a monthly retainer. Could be £2,000. Could be £8,000. Could be more. And most franchise directors have the same quiet question they never ask out loud:
“What am I actually getting for this?”
The honest answer, at a lot of agencies, is that a significant chunk of your retainer goes on work that has nothing to do with growing your franchise network. It goes on reporting. Strategy documents. Content planning meetings. Internal briefings. Status updates. Slide decks that summarise what happened last month.
None of that is execution. None of it generates a lead, converts a candidate or fills a territory. It’s process. And you’re paying for every hour of it.
Where a typical £5,000/month agency retainer actually goes
Based on industry averages for franchise marketing agencies
£750/mo · 15%
£600/mo · 12%
£500/mo · 10%
£400/mo · 8%
£250/mo · 5%
£2,500/mo · 50%
£2,500/mo · 50%
Half. Half of a typical retainer goes on work that isn’t actually growing your network. It’s keeping the agency organised. You’re paying for their process, not your results.
And until recently, that was just how agencies worked. There wasn’t a better option. Someone had to write the reports. Someone had to build the strategy decks. Someone had to sit in the meetings.
That someone is now AI. And the good agencies have already made the switch.
What Good Agencies Do Differently Now
The agencies that have genuinely integrated AI and automation into their operations aren’t using it to replace their team. They’re using it to stop billing you for admin.
Reporting that used to take a strategist half a day to compile? Automated. Pulled in real time. No human hours billed to your retainer.
Content first drafts that used to take a copywriter three hours? Generated in minutes. Refined and quality-checked by a human, not written from scratch at £50 an hour.
Strategy documents that required two days of research, formatting and internal review? AI handles the data gathering, the benchmarking, the structure. The strategist focuses on the thinking — the bit you’re actually paying for.
The result? More of your money goes on the work that actually matters. Campaign execution. Creative. Media buying. Conversion optimisation. Pipeline management. The things that generate leads, convert candidates and grow your network.
| Task | Agency Using AI | Agency Not Using AI |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly reporting | Automated — £0 billed | 4–6 hours — £200–£300 billed |
| Strategy documents | AI-drafted, human-refined — 2hrs | Written from scratch — 8–12hrs |
| Content first drafts | AI-generated, human-edited — 30min | Copywriter from blank page — 3hrs |
| Competitor research | AI-monitored weekly — minutes | Manual quarterly review — full day |
| Lead qualification | AI caller — sub-60 seconds, 24/7 | Manual callback — 24–48 hours |
| Status meetings | Live dashboard — check any time | Weekly call — 1hr billed each time |
Same retainer. Radically different allocation. One agency is spending your money on growing your network. The other is spending it on telling you about your network.
The Real Numbers
Let’s make this concrete. A franchise brand paying £5,000 a month to a marketing agency is investing £60,000 a year. Over a typical 12-month engagement, here’s what that looks like depending on who’s spending it:
£48,000
spent on execution — ads, creative, SEO, pipeline, conversion
£12,000
on strategic oversight, QA, human refinement
£30,000
spent on execution — campaigns, creative, actual work
£30,000
on reporting, strategy docs, meetings, content drafts, admin
That’s an £18,000 difference in execution spend per year. Same budget. Same retainer. One agency is putting 80% of your money to work. The other is putting 50%.
Now multiply that across two, three, five years of a relationship. The compounding gap in actual results is enormous.
The Franchise Maths
If that extra £18,000 in execution converts just one additional franchisee per year at a £20,000 franchise fee, it has paid for itself. Two additional franchisees and you’ve doubled your return on the same budget. The money was always there. It was just being spent on the wrong things.
What This Means For Franchise Brands
This isn’t about firing your agency. It’s about asking better questions.
How much of my retainer goes on reporting? If the answer is more than zero human hours, ask why. Automated reporting dashboards exist. Real-time data exists. If your agency is still billing you for someone to compile a PDF every month, that’s a choice they’re making — and you’re paying for.
How are you producing content? AI doesn’t replace good copywriting. But it eliminates the blank page problem. If your agency is billing three hours per blog post for the first draft when AI can produce a structured brief in minutes, the question is where those three hours are going.
Do I need this meeting? Weekly status calls exist because agencies historically had no other way to keep clients informed. A live dashboard replaces that entirely. If your agency still needs an hour a week to tell you what’s happening, they probably don’t have the infrastructure to show you instead.
What percentage of my spend goes on execution? This is the only question that matters. If the answer is under 70%, something is wrong.
The agencies that have adopted AI aren’t charging less. They’re delivering more. Same retainer, more execution, better results. That’s not disruption. That’s efficiency.
Where We Sit In All Of This
We’d be hypocrites if we didn’t include ourselves in this. SOOM® is a marketing agency. We charge retainers. We produce content, run campaigns and manage recruitment pipelines for franchise brands.
The difference is that we built KORE by SOOM® specifically to eliminate the wastage. Reporting is automated. Dashboards are live. Lead qualification happens in under 60 seconds via AI, 24 hours a day. Content drafts are AI-generated and human-refined. Strategy is built on real-time data, not quarterly reviews of numbers that are already three months old.
That means more of every pound a client invests goes on the work that actually grows their network. Not on telling them about the work.
We didn’t build this to be clever. We built it because charging clients for admin we could automate felt like a waste of their money. And wasting client money is not a long-term business model.
The Bottom Line
AI won’t replace good agencies. But it has made the gap between good agencies and lazy ones impossible to ignore.
The good ones have invested in automation so they can invest your money more efficiently. They’ve eliminated the process bloat. They’ve stopped billing you for work a machine can do better, faster and for free. And they’ve redirected that capacity into the things that actually move the needle — creative strategy, campaign execution, pipeline management, conversion.
The lazy ones are still factoring reporting, strategy writing, planning meetings and content drafts into your retainer as if it’s 2019. Still billing human hours for tasks that take AI seconds. Still spending half your budget on organising themselves.
Same applies to consultants. Same applies to recruitment agencies. Same applies to every service business in franchising.
The question isn’t whether your agency uses AI. It’s whether they’re passing the efficiency on to you, or keeping it for themselves.
One Question To Ask Your Agency This Week
“Of the retainer I pay you each month, what percentage goes directly on campaign execution versus reporting, planning, meetings and admin?” If they can’t answer that clearly and immediately, you already have your answer.
Previous in this series: Will AI Replace Franchise Consultants?