Is it time for CMOs to demand outcomes, not activity, from their agencies?

Jaco Lintvelt

Why the shift from performance to outcomes?

For years, agencies have been paid for activity. And we were no exception. We were rewarded for “the doing.” The campaigns we launched, the media we bought, and the optimisations we executed. But shifts in the market, and most particularly shifts in client expectations, has us moving inexorably towards a model where we are held to account for the results.

For us, the shift from a performance agency to an outcomes agency changes the way we work with clients at a very fundamental level.

Outcomes are about the results. It’s about the revenue, the profit, the customer growth and retention that those activities ultimately deliver.

The shift from “the doing” to “the results” may sound obvious, but it demands a different level of trust from clients, and a different level of discipline from agencies.

Our argument is that you cannot simply announce yourself as an outcomes player. You have to earn that status and be someone who can deliver on what they're selling. But that is a higher bar than it appears.

If you want to talk credibly about outcomes, you cannot just declare it in a slide. You need a substantial performance record. In our case, that is delivering performance related services to customers for close to 25 years. That accumulated muscle is what allows us to step into more concrete outcome commitments.

It’s not all or nothing

The second driver in this shift is the changing expectations from CMOs and FDs

Companies today don’t want to talk about billing per hour or billing per asset. They are very keen, however, to talk about the outcomes.

At the same time, most leaders recognise they cannot flip their entire budget into outcomes-based contracts overnight and there doesn’t have to be an either-or model.

Practically, that means identifying parts of the marketing engine where the link between spend and result is well understood, the data is dependable, and internal stakeholders can agree on what success looks like. In these areas, companies should have a component of their marketing results that they are procuring on more guaranteed outcomes. The rest of the budget can remain on more traditional structures and be used for innovation and testing.

Using tech to drive measurable results

The third driver is all about technology and it is making this shift both more feasible and more demanding.

On the media side, platforms like Google already allow for highly granular outcome measurement on single channels and increasingly robust measurement approaches where you can combine the outcomes of different channels.

On the data side, Google Cloud delivers use cases that cut across marketing, data infrastructure, analytics and sales data. If you want to be paid on outcomes, you cannot confine yourself to surface-level media metrics; you need to operate where marketing data, sales data and business systems converge.

Incubeta’s bet is that the real value lies not in simply running cloud infrastructure, but in turning that combined stack into measurable marketing outcomes.

Okay, but why the AI?

Everyone in this industry is very aware that AI has moved from buzzword to backbone. Clients now care about results, not the wiring.

We see agentic intellectual property as the real differentiator for agencies.

When we talk about agentic intellectual property, we are talking about something far more substantial than using generic generative AI tools. Most agencies are already leaning into genAI to draft copy or speed up execution, but that’s just hygiene.

What we are building is codified, always‑on, AI‑driven workflows that embed more than two decades of performance and outcomes experience into systems that can run at scale and deliver value from day one.

Our agents are proven. Think of it like implementing a system that is active and working 100% from the start, with the day-to-day work focused on fine-tuning and removing obstacles.

Combined with the creativity and strategic insights of our people, this agentic IP becomes the operating system that allows us to move from isolated, clever campaigns to durable, scalable marketing outcomes.

What does this mean for local CMOs?

For South African marketers, an outcomes model isn’t a theoretical future state. It’s already starting to shape how the more progressive organisations brief, buy and evaluate their partners.

For local marketing leaders, the practical response should be isolating which of your partners can show a combination of track record, data and cloud competence, and proven agentic workflows. And, which of them is also prepared to share risk on the outcomes you actually care about. Those are the relationships worth doubling down on. And that’s why you should be looking for an AI outcomes agency.