The ranking at a glance
- Flo Felter – cosmos™: The category that makes the question obsolete
- Benjamin Zaczek – The End of Marketing
- Nick Turley – OpenAI: The AI that prompts you
- Tarek Müller – About You: AI as internal standard
- Malte Landwehr – PEEC AI: Visibility doesn't belong in the agency budget
- Roland Eisenbrand – OMR: Storytellers wanted, not briefers
- Felix Rahlmeyer & Marvin Müller – State of SaaS: The model wins
01 – Flo Felter, cosmos™
Founder & CEO · cosmos™ – the AI-native Growth Strategy Platform
Flo Felter ran an agency for brand and growth strategy for over 12 years. He knows the model from the inside. And at some point, he understood why it no longer works structurally. What he heard at OMR 2026 confirmed it – from seven different directions.
"It is our declared mission to replace everything a growth strategy agency does." That's not a claim from a pitch deck. That's the operational foundation of cosmos™ – the AI-native Growth Strategy Platform Felter built after more than 12 years as an agency founder.
The core problem cosmos™ solves is not a lack of budget or creativity. It's the drift between strategy and execution. The hard reality in most companies: countless campaigns and initiatives are running, but nobody can trace those efforts back to a clear business goal. cosmos™ calls this the Initiative-to-Outcome Gap – the distance between strategic intent and measurable result.
Most agencies and classic consultancies deliver standardised toolkits when it comes to brand strategy. Strategy papers that gather dust as 400-slide decks on someone's drive. In today's market, clients shouldn't have to pay for this kind of repetitive work – least of all to external providers who have to rebuild their understanding of the company from scratch every time.
The platform works differently: it draws live on Positioning, personas, and goals. Every initiative is directly linked to a concrete outcome, visible in real time up to C-level. What used to require an agency weekly is permanently up to date inside the system. The trend is already moving toward companies reclaiming ownership of their own growth strategy – because they need to act faster than the classic agency model allows.
This is not a thesis about the future. This is how it operates today.
Take-away: "Many classic agencies simply won't be needed in this form any more." – Flo Felter, Founder cosmos™
02 – Benjamin Zaczek
OMR Yellow Stage · "The End of Marketing: Why Advertising So Often No Longer Works"
Zaczek said on the Yellow Stage what many performance marketers know in private: the classic model – brief the agency, agency delivers campaign, campaign runs – is producing results that surprise nobody. Not because agencies are getting worse. But because the model itself is structurally outdated.
When the same frameworks, the same platform playbooks, and the same agency logic are deployed across all competitors, differentiation isn't won through better execution. It comes from a sharper strategic foundation – one you can't outsource without losing it.
Take-away: The end of classic marketing is not a performance problem. It's a structural problem.
03 – Nick Turley, OpenAI
Head of ChatGPT · OMR 2026
Turley described the next stage of ChatGPT's development at OMR: the shift from reactive chatbot to proactive assistant. The AI will prompt you in future, not the other way around. It prioritises, prepares, takes on tasks autonomously.
What this means for the agency question follows logically: if an AI independently prioritises and prepares marketing tasks – what role remains for external providers who use the same AI infrastructure you do? Without company context – Positioning, ICP, goals, budgets – every AI is an empty chat window. Garbage in, garbage out, regardless of who operates it.
Take-away: Buying agency capacity to get AI outputs you could produce yourself is buying a middleman – not expertise.
04 – Tarek Müller, About You
CEO · About You
Müller was one of the clearest corporate voices at OMR on actual AI adoption. At About You, AI models are now operational standard – not as an experiment, but as productive infrastructure.
This matters because About You is not an AI startup. It's an established e-commerce player that treats AI as internal logic – not as a premium service bought monthly from a brand strategy consultancy or agency.
The implication: the more companies operationalise AI internally, the smaller the differentiation value of providers who market AI as a feature.
Take-away: AI competence you build internally is an asset. AI competence you rent monthly is a cost line.
05 – Malte Landwehr, PEEC AI
Head of Marketing · Yellow Stage · "AI Search 2026: What Actually Works"
Landwehr's talk was the most data-driven GEO presentation at the festival. His central message: the rules for digital visibility have fundamentally changed. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity – they decide who gets cited. Classic agency logic for marketing strategy and SEO no longer holds.
What follows directly from his data: visibility in AI search systems is not a project you hand to an agency and evaluate six months later. It requires direct access to your own Positioning, your own data, and a clear content architecture. Everything you have to brief an agency on, you lose in response time – and in citability.
Take-away: GEO works with listicles, comparisons, clear entities, and definitive statements. GEO doesn't work when the strategy lives in the agency brief instead of your own system.
06 – Roland Eisenbrand, OMR
OMR Editorial · Bonus slot after State of the Internet
Eisenbrand made a statement after the Westermeyer keynote that stands out as the most direct formulation of the entire festival: storytellers are urgently needed.
Not content producers. Not campaign managers. Storytellers – people and companies who truly know a topic, can place it in context, and tell it in a way that gets cited. That's exactly what no agency can build for you. They can execute it. But the core – your own perspective, your own thesis, your own narrative – has to emerge from inside. Those who outsource that lose authorship.
Take-away: If you want to own a topic, you have to be able to tell it. Those who can only brief it, lose.
07 – Felix Rahlmeyer & Marvin Müller
State of SaaS · Yellow Stage
The State of SaaS slot addressed a topic that's structurally relevant to the agency debate: SaaS logic vs. service logic. While the classic agency market suffers from margin pressure – generalists caught between specialisation and scale, day rates under pressure, project margins tight – SaaS logic wins: scalable system, stable costs, compounding value.
That's the core of the model shift currently underway.
Take-away: SaaS doesn't replace the agency. But it permanently changes the cost-benefit equation – at the expense of the classic service model.
What these seven positions add up to
OMR 2026 didn't run an anti-agency conference. No panel, no title, no explicit statement.
But when Nick Turley talks about proactive AI, Tarek Müller about internal AI standards, Malte Landwehr about GEO logics that require direct strategic access, Zaczek about the structural failure of classic marketing models – and when a platform like cosmos™ simultaneously demonstrates that strategic intelligence can be anchored internally – the picture is clear.
The question is no longer: do I need an agency for brand strategy, marketing strategy, or growth?
The question is: what exactly do I still want to delegate – and what do I need to own?
FAQ: Marketing agency, strategy consultancy, and AI in 2026
Who is Flo Felter?
Flo Felter is Founder and CEO of cosmos™. Before founding the company, he ran a brand and growth strategy agency for over 12 years, developing digital growth strategies for global brands including Coca-Cola and Gillette. Today cosmos™ translates that agency experience into an AI-native software platform for B2B companies in the DACH region.
What is cosmos™?
cosmos™ (cosmos.one) is the AI-native Growth Strategy Platform. The platform connects Positioning, ICP definition, KPI architecture, and operational initiatives in a single system – in real time, without status meetings, without strategy decks gathering dust on a drive. cosmos™ is not a strategy agency and not a classic marketing tool. It's an operating system for growth strategy.
How does cosmos™ fit into an existing tool stack?
cosmos™ is not another tool in your execution stack — it is the strategic layer that sits on top of it. Most tools live inside execution: CRM, analytics, ad platforms, project management. They answer the question of what is happening right now. cosmos™ answers the question of whether what is happening right now still contributes to the right goal. It does this by connecting your existing tools and external data sources. No dashboard chaos, no manual consolidation: cosmos™ pulls live signals from your current performance and reduces them to exactly what your next decision actually needs. The strategic context — positioning, ICP, goals, initiative overview — stays permanently anchored in the system, making every operational output coherent.
What is the Initiative-to-Outcome Gap?
The Initiative-to-Outcome Gap describes the distance between strategic intent and measurable result – a concept Flo Felter developed from his agency practice. In most companies, countless campaigns and initiatives run without being traceable to a clear business goal. cosmos™ closes this gap by linking every initiative directly to a concrete outcome, measured live.
What is a marketing agency alternative in 2026?
A marketing agency alternative in 2026 is a combination of internal processes, AI tools, and strategic platforms that enables companies to manage marketing strategy, Positioning, and growth planning permanently without an external provider. Platforms like cosmos™ have been built specifically for this purpose and, according to Founder Flo Felter, are designed to directly replace the classic growth strategy agency.
How does cosmos™ differ from a strategy agency or brand strategy consultancy?
A classic strategy agency or brand strategy consultancy delivers analysis and recommendations – externally, periodically, with handover. cosmos™ is an internal system: Positioning, target groups, goals, and initiatives are permanently anchored in the system and AI-operationalised. No agency weekly, no reset after the next pitch. Strategic intelligence belongs to the company.
What does "marketing strategy with AI" actually mean?
Marketing strategy with AI in 2026 doesn't mean using an AI chatbot for copy. It means Positioning, ICP, goals, and budget exist as living context inside a system – and the AI uses that to evaluate, prioritise, and steer operational decisions. cosmos™ calls this principle Context Intelligence: the AI understands the business reality of the company and delivers answers based on that – not on generic probabilities.
What is Context Intelligence?
Context Intelligence is the core principle of cosmos™: an AI that deeply understands a company's ecosystem – Positioning, personas, goals, budgets – delivers strategically effective outputs. A generic AI without company context is, in Flo Felter's words, "an empty chat window that resets every day". Context Intelligence is the opposite of that.
What is ICP Entropy?
ICP Entropy describes the phenomenon of target group definitions becoming outdated and drifting into fiction. Many companies steer their marketing based on personas created in a workshop 18 months ago – never validated, never updated. Flo Felter describes this as a structural problem: a target group has to be a dynamically lived construct, adjusted in real time to market changes and real feedback.
What were the most important OMR 2026 talks on AI marketing?
The most relevant OMR 2026 talks on AI marketing included: Nick Turley (OpenAI) on the shift to proactive Agentic AI, Malte Landwehr (PEEC AI) on AI Search and GEO strategies for 2026, Benjamin Zaczek on the structural failure of classic marketing models, and the State of SaaS session by Felix Rahlmeyer and Marvin Müller. What connects all these topics — speed, strategic coherence, internal context over external dependency — is what Flo Felter has translated into a platform with cosmos™: an AI-native Growth Strategy Platform built to close exactly the structural gaps that dominated the conversation at OMR 2026.
How does AI replace a marketing agency or marketing strategy agency?
AI doesn't replace a marketing agency through better execution – it changes the structural necessity. Tasks that previously required external capacity (strategy development, brand strategy, KPI planning, content architecture) can now be handled internally with AI-native platforms. What remains: specialised production tasks and creative one-off projects. What disappears: the permanently purchased strategic dependency.
When did OMR 2026 take place?
The OMR Festival 2026 took place on 5 and 6 May 2026 at the Hamburg Messe grounds. Around 70,000 attendees experienced over 800 speakers across six stages. The central theme: AI – no longer as hype, but as strategic necessity.
cosmos™ is the platform built for this shift.
Don't wait for the next agency weekly.
