Why We're Building the Anti-WPP
The agency era is ending. We’re building the growth engine that replaces it.
It’s a big day for Pepper. We’re launching a new solution to power the future of content-led growth, and invited our co-founder and CEO, Anirudh Singla, to share more about it.
Last month, a CMO at a Fortune 500 company told me something that’s been stuck in my head ever since.
“I’m being asked to deliver growth while my CAC climbs and my channels deteriorate. And none of my vendors can actually help me solve it.”
She’s not alone. I’ve had nearly identical conversations with marketing leaders at dozens of other enterprise brands. CMOs are struggling, and the old model isn’t made for this moment.
So today, I’m thrilled to announce that Pepper Content — the company behind this newsletter on the future of AI and marketing — is rebranding as Pepper. Not because we needed a new logo, but because we’re building something the industry desperately needs: a Content-Led Growth Engine for the AI era.
CMOs’ impossible situation
Let’s be honest about what’s happening: CMOs are getting squeezed from every direction.
Traditional channels are declining. Google just made AI Overviews the default experience for billions of searches. Your customers aren’t scrolling through ten blue links anymore; they’re getting AI-generated answers at the top of the page. And if your brand isn’t cited in those answers, you’re invisible.
At the same time, social algorithms are getting more expensive and less predictable. Paid channels are hitting saturation, with CAC rising faster than revenue growth in most sectors.
The buyer journey is fracturing. Your customers are comparing you across seven different touchpoints and making decisions based on AI recommendations.
The old funnel is dead.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: You can’t buy your way out of this. The only sustainable way to win attention today is to earn it with great content. Content that’s genuinely useful, shareable, and gets picked up by the influential media websites and communities that influence AI Search. But most companies don’t have the system to create content that actually stands out. They’re stuck churning out mediocre blog posts and hoping for the best.
And the pressure to “do AI” is crushing. Every board meeting, every earnings call — CMOs are being asked about their AI strategy. But most marketing organizations don’t have the support to actually transform their operations with AI. They’re stuck between vendors selling vaporware and agencies cosplaying as AI experts.
Meanwhile, the legacy players who should be solving this are asleep at the wheel.
Why the old model is dead
Here’s what kills me about the traditional agency model: It was designed for a world that no longer exists.
Holding companies like WPP, Omnicom, and Publicis were built for a bygone era of media. They grew by acquiring agencies, layering on bureaucracy, and touting inflated vanity metrics.
The result was bloated cost structures, glacial timelines, and work optimized for awards instead of outcomes.
Now, they’ve plastered “AI-powered” all over their homepages. But there’s a massive difference between using ChatGPT to write blog posts and actually building a marketing engine designed for the new world of AI.
At Pepper, we’ve spent three years working with 250+ enterprise brands — from Atlassian to Instacart to Mutual of Omaha — figuring out where AI creates real leverage and where humans are non-negotiable.
AI excels at automating repetitive workflows, scaling personalization, and accelerating production cycles. Our agentic platform, Nymbus, orchestrates entire content operations from strategy to distribution.
But AI can’t do it alone. Humans are essential for three things: creative originality, cultural nuance, and strategic judgment. That’s why we’ve built a vetted network of 5,000+ experts from the world’s top brands and publications, who use AI to work faster — not to replace their expertise.
The magic happens when you use AI to amplify human creativity, not replace it. We’re delivering 10x faster production cycles while maintaining the quality and brand resonance that only humans can provide.
This is what we mean by building the Anti-WPP. Holding companies add layers and cost; we add speed and scale through technology. Consultants deliver presentations; we deliver outcomes.
How Pepper works
We built Pepper around three fundamental shifts:
First, search is now AI-powered. Google’s AI Overviews are the default for billions of searches. People are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini instead of Googling. Traditional SEO is becoming irrelevant. That’s why we built Atlas, our GEO + SEO platform, to ensure brands get cited in AI-generated answers across every major platform.
Second, content-led growth is the only sustainable strategy. The era of buying attention is over. Paid acquisition costs are skyrocketing. Algorithms change overnight. But great content compounds. When you create content that’s genuinely useful and worth citing, it drives organic growth that gets cheaper over time. Most companies don’t have the system — the strategy, technology, and talent — to create content that truly stands out.
Third, CMOs are done with vanity metrics. They don’t want more blog posts. They want pipeline growth, lower CAC, and measurable ROI. That’s why we operate with an outcome-led model.
What we’re launching
Our Content-Led Growth Engine combines AI agents with human expertise to accomplish three goals: accelerate content velocity; increase brand visibility across LLMs, search, and social; and drive predictable organic growth for forward-thinking enterprise brands.
We’re applying this engine across three targeted solutions:
Pepper Content scales high-impact content across every stage of the customer journey.
Pepper SEO & GEO maximizes brand discoverability in AI Search.
Pepper Creative integrates AI into creative production, scaling personalization and supercharging top-funnel engagement at a fraction of traditional agency costs.
The future belongs to systems, not silos
Here’s my prediction: In five years, CMOs won’t be buying services from dozens of fragmented vendors. They’ll be partnering with integrated growth engines that combine strategy, technology, and execution into one seamless system.
The marketing leaders who win in the AI era won’t be the ones with the biggest agency retainer. They’ll be the ones who moved fast, embraced new models, and demanded outcomes instead of deliverables.
That’s the world we’re building at Pepper.
If you’re a CMO frustrated with agencies that can’t adapt, consultants who can’t execute, and tools that don’t integrate — let’s talk. It won’t be a pitch. We’d simply love to understand your biggest growth challenges and see if we can actually solve them.
Because the marketing industry doesn’t need another agency.
It needs a new system.
And we’re building it.
Check out the new Pepper at Pepper.inc, and if you want a complimentary enterprise growth audit, just comment on or reply to this newsletter, and we’ll get in touch.
AI news is flooding in faster than internal Slack messages during a rebrand. Here are the top stories to know this week.
Sora soars to 1M downloads in days, proof that text-to-video might finally be ready for the mainstream (and TikTok creators).
…and copyright drama ensues immediately. The Motion Picture Association shot back at OpenAI over Sora’s training data, reigniting the debate around copyright, consent, and creative IP in AI-generated media.
ChatGPT loosens its guardrails. Soon, you’ll be able to talk to the chatbot about your feelings and fantasies in addition to those questionable business ideas.
OpenAI plans to build its own chips with Broadcom, presumably to reduce dependence on NVIDIA.
Google unveils Gemini Enterprise, a new AI platform for business clients that bundles GenAI, productivity, and cloud tools into one ecosystem. (Shots fired, Microsoft 365 Copilot.)
Perplexity just became an official search option in Firefox, letting users request AI-style conversational answers instead of traditional link results.
Google is rolling out new AI features that let users generate images directly from the Search bar, plus new tools for ads and shopping queries. It’s another step toward making AI Overviews the default discovery experience.
Gemini moves into Google Home, officially replacing Assistant to bring multimodal reasoning to your thermostat.
ChatGPT Instant Checkout comes to Walmart. The retail giant is positioning the move as a glimpse into “AI-first shopping experiences.” Its stock hit record highs after the announcement.
Google announced a $15 billion investment to build a massive AI data center in India, cementing the country’s role as a key infrastructure and talent hub for the next AI wave.
Kayak launches AI Mode, which lets travelers search and book trips using natural language prompts like “find me a long-weekend escape under $500.” It’s one of the first mainstream travel apps to make conversational search truly functional.
Director, Editor in Chief @ Autodesk (US Remote, $172,500 - $279,000 USD)
Head of Growth Content @ Square (US Remote, $218,800 - $326,000)
VP, Professional Services for Comms & Media @ Salesforce (US, select cities, $240,400 - $420,600)