A little over a year into running the 4As, Justin Thomas-Copeland has taken stock and is making positive changes. Sitting down on a hot day at Cannes Lions with Indie Agency News, the CEO laid out a reinvention that touches almost everything the century-old trade body does — how it’s organized, what it sells, who it serves and how fast it can move, thanks to some smart new tools.
It’s a strategy he calls “4As as a service.” Less white-glove institution and more platform brand.
“We cannot scale at the speed the industry now runs,” Thomas-Copeland said, so he’s helping to rebuild the 4As to run more like a product company that happens to be a not-for-profit org that helps the industry.
Talent is a pillar
A recent talent white paper, “Redefining Entry-Level Agency Positions in the Age of AI” — a study the 4As contributed to alongside Bill Daddi, President, DBC — didn’t tell Thomas-Copeland anything he didn’t already know.
“We are students of the talent and human factor in our industry. We have to be,” he said, naming the MAIP Foundation, conversations with HR offices about intern budgets and graduate intake, and daily member calls.
“Every time I sit down with a CEO, I ask about their talent strategy, the up-skilling budget they have, the types of retraining they’re doing,” he stated.
Thomas-Copeland sees the holding companies and the independents pulling in different directions. Holdcos have made big technology bets, so they want “orchestrators” who can move across a proprietary stack. Independents don’t have that stack to sell.
“You’ve got to be dangerous in most things,” he said. “Know enough to be dangerous in most things.” In other words, different needs, different training, and different math.
An innovation team of two, building ‘4As in your pocket’
The org chart at the organization has been refocused. Some practice areas are being sunset, replaced by connected business units, and a horizontal delivery group — the Integrated Program Management and Innovation Team — that finally gives the 4As a “brain of delivery” it never had before.
The smallest is a two-person innovation team with an outsized mandate: building the organization’s first agentic AI tools for members.
“There’s no magic why, at some point in six months, this couldn’t be an app in your phone,” Thomas-Copeland said, floating the idea he keeps returning to — “4As in your pocket” that would make interacting with the organization much easier for members.
The tool that “changes the game”
The centerpiece of the new changes is still in beta, but is already making waves: 4As Intelligence. It’s a member-query service built to answer questions at the speed of the business. Historically a member email might take 24 hours to answer. “That 24 hours could be the 24 hours I needed the answer,” Thomas-Copeland said.
Built on the Gemini stack with a clean, simple interface, the tool draws first on the 4As’ own IP, then falls back to a third-party research provider when the association’s library comes up short.
Thomas-Copeland said that some of the information at the 4As has been hard to reach for its tens of thousands of members. This tool will help reach that information quicker.
“You sit on this stuff — you’ve got to make it accessible for it to be valuable,” he said.
The platform is set to answer questions for users, helping with research and problem solving, utilizing Google Deep Research for the research portion of the answers. And not only will the AI agent come up with answers based on thousands of documents in the system related to your question — linking back to white papers, videos and other information in the 4As archive — it will suggest alternative perspectives to the question you asked. It’s a “Did you consider this different angle?” that will provide a thought-provoking alternate way of looking at the issue.
A friendly launch of 4As Intelligence was set for July, with a member beta rolling out over the summer.
“It’s essentially going to change the game,” he stated.
A GenJam that sends creatives home with 30 new friends
The 4As is upping its offerings to the creative community, and it recently hosted The GenJam for Mother’s Day in New York. Creatives arrived at 9 a.m., got logins to an AI platform, took a brief from the host an agency’s CCO at 9:30, and put down tools by lunch. The afternoon was peer-to-peer — everyone reviewed everyone’s work.
McCann hosted 46 creatives, while Mother in Brooklyn drew close to 30. That’s where a young Weber Shandwick team walked away with the win. It was a case where the barriers dropped, and people left the building within eight hours with a new community.
Creatives left with reassurance as well in that their craft is as important as ever. Hard skills, soft skills and community in a single day. Now, the event is being productized, with dates planned on the West Coast and down through the Central and Southern U.S.
Moving faster than comfortable
There’s more in the works for the future — a head of product hire, a product portfolio strategy with a value map, an upgraded CRM, and a sharper, more point-of-view brand voice. Thomas-Copeland stated he is a direct marketer by trade, so building models off member data is second nature.
“It’s a cultural shift. It’s challenging, because everything is moving faster…We have to keep moving.”
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Kyle O’Brien is managing editor of Indie Agency News.
