The creative agency is dead. Long live the creative agency.
Big agencies think they are tech companies now.
They’re training datasets, not people.
They’re automating, not inventing.
Is the age of using big agencies for big ideas over? Perhaps for some…
The holding groups are crumbling. Iconic agency brands, erased. Resources centralised. Cutting back and cutting loose. It’s more tech—fewer people.
Meanwhile, brands are in-housing more resources and with that, more agency functions.
Platforms are in the client’s kitchen eating your lunch.
Experienced talent deemed too old and too cynical of the technological age are sharking the edges, hunting whales.
Yet within managed decline, a gap reemerges.
The fruit still grows beneath the brambles.
What we used to sell holds immense value—bold, forward-thinking creativity.
But we became a mirror of convention. Through studying the science we allowed ourselves to become formulaic.
Creativity has always been and will always be our greatest lever for growth.
It is the overstretch.
The outreaching hand.
It doesn’t follow convention—it creates new ones.
We’ve been told…
“Advertising is a weak force”
“People don’t care about brands”
“Light buyers matter more than loyalists”
All of these things are widely proven. Yet, all of these things merely reflect the status quo—the conditions we created through convention by fighting for the lowest common denominator. They are provable within the data we created.
They are not hard truths. They are the edges of the known world.
For many of us, they represent rules for engagement—the constraints for how we must do business.
They should make you mad, not lazy. Real mad. Burn it all down, mad.
For myself and others, they present clear provocations and the case for creativity.
Through data and observation, we mapped the status quo.
Now we must chart a course off it.
The value of the outsider, the renegade and rebel, could not be clearer.
Since the mid-90s’ the corporate world has been embracing homogeny like the favourite uncle at a wedding. Cost-cutting for bonuses. Bland and stable. Predictably incremental. A world without dreams where everyone sleeps cosily. The sheep grew fat and lazy and forgot all about the wolf.
I’ve been asleep. I’ve been lazy and reliant on other people’s ambitions. But I think there are others who feel the same as I do. Who would gladly burn it all down in an act of creation.
If you believe…
Creative effectiveness is more than glossy replication…
Ideas are storms that can’t be bottled…
Humanity is deeply flawed and infinitely beautiful…
You’re tired of…
The latest robot-made garbage…
Agency cultures that mask exploitation…
Feeling trapped by conventional thinking…
Then, let’s have a coffee.
We don’t have to witness the last steeple fall to know the city is lost.
