Inside the creativity debate—how the rise of media and tech is redefining success

Creativity, once regarded as the bedrock of the ad industry, has increasingly become less of a priority. Look no further than this year’s Super Bowl—once the ad world’s shining showcase—where many of the ads were uninspired or lackluster. There are many theories as to why. Some blame holding companies for commodifying work by prioritizing media over creative, while others believe an overreliance on performance marketing and technology is hurting the craft. Others maintain that creativity isn’t in decline, it’s simply evolving to meet the unending demand for personalized content and a data-driven, results-oriented approach to advertising. What is undebatable, though, is that the shift is financially driven. Evidence Omnicom Group’s proposed acquisition of Interpublic Group of Cos., which would create the largest agency company in the world with combined revenue of almost $26 billion. On Omnicom and IPG’s investor call to announce the deal, there was little mention of creativity. Instead, executives touted the proposed combined company’s scale and capabilities around media, data, principal-based media buying and technology. Today, holding companies are gashing the price of creativity in order to secure the more lucrative media accounts, according to industry insiders interviewed by Ad Age, and there is little to no expectation that creative agencies will generate profit, said Tom Denford, CEO and co-founder of consultancy ID Comms. Denford said that creative today “really only serves one purpose.” “It's just sticky, and it keeps the media in the group,” Denford told Ad Age. “[Agencies] want to do just enough to service that.” In their pursuit to win the media business, holding companies have devalued “the one thing that separates them from everybody else, which is our ideas, our strategies, our output and the product we produce,” said David Droga, CEO at Accenture Song. “Then clients started not valuing creative, stopped paying for creative and such. It became this self-inflicted destruction.” Ad Age Small Agency Awards Showcase your agency’s creativity, business success and commitment to a thriving workplace. Enter today Omnicom, WPP and Publicis Groupe declined to comment on this story. IPG was not immediately available for comment. Erin Riley, global CEO of TBWA, said the Omnicom-owned agency is “not worried about marketers devaluing our creativity” and that big ideas “are still very much in demand.” “In a world where evolving technology is optimizing to sameness, the best marketers recognize that novel, disruptive creativity is more valuable than ever,” Riley said. Philip Gaughran, president, global creative product, growth and strategy at Dentsu, said creativity is not an either/or proposition. “When you need to solve client brand and business challenges in today’s environment, collaboration is more effective than competition—so our creative agencies work together with our media agencies, not in opposition, or one simply supporting the other,” he said. “It’s not media at the expense of creativity, it’s the combined effect that helps impact more. Those agencies who have a very narrow definition of ‘creativity’ cannot compete with that vision.” The changing role of a creative agency Creative agencies were once the “centerpiece” of a brand’s marketing communications mix—but that’s no longer the case, according to Bob Kantor, the CEO of indie agency network Dawn and former global chief marketing officer for MDC Partners, before its 2021 merger with Stagwell. “Modern marketers, more and more, are not seeking out traditional lead creative agencies as their core model,” Kantor said. “The challenge the legacy holding companies have is that these traditional creative agencies are a very significant part, in fact, a centerpiece, to most of their portfolios.” Several marketers have recently opted for an agency roster model, including General Motors, KFC and Geico, the last of which recently launched a review to expand the number of shops it works with. There, of course, have also been instances of companies consolidating their services under one holding company. Lead agency relationships aren’t completely gone either, with brands such as Starbucks choosing such a model. Holding companies are implementing more integrated services to adapt to a changing market. A watershed in this regard was Publicis debuting its Power of One model—a play for winning huge swaths of marketers’ business by combining multiple agencies to manage and pitch major accounts. Since then, the French holding company merged its Leo Burnett and Publicis Worldwide to bridge human craft with technology. Publicis’ bet on the model, along with its investment in Sapient and Epsilon, has separated it from the rest of the holding companies because the company has a clear vision that rivals don’t, said Brian Wieser, CEO and principal of consultancy Madison and Wall. WPP, meanwhile, has consolidated creative agencies over the past couple of years and Omnicom has brought together certain parts of its business, such as production, opting for a collective model with its creative agencies, called the Omnicom Advertising Group. Recent news: A decade of deals that transformed the ad industry Troy Ruhanen, president and CEO of OAG, said the collective is different from a consolidation because the intent is to keep Omnicom’s agency brands separate while sharing capabilities in areas such as AI. “[Clients] do pitches for a reason,” Ruhanen said. “They want to see some variation … that’s why for us, agency brands will always have a future inside of that. Now, it still comes down to performance. You could have a clear positioning, but if [your agency] is not winning, if you’re not growing or doing fantastic work, then you don’t have a right to just survive.” More pressure on content At the same time, marketers’ needs have evolved. Brands are now tasked with marketing on so many different media channels that their budgets are spreading thinner each year, which means mass-produced content has taken priority over brand-building work. “It’s more about messaging than marketing,” Dan Jeffries, founder of Jeffries Consulting, said. “More product and price messaging. What ends up happening is the content itself is very bland, and it’s not that breakthrough stuff. It’s not memorable at all.” Then there’s the sheer demand for volume. When executives talk about performance marketing they are increasingly talking about personalized content at scale and investments in generative AI to grow those capabilities. “The money isn’t going to search and direct [marketing]. The money is going to Facebook video, TikTok, YouTube, retail media and more,” said Andrew Swinand, the CEO of Inspired Thinking Group and former CEO of Publicis Creative. “The issue is ubiquitous channel proliferation requires more content, which leaves less [budget] for the big hero idea. Brands are trying to solve it by doing less brand content or outsourcing.” A 2024 report by Deloitte projected that brands would increase their annual personalization budgets by 29% last year and that the amount of brands incorporating personalization has increased by 50% in two years. The silver lining for creativity is that executives such as Swinand believe that AI-enabled content automation will decrease the amount that marketers are spending on that part of the marketing mix, leaving more room for investment in big brand ideas. Along with Inspired Thinking Group and major holding companies, other agencies have made significant investments in content automation, including Monks and even small agencies such as Supergood. Accenture has been one of the leaders in generative AI investments. Accenture currently has 25 generative AI studios globally which any business unit, including Accenture Song, can utilize. More: OpenAI made its Super Bowl debut ad with Accenture Song Swinand predicts that if the industry truly embraces the model of AI-based content automation with brand ideas at the top, agencies will shrink significantly, but the importance of agency brands will increase. “Creative agencies will be smaller and have a higher margin,” Swinand said. Holding companies “are just doing away with brands, whereas I actually think brands matter more than ever. It will be a smaller, more focused brand, but there are people who are just better conceptual thinkers like [Mischief founder and Chief Creative Officer] Greg Hahn, [WPP Global CCO] Rob Reilly, and [McCann Worldgroup North America CCO] Britt Nolan. You want those people on your business.” Evolving rather than declining Creativity isn’t dying; it’s just showing up in different ways and from different people, according to Droga. Accenture Song, which describes itself as a tech-powered creative group, acquired design and tech agency Work & Co at the beginning of 2024. Creativity “doesn't just mean we’re hiring writers and art directors and designers,” he said. “It can be designers. It can be AI strategists, it can be the way we apply Work & Co, which is about designers and engineers sitting together with new versions of creativity deployed in new ways.” The industry’s traditional definition of creativity, focused largely on 30-second branding films, is too narrow, said Justin Billingsley, chief growth officer at Monks and former global chief marketing officer at Publicis. Now, creativity is about integrating media, technology and data—and the most valued employees are the ones who can orchestrate these elements. “The new creativity isn’t making pretty shiny things that people talk about after the Super Bowl,” said Billingsley. “What we’re sitting with now is a time where attribution of work that actually works is stronger than ever before.” Holding companies’ price-cutting has actually had a trickle-down effect on workflow, said Billingsley. While the average creative director may not be aware their work is being discounted, their corporate superiors know “how much they’re getting paid for the work, and that means that they will constrain the amount of teams that are on the business,” he told Ad Age. “They’ll constrain the amount of versions that you do before the work gets accepted. They’ll constrain the time you have available.” Myles Worthington, CEO of Worthi, said he’s not sure those big Super Bowl spots do the job they used to. What makes good creative is “still being misinterpreted,” Worthington said, noting that TV campaigns can feel too “premium” and they don’t resonate with younger audiences. It’s “why TikTok does so well, because it can be quick and not so premium.” Also: Recent Super Bowl ads were largely forgettable Karl Lieberman, global chief creative officer at Wieden+Kennedy, argues that the sheer number of ways to interact with consumers, whether through a Twitch partnership or social media campaign, presents more opportunities to be creative. One example may be a quick-turn value campaign for McDonald’s that featured John Cena, built in 10 days after the agency picked up on a remark the wrestler-turned-actor made in a livestream. “I’ve been working in advertising since 1999, and back then you made maybe one or two good things a year,” said Lieberman. “Now, oftentimes … someone will have 100 interesting pieces of work a year.” The emphasis on performance marketing is a bit of a misnomer, said Greg Hahn, chief creative officer at Mischief @ No Fixed Address, because it has always been creativity’s job to perform. “There’s a perception that [work] can be [creative or effective], and we’re trying to prove it’s both,” Hahn said. “That’s why [Mischief] puts so much emphasis on our Effie wins, versus some of the other [award] shows.” To make effective work, Hahn said the agency always focuses on strategy first. “Our first step is what to say and then the second step is how to say it,” he said. “By the time we get to execution, as wild as it may seem, it will seem super logical. Once you take the steps to get there then it’s not a risk. It’s very calculated.” More: Greg Hahn named 2024 Creativity Awards CCO of the year “Performance is important,” said Jaime Robinson, co-founder and CCO of Joan. “We’re not making art projects, we’re here to actually drive business results.” Rise of independents All these factors are leading to a bifurcation of creativity in the industry between holding companies and independent agencies. Brands are going to holding companies for mainly integrated services, business transformation and media, but more often looking to smaller indies for disruptive creative campaigns. Several experts pointed to indie creative shops—many of them led by disgruntled former holding company executives—as leading the charge in creating standout ads, and these shops are winning bigger accounts. Indie Agency News pointed out that, out of the 57 ads that ran in this year’s Super Bowl, 25 were created by independents and 22 by holding company agencies (10 were done in-house). More: The best and worst Super Bowl 2025 commercials “Strong creative is ultimately the product of strong relationships,” said Omid Farhang, the CEO and founder of Majority. “Where relationships suffer from bureaucracy and inefficiency, a new generation of creative boutiques are pouncing with the competitive advantage of personal touch.” Some executives feel that holding companies and indies aren’t even in the same business anymore. “Independents are in the business of creativity, of designing processes, products, people … everything is designed around ‘How do I make the very best creative I can?’” said Kelsey Hodgkin, CEO and partner at indie shop Special U.S., and a former holding company executive. At holding companies, “everything is designed around growth and the numbers, and decisions are made based on scopes and what departments you need to fill scopes, versus necessarily the quality of the product going out the door.” There is a place for both models to work in tandem and actually complement each other, according to experts. Hodgkin said some recent client wins suggest marketers are hiring indie shops to handle creative and then sending “the rest of it” to a holding company. One of the biggest reviews of last year, General Motors, had such an outcome. While Stagwell’s Anomaly and 72andSunny were added to the creative roster, so were independents Mother and Preacher. Then the automaker hired S4 Capital-owned Monks for content development and Omnicom Precision Marketing Group for CRM. Dentsu’s Carat remains GM’s media agency. Holding companies are not necessarily interested in handling the type of creative work independent shops are managing, according to Howard Moggs, founder and chief growth officer of growth consultancy Team Uncommon. “The best creative in the industry is coming out of independents,” Moggs said, “but the reason why they’re feasting is because the big shops don’t want to feast on the minnows. They’re going after whales.” Moggs is also encouraging the indie agencies he works with to drive more value in creative ideas by changing the conversation on deliverables and pricing. “Creativity needs to be pointed at an outcome,” Moggs said. “Stop selling it as a service and start selling the value that it delivers and using creativity as a means to get there.” Indie agencies are also the ones leading a shift in how agencies are compensated, replacing traditional pricing based on billable hours and costs per head with deliverables- and performance-based compensation. Some people including Moggs said pricing models have to change in order to reverse the commoditization of creativity. Joan’s Robinson said her independent shop had a completely deliverables-based compensation model when it was founded in 2016, but has since evolved to add traditional pricing based on client needs. “The nice thing about being an independent is that you can try things and you can see if they work,” she said. “Holding company agencies don’t have that luxury, because there’s somebody at the top who’s asking for their kickback or their cut who’s set a number and they are like, ‘You have to hit this.’” Also read: How agencies can retain their culture as they grow Impact on creative talent The broader industry shift is impacting talent, too. Maria Milliken, senior client partner at Korn Ferry, said leading with a creativity-first approach can appear outdated in today’s landscape for holding companies. She said many agencies are hiring fewer people in concentrated creative roles now that they are billing against a broader set of problems. They are now seeking people with expertise in commerce, product development, tech and data. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Robinson said it’s been important for her and other leaders at Joan to continue putting creativity–in whatever form that takes—“front and center,” so the agency can keep attracting younger generations of talent and not lose it to rival industries. “Creativity will always be [in this industry], it just might not look the same as it did before,” said Moggs. “Creative jobs probably will look different in the future, but there’ll always be jobs for people to be creative.”

Inside the creativity debate—how the rise of media and tech is redefining success

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