Why creative agencies are dying.

The creative agency world is going through a quiet crisis, and many agencies haven't noticed yet. After more than 100 campaigns and a long look at the industry from the inside, I think I know what's going on. Clients are tired of choosing between beautiful work that doesn't perform and effective work that has no soul.

The agencies still playing by the old rules are losing clients to a different model, one that refuses to make that choice at all.

The false choice

For decades, the unspoken deal was: you can have stunning creative work, or you can have measurable business results. Rarely both. That put marketing directors in an impossible spot. Some ended up with campaigns that won awards but didn't move revenue. Others got campaigns that delivered numbers and looked like nobody cared.

It was never a law of nature. When Kantar matched ad testing data with WARC profit figures, they found that the most creative and effective ads generate more than four times as much profit. At the same time, Peter Field's IPA report The Crisis in Creative Effectiveness found that award-winning campaigns had become no more effective than campaigns that won nothing. Creativity pays, but only when it's pointed at the business.

What's replacing the traditional agency

The future isn't more agencies. It's strategic creative directors who work inside a business as partners rather than vendors. I see four reasons this model keeps winning:

• Less overhead, more expertise. Instead of paying for offices and junior layers you don't need, you get senior strategic thinking for the time you actually use.
• Faster decisions. No briefing through layers of account management. You talk directly to the person who understands your business and can decide in the room.
• Real business context. Traditional agencies rarely get close enough to understand your market, your competitors or your internal politics. An embedded partner lives in that context every week.
• A results focus. Every creative decision is judged against business outcomes, not awards or personal taste.

Brands have been moving this way for a while. The ANA's 2023 in-house agency report found that 82% of its members now have an in-house agency, which tells you how many companies want creative capability closer to the business.

Three forces behind the shift

The first is AI. The uncomfortable truth is that much of what agencies sold was always execution rather than strategy, and AI now handles a lot of design, copy and production faster than a junior team. What it can't do is understand business context, build relationships or think about market positioning. That's where people still add real value, as I wrote in why AI didn't kill creativity.

The second is that clients want partners, not vendors. The old agency theatre of glossy case studies and process diagrams doesn't impress the way it used to. Clients want evidence of business impact.

The third is that performance is no longer optional. Creative work that doesn't drive measurable outcomes is expensive decoration, and the market has very little patience left for pretty campaigns that don't move the business.

What I see working now

The partners doing well cover strategy, execution and performance optimisation together, instead of spreading them across separate specialist agencies. Call it the Swiss Army knife approach.

They also work differently with clients. Rather than one-off projects, the model I see winning is being embedded in a client's business one or two days a week: deep integration, ongoing strategic guidance and consistent execution. And every creative decision starts with the same question: how does this move the business forward? That doesn't limit creativity. It focuses it.

Traditional agencies struggle to follow. High overhead makes them expensive next to lean strategic partners, project-based thinking keeps them in vendor mode, heavy processes slow decisions down, and an award-driven culture pulls against a results-driven one.

How to choose a future-ready partner

If an agency asks about your creative preferences before your business objectives, that's a warning sign. Good partners start with the business: what are you trying to achieve, how will we measure success, what would a breakthrough look like? Then they design creative work that genuinely serves those answers.

A few questions worth asking any partner:

• How do you measure creative success beyond engagement metrics?
• What business results have your campaigns actually driven?
• How do you build performance tracking into the creative strategy?

Look for someone who challenges your brief instead of just executing it, and who asks uncomfortable questions about your goals. Creative work without business understanding is expensive guesswork.

Where this leaves us

The partners thriving today have solved the creativity-versus-performance problem. They don't make you choose between work people remember and results you can show the board. They deliver both, on purpose. The shift is already happening; the only real question is whether your creative partnerships move with it.

If you're rethinking how creative work happens in your company, I'd be glad to compare notes. You can read more about how I work, see selected work, or book a 1-1.

— Joost