The End of Creative Agencies. Or the Beginning of the Right Ones.
The transformation isn't using AI. It's doubling down on what AI can't do.
The week my exit was announced, a past client called.
Voice I knew well. The question was new.
“If you’re leaving Ogilvy, it must be the end of creative agencies.”
He said it as a statement.
It made me really upset.
If there is one thing I have passionately believed in for thirty years, it’s creativity. And the agency as the ecosystem built to deliver it. And the agency’s capacity to transform - which, frankly, is what I have spent most of those thirty years doing.
So no. I didn’t agree with him. But I didn’t entirely disagree either.
I had written about this publicly a year ago. So I had a head start on the answer.
Why Think Alone?
Twenty-five years ago I built Truffles, Ogilvy’s first global intranet - a way to turn ten thousand people across a hundred and fifty offices into a single knowledge organisation.
The campaign that launched it asked one question: Why think alone? It worked because it answered the question every employee was already asking - what is in it for me?
That stayed with me.
So when AI arrived as the next great transformation an agency had to absorb, I knew behaviour wouldn’t change because we mandated. Or explained the features.
I made it about the same question. Person by person. Role by role.
May AI help you?
Snapshot of campaign developed by Thjnk - part of the Ogilvy Group Germany
An art director. A strategist. An account director. A finance manager. Each one shown becoming a sharper version of themselves.
And in the building of that campaign - role by role, person by person - I realised something larger than AI training. This industry had forgotten what made it different in the first place. The talent. The creative solving. The ability to build difference for a brand the way nobody else can.
AI was going to augment that. Beautifully. Necessarily.
But augmentation was not the destination. The talent was. The campaign about AI adoption was, underneath, a campaign about putting talent back at the centre of the agency.
That realisation is what I told the client, when he called. The version of agencies he thought was ending - yes, that one is ending. AI is going to finish what industry strain and procurement started. Content factories with strategy departments attached, scaling output for clients who measured value in volume. Over.
But what creative agencies were actually built to do is not over. We just forgot it for a while. AI has done us the favour of reminding us. And right now, in this exact window, there is a chance for creative agencies to double down on the thing that made them valuable in the first place.
Difference. That is the job. It always was.
Kantar’s BrandZ analysis, presented at Cannes 2022 and reinforced in the years since, lands on a single number that ought to be tattooed on every CMO’s office wall.
Meaningful Difference. Ninety-four percent of a brand’s pricing power.
Salience? Six.
Six.
Which means the entire commercial premium a brand can command - every euro of margin above the category average - comes almost entirely from being meaningfully different in the consumer’s mind. Not from being seen more. From being unmistakable.
Salience - the marketing term for how easily a brand comes to mind - still matters. It drives volume. It earns the buy today.
And salience needs creativity. You don’t get top of mind by being average. You get there by being memorable. Where AI helps is the volume part. The variants, the targeting, the frequency, the distribution, the optimisation - the modern salience game is fought across hundreds of touchpoints in ten markets in real time. The idea that breaks through is still the agency’s job.
Meaningful Difference is the other ninety-four percent. The pricing power. The margin. The premium consumers will pay above the category average. AI cannot deliver that. Because AI averages. Meaningful Difference is anything but average.
Klarna ran the experiment publicly for the rest of us. In 2024 they cut external marketing agency spend by twenty-five percent, compressed six-week image cycles into seven-day AI ones, and reported ten million dollars of savings. Bold. Visible. Real.
By spring 2025 their own CEO walked it back. They had focused too much on cost, he admitted. The result was lower quality, and not sustainable. Customer satisfaction had dropped twenty-two percent. Brand voice, by then, was indistinguishable from any other fintech in the category.
The savings were real. The damage to the brand was also real.
Strategy without a path is a slide. A slide is not a transformation.
This is where consultants and agencies have been getting confused with each other.
Consultants give you a beautiful strategy. One hundred and forty-eight slides. A maturity model. A roadmap with workstreams. The CEO nods. The deck goes on the shared drive. Nobody knows what to actually do.
Agencies, at their best, do something different. They do the strategy, they do the plan, they do the solutions. The same people, in the same room, all the way through. That continuity is what agencies have spent the last fifteen years pricing away in the name of efficiency.
The most valuable people in this industry have always lived in that continuity. We have called them creatives, strategists, planners, account directors, designers, social leads. They should all be called solutionists.
Solutionist says what the person is for.
I made the word up. It’s not in the dictionary. That’s deliberate.
I have watched it happen a hundred times. A real solution, strategically argued, that the client can see come alive in the room. Practical. Emotional. Customised for the brand. Engaging to the audience. Stirring something. Moving the business.
Theory becoming real. That is what a solutionist creates. That is what creative agencies have always done at their best.
A solutionist starts with a real business problem. A solutionist ends with an idea that can be implemented tomorrow.
They borrow from culture, behaviour, data, technology. They iterate live. They bring people with them, including the client, especially the client.
Augmented by AI, every solutionist becomes a sharper one. Faster across the boring parts. More patterns spotted, fewer hours wasted defending the obvious. The technology gets better. The judgement matters more.
Become an augmented creative solutionist.
Become the best talent. Because that is what clients want. That is what the talent wants. We just have to remind everyone.
The agency is the differentiation. Or it isn’t an agency.
Positioning a creative agency as a home for augmented solutionists is meaningless if the agency works the way it does today.
Briefings should be collaborative and iterative. Client and agency in the room together. Not the agency disappearing for three weeks and returning with a deck.
Actually, briefings should not be waited for. They should be co-created in regular business sparring sessions. Yes business. Not marketing. Not comms.
Ideation happens in hothouses. Always. Multiple disciplines, compressed time, real solutions by the end of the week.
The expert in influencers and creators sits at the table from the start. Not bolted on as a media line. Contributing from the first conversation to drive the conversation.
The behavioural science expert is in the room from the brief. The best of them understand the real barriers and motivators of human decision-making — and almost always lead the team to the simplest solution. The one that makes all the difference.
Ideas do not arrive as scripts anymore. They arrive as partnerships, sponsorships, experiential moments, cultural events, services, customer programs. Creating genuine, brand human connections one at a time at scale.
Cultural pulse is shown continuously, as evidence the agency knows what is going on in the world the brand actually lives in. Not delivered as an annex.
The agency runs on the best AI tools available, and replaces them the moment something better arrives. Experimentation is constant. What works in one office is in every other office’s hands by the end of the week.
New joiners rotate through every capability in their first three months. Because the only way to grow solutionists is to make them touch every part of the problem before they specialise.
None of this is exhaustive. Some of it already happens - but usually only for a pitch, then disappears once the work is won. The point is not the list. The point is to be ruthlessly focused on demonstrating the value of solving with the client, not for them.
To design the whole agency experience around that.
Visible difference. Felt difference. Different enough to charge for it.
That last part matters. Premium pricing is not what agencies ask for at the end of a long process they hope went well. It is what agencies earn when the difference between them and the next team in the pitch is impossible to miss from the moment a client walks in.
A personal note, since the call that started this piece was personal too.
I am leaving Ogilvy. I do not yet know what comes next.
What I do know is that I am leaving the best agency of augmented creative solutionists I have known. And I will always root for them and every augmented creative solutionist in this beautiful, suffering industry.
Because talent is what I have always been about. And it is what I will miss most.
Output got cheap. Difference got rare.
Talent is the only thing that builds it. AI makes it better.
Creative agencies that organise around that - and pay for it - will own the next chapter.
I think you hit it right on the head - AI is only as good as those who use it. I'm only beginning to understand that since I've put so much energy into hating it. Time to stop that and get on with figuring out how to make it work for me - thank you for the reminder.
Patou, I love the way you write about our industry while making it personal - it's what I try to do in some of my pieces too. I sent the story I kicked off my blog with to your inbox - only if you have time. I think (hope) you might relate.
I adore your blog and can't wait for more.
Beginning of the right ones is perfect! Creative agencies was always about creative content, which was literally abused by hobby marketers. Finally time has come where end users are pushing them out.