Let It Burn

Toasting Marshmallows Over Adland

(Kate Winslet in The Dressmaker. Burning it all down. Rolling out the petrol-soaked red carpet. Felt apt.)

For the last however many decades, the work of marketing, brand building, communications and creativity has been consolidated into something we’ve called an ‘industry’. The advertising industry. And the shape of that industry has been agencies – big fat retainers, sexy offices, bloated overheads, giant teams spinning out TV commercials and brand campaigns. That was the machine.

And for a while, it worked. Or at least it appeared to work, if you were sitting in the right seat.

But I’ve been watching this thing slowly collapse for the better part of a decade now, and I think we’ve reached the point where we can stop pretending otherwise. The model is broken. The economics don’t hold. The retainers have shrunk into project work that makes cash flow a nightmare. The holding companies have been merging and acquiring and consolidating, which is what you do when you’re trying to paper over decline. And the layoffs – fuck me, the layoffs.

Omnicom just cut 4,000 jobs and announced it’s killing DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe entirely. Brands that have existed for decades, just absorbed into other brands like they never mattered. And they did this weeks before Christmas, which is an asshole move. But then, these big holding companies are assholes. They always have been. They’ve spent decades extracting value from creative talent, building bureaucratic empires that serve shareholders and executive bonuses, not clients, and certainly not the people actually doing the work. So forgive me if I don’t weep for the machine. I weep for the people caught up in it.

WPP’s stock tanked 18% in February. They lost 6,000 people last year. They’re telling investors to expect more decline to come. Over a third of agencies have conducted layoffs in the past twelve months. The sun is setting on legacy models and there’s a feeling right now – I see it everywhere – of the whole thing disappearing into a giant gaping black hole.

And if you’ve just been laid off, or you’re watching your agency shrink around you, or you’ve gone freelance and you’re staring at a market that feels impossible to crack, I understand why it feels like doom. Like there’s nowhere left to go.

But here’s what I want to say: I don’t think the industry is disappearing. I think it’s disseminating.

There’s a difference.

The work of brand building, marketing, communications and creativity – that work still needs to happen. Brands still need to be built. Stories still need to be told. Strategy still matters. None of that demand has evaporated. What’s changing is where it lives. And how it gets done.

82% of major brands now have in-house agencies. That’s up from 42% in 2008. P&G – one of the biggest advertisers on the planet – now manages 80% of their media spend internally. The split between external and internal work has basically inverted. A decade ago, most of the work went out. Now most of it stays in.

And the stuff that does go out? It’s going to look less and less like big bureaucratic holding companies and more like ragtag groups of brilliant minds. Strategists and creatives and makers who can be assembled for a project, who can move fast, who aren’t carrying the overhead of a Soho office and seventeen layers of account management.

But it’s not just about where the work lives. It’s about how it happens.

The old model was a conveyor belt. A creative assembly line. Brief comes in, gets processed through a series of handoffs – strategy to creative to production to media – each department passing the baton to the next. Paint by numbers. Templated. Industrialised. Strategy wasn’t really strategy; it was a sophistication signal, a pitch-winning tool, intellectual seasoning sprinkled on the production line to justify premium pricing. Insights became SKUs.

That model is dying because it doesn’t match the shape of the work anymore.

The work now is faster. More fluid. More intuitive. It doesn’t move in a straight line from brief to execution – it loops and iterates and responds in real time to culture and data and platform changes. It requires people who can think and make across disciplines. It requires proximity to the brand itself – to the inner machinery of the business – not an external vendor three tissue meetings away from anyone who can actually say yes.

AI is part of this too. Not because it’s going to replace everyone – though let’s be honest, some roles are going to thin – but because it’s fundamentally reshaping how the work gets done. When a single person with the right tools can do what used to take a team of twelve, when AI can turn one strategist into a small army, the economics of the bloated agency model make even less sense. But that’s a conversation for another day.

The point is this: the holding companies can’t do the speed that’s required now. They can’t keep up with how fast platforms change, how fast culture moves. They’re not close enough to the bone of the brand. The work itself has evolved. The rhythm has changed. The pace has changed. And a machine built to produce three TV spots a year doesn’t scale to three hundred pieces of content a month.

I’m not saying this from the sidelines, by the way. I left the agency world seven years ago and I’ve spent that time deliberately finding alternative spaces for my skills – problems and clients and industries far outside what the “advertising industry” would recognise as its territory. I work with sports and entertainment ventures, with enterprise AI transformation, with leadership development for global executives, with emerging technology companies trying to figure out what they actually are. I embed directly with brands, not as a vendor but as a strategic partner. I assemble teams when I need them and work solo when I don’t. It’s not a traditional agency. It’s not even a traditional consultancy. It’s something more fluid, more responsive, more human-scaled.

And it’s working.

Not because I’m special – but because the model makes sense for how the work actually needs to happen now. There’s a version of this for everyone. It just doesn’t look like the thing we were trained to aspire to.

But I’ve also had seven years to figure this out. I left on my own terms. I had time to experiment, to fail, to build something that fit. I wasn’t pushed out three weeks before Christmas with a mortgage to pay and a market flooded with people just like me.

So I’m not going to stand here pretending this is easy. There’s a burning down happening. And it’s brutal for the people in the blast radius.

If you’ve just been laid off – especially weeks before Christmas, by a company that couldn’t even give you the dignity of timing – I know this might all sound like cold comfort. The rent is still due. The bills don’t care about industry restructuring. The fear is real and valid and no amount of posts about “exciting new chapters” is going to make any of this feel less shit.

Losing a job isn’t just losing income. It’s losing identity. It’s losing the structure that told you who you were and where you belonged. It’s waking up on a Monday with nowhere to be and feeling like the map has disappeared. And when everyone around you is also flooding the market, when every job posting has three hundred applicants, when the industry you built your career in seems to be actively collapsing – I get why it feels hopeless.

But here’s what I want you to hear in this moment: those skills you built, the instincts you honed, the ability to see patterns and tell stories and understand people and make things that move them - none of that disappears because some holding company decided to please shareholders before year end. That stuff lives in you. It’s yours. They didn’t give it to you – you built it, often in spite of them, not because of them.

The machine never deserved you. It just convinced you it was the only game in town.

It wasn’t. And it definitely isn’t now.

The work is disseminating – into in-house teams hungry for real talent, into collectives forming around shared values instead of shared overhead, into direct relationships with brands who are tired of the holding company tax, into new shapes we haven’t even named yet. The demand for strategic thinking and creative excellence and brand building hasn’t evaporated. It’s just finding new vessels.

And yes, your skills might need to evolve. The strategist of the future isn’t going to be a deck-maker who hands off to creative. They’re going to be embedded, fluid, multi-faceted – part strategist, part creative, part cultural translator, part systems thinker. The old silos are breaking down because the work demands it. But that’s not a threat. That’s an invitation to become more of what you already are, not less.

This isn’t a sunset. It’s a shape-shift. And if you can hold on through the fear and the uncertainty and the very real financial terror of not knowing what’s next – there’s something almost exciting about being here at the start of whatever comes next. Not as a cog in someone else’s machine. But as someone who gets to help build something better.

The assholes are losing. The bureaucracy is crumbling. The sausage factory is shutting down.

And you? You’re still here. Skills intact. Ready to work.

The logo on the building was never the talent. You were.

That’s not nothing. That’s everything.

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