POV: The creative industries are about to split in two

Big agency networks lurching. Brand clients in-housing creativity. Marketing budgets re-assigned to procurement. Some freelancers taking to LinkedIn to either complain about a mass work dry-up, or post a defiantly chipper: “Great news everyone, I’ve got some capacity coming up. Hit me in the DMs if you’re looking for some strategy/social/design support.” Creative trade industry press catastrophising for clicks.

It’s getting a bit boring, isn’t it? All this gloomy, reductive thinking, scaremongering headline-grabbing nonsense? This bleak picture of the creative economy is something that we need to urgently transition away from. Because despite the challenging and uncertain current situation, there are signs that our industry is about to witness a major growth spurt. Your business will either kill it or get killed along the way, depending on your perception of one burning issue: whether you are about driving efficiency, or growth. Whether you use AI to replace your people, or maximise their potential.

Shouts and Murmurs

At Unknown, a big part of our job is listening to what’s occupying the minds of creative leaders. As a talent growth consultancy we need a close understanding of our clients’ fears, hopes and ambitions. We talk to thousands of our community each month and we host a monthly IRL meeting – Good CEOs – with a network of creative industry CEOs. It gets deep. It gets personal. It gets emotional. Recently, we’ve noticed a sense of optimism – entrepreneurs in our space are getting ready to grow again.

We focus every conversation along the same pattern: Where are you now? Where are you going? What’s stopping you from getting there? This forces people to think from a place of abundance rather than fear.

There are three encouraging factors. An influx of private equity money is helping more medium-sized agencies scale and win bigger, more prestigious accounts. And there’s evidence to show that brand clients are falling out of love with performance marketing, and returning to a philosophy of brand building. But the biggest issue is the thing I’ve already mentioned. The best agencies are about to figure out how to use AI to maximise, rather than replace the talent they have at their disposal.

There’s a split forming in the behaviour of companies in the creative industries. And the two archetypes – let’s call them maximisers and replacers – are becoming easier to spot.

Replace (to the bottom)

The replacing group are using AI to cut costs, speed up process, and banking the capital versus time saved. They’re seeing a jump in their bottom line as fewer human resources are used to bring a project home. They are aware that tech is fast, cheap, and that LLMs don’t get upset about being asked for last-minute project changes. But there’s a problem with this approach.

It’s not about delivering better to the client. Its measures are borne from insecurity and a sense of vanishing territory. Think about it. Saying: we did this project more cheaply, with fewer people and with less cost might be the least emotionally motivating thing you can claim. Driving project efficiencies is a yawn. It’s a table stakes thing. Consider Coca Cola’s 2025 Christmas campaign. Made cheaply with AI and wholeheartedly hated by nearly everyone who saw it. The top comment on the ad’s YouTube listing still reads: “The most profitable commercial in Pepsi's history.”

Then take WPP, or as the media calls it, “the beleaguered WPP”. It’s been trying to cut its way to profits since long before ChatGPT broke the internet and has lost its ‘world’s biggest agency group’ title in recent years. Last month, it said it wants to become “a simpler, lower-cost, AI-enabled business” or save £500 million over the next two years. It then sparked outrage with the announcement that its top brass are considering £11m in bonuses for its new CEO Cindy Rose. To be continued.

Omnicom tried a similar tack in 2025 when it bought IPG, closed most of its creative agencies, and cut a fifth of its jobs in just over a year. The industry response to Omnicom going after scale rather than creativity was pretty clear. One ex-CEO said it was “like California falling into the ocean”.

The financial logic is hard to argue against and many firms are following that logic. In 2023, research agency Forrester said that 7.5 per cent of US creative agency jobs would be automated by 2030. In October they changed that forecast. Now it reckons on 15 per cent by the end of this year. And yet, the creative economy is set to double in global GDP value within the next four years. Which means that the money is out there, it just moves a little differently these days.

Maximise (for continued rise)

Art directors aren’t cooked. Neither are copywriters, strategists, suits, finance or production people. The only thing that should be resigned to history is the argument that AI adoption automatically means layoffs.

Looking more broadly, Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, put the argument smartly: “If the world runs out of ideas, then productivity gains translates to job loss.” In other words, if your organisational response to AI is to shed staff, you might want to consider your own level of vision. Perhaps you don’t need more technology, but better ideas.

Some might be lured into thinking that small-scale outfits are the most likely to fall into the maximiser camp. But that isn’t necessarily so. The progress of Publicis Groupe in recent years demonstrates that big networks can Maximise with the best of them.

A few weeks ago, it raised its expectations for its 2026 earnings and said that its bet on AI was to thank for higher margins and more growth. Publicis is also hiring more creative staff to work with AI platforms, agentic designers and the proprietary data providers it has bought. “The best way to preserve jobs is to grow. We are confident for our people, because we are growing faster than the market,” CEO Arthur Sadoun told The Drum last year.

R/GA is another maximiser example. After Truelink Capital backed it with $50m, the agency has used some of its commercial muscle to buy AI system design studio Addition. Since then, R/GA has teamed up with Google and Moncler to make an experimental AI film that 1) while not perfect, is actually passable and 2) probably could not have been done before.

These aren’t accidents. They’re the future, and they’re the five per cent of the present. AI consultancy Spark said last year that while 80 per cent of agencies are already using AI, only one in 20 “have moved beyond experimentation to build real competitive advantage”. Meanwhile, The American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) has also declared the industry to be at a nexus: “AI is already amplifying human genius… (but) real-world application quietly remains fixated on cost efficiencies,” CEO, Justin Thomas-Copeland said last year, asking whether the industry is “pushing for greatness… or subtly settling for ‘good enough’ in the name of easy efficiency?”

Dual-speed category

Two philosophies are emerging in the creative industries. One is about fear, uncertainty and defending a position. The other is about confidence, ingenuity and boldly expanding into new creative frontiers. One is short termist, the other imagines an amazing future of growth and innovation. In the coming years, we’ll see the difference between these two approaches become clearer, and more creative leaders will transition from one camp to the other. As this scenario plays out, replacers will become more pessimistic about the fortune of the creative industries, and maximisers will become more optimistic. It calls to mind the old quote by Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”