Last One Out, Turn off the Lights
If I had to name one thesis that ties together most of the “strange” moves we’re seeing in the advertising industry right now, it would be this: the era in which an agency’s brand name served as the most important cognitive shortcut for quality is ending. In its place is an era where predictable outcomes, scalability, and technology matter more—even if that means symbolically burning a few sacred logos along the way.
In recent weeks we’ve seen this play out in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. After Omnicom’s acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG) closed, the company announced a reorganisation—along with the sunsetting of historic agency brands: DDB and MullenLowe are to be folded into TBWA, and FCB is to be absorbed into BBDO. In other words: within Omnicom, legacy creative brands are being retired not because they “stopped delivering,” but because, in the logic of the new setup, it pays to simplify the structure and concentrate clout under a few umbrellas.
At the same time, WPP—until recently the very embodiment of global scale—is grappling with a painful loss of value and yet more profit warnings. When I look at market-cap figures—falling, by most estimates, from roughly £24 billion in 2017 to around £3 billion in 2025—I don’t read it solely as “management failure.” I see the cost of a paradigm shift that’s only now gathering speed. I also see how the language of client conversations has changed: more and more, it’s not the CMO deciding “who has the best ideas,” but the CFO and procurement asking about repeatability, risk, transparency—and whether you can deliver a similar effect faster and at lower cost.
To understand where this ruthlessness comes from, it helps to view the history of advertising as a sequence of advantages that became standard faster than the industry managed to narrate them as its unique edge. First came big creative. Then digital. Then data and personalisation, followed by automated media buying and real-time testing. Over and over, pioneers discovered that what looks like art today becomes a feature in a tool tomorrow—and soon after, a checkbox in an RFP. The paradox is that the industry spent years proud of teaching the market modernity—only to start losing once the market learned it and began treating it as obvious.
Today, that democratisation is accelerating again, because AI is lowering the barrier to both creative production and campaign optimisation. Technology platforms aren’t hiding their ambitions. Meta, for instance, has been pushing toward a model where advertisers can create and target campaigns through automation directly inside the platform ecosystem. If the gateway to the audience, the data signals, and the distribution mechanisms sit in the hands of a few players, then they will decide how much work the intermediary “must” do—and how much can be compressed into a few settings and a few assets that the algorithm will turn into hundreds of variants.
In that world, holding companies make a cold calculation: an agency brand, while it builds pride and attracts talent, can be an expensive luxury when the client is no longer buying a “story about creativity,” but an integrated growth-delivery system—where creativity is one link in a chain, alongside data, commerce, production, and measurement.
That’s why words like “operating platform,” “capabilities,” “commerce,” and “production” are showing up in holding-company communications. It’s not accidental—it’s an attempt to translate advertising into a language that can be managed like a supply chain: measurable stages, shared data, a single reporting standard, and—crucially—fewer overlapping structures. In practice, that means fewer autonomous “principalities” and fewer feudal titles, and more product and technology thinking—what Omnicom described as a shift toward capability-based divisions. This model rewards process consistency, so pressure rises for standardisation, which improves margins—but can also squeeze out autonomy if people lose space for their own voice and, yes, creativity.
Does that mean creativity is becoming irrelevant? Quite the opposite—its role is simply becoming more precise. Creativity is no longer only the brilliant advertising artifact that wins attention through form alone; it’s the architecture of meaning and behavior: how a brand operates in conversation, in the feed, in the store, in customer service—and how it stays coherent when thousands of message variants are generated automatically. This is creativity that sets boundaries: what the algorithm is allowed to do, what it’s not allowed to do, where personalisation ends and loss of identity begins.
That’s why the disappearance of signs like DDB or FCB hurts twice: because we lose a piece of history, and because we lose a clear quality signal that helped clients and talent make faster decisions. When a holding company says, “we’re absorbing this into a larger whole,” everything may add up operationally—but at the level of symbols something gets diluted. And with dilution comes risk: people will look for meaning elsewhere. In boutiques and independents. Or simply on the client side, where responsibility for brand coherence is often greater today than ever before.
And here I return to the thesis: if the agency brand is to survive as real value rather than ornament, it has to prove again that it offers something you can’t buy in a platform dashboard or an automated creative-generation tool. That “something” will be a mix of strategic responsibility for the brand’s meaning, courage in decisions (including unpopular ones), the ability to connect channels and experiences into one logic, and the capacity to impose order on data and processes—so that technology is a tool, not a religion.
If we treat these months as a signal rather than industry gossip, we’ll see that the game is about a new centre of gravity: from “the agency as a temple of creativity” to “the agency as a system for delivering advantage.” And in systems, the winners are those who can simplify the complex without losing what’s human.
In sum: it’s not creativity that’s going out. It’s holding companies that are turning the lights down to “economy mode.” And the part that remains closest to the act of creation is moving anyway—into independent agencies, where platforms are tools, not leashes. They adapt faster to change, especially around AI, because what matters most is flexibility, attentiveness, and speed of response.
