Why Creative Agencies Lost—and What They Must Do to Start Winning Again

Media shops provide scalable lessons

The ad industry loves to debate creative vs. media. Which is more strategic? Which drives growth? Who sits closer to the CEO? But that misses the actual problem. Media agencies built businesses that scale. Creative agencies never did.

Media shops organized around a simple machine: More client cash flowing through their pipes means more revenue. Fees. Volume incentives. Data leverage. Margin on margin. Their economics compound. A dollar placed becomes infrastructure for the next dollar.

Creative agencies built the opposite. Every idea is a bespoke project. Every campaign starts from scratch. Deliver, invoice, repeat. There’s no compounding. No flywheel. Just craft sold by the hour.

When media and creative split decades ago, creative lost access to the volume economics that kept them powerful. Media kept the machine. Creative kept the romance. But romance doesn’t pay for growth.

Creativity as a System

Media didn’t win because they’re smarter about brand building. They won because they built self-reinforcing systems: More spend → better data → stronger performance → more spend.

Creative got stuck in a linear trap: Deliverable → approval → invoice → start over. That model might work for boutiques. It doesn’t work for businesses trying to compete with consulting firms, tech platforms and AI-native shops.

Here’s what’s different now. Creativity has finally become infrastructure. Not metaphorically. Literally.

AI lets you turn creative into systems. Ideas become logic. Campaigns become templates. Brand becomes code. A design system isn’t just a style guide anymore. It’s an engine that generates thousands of variations, optimizes itself and plugs directly into commerce, media and product.

That’s not automation replacing creativity. It’s creativity becoming scalable for the first time.

Think about what this unlocks:

• Brand expression as an API, not a PDF.
• Creative that adapts in real time to performance data.
• Systems that learn and improve without starting from zero.
• Ideas that live inside the platforms where business actually happens.

This is the shift. Creative work can now compound the same way media spend does.

What Creative Agencies Need to Stop Doing

Creative agencies must stop selling deliverables and start building engines. 

That means:

• Design systems and designing systems that function as creative operating systems.
• AI-powered tools that let brands generate on-brand work at speed and at scale.
• Workflows where creativity and optimization happen in the same loop.
• Creative infrastructure that plugs into a client’s entire stack, not just their campaign calendar.

The agencies that figure this out stop being vendors. They become the layer that makes everything else work. And that layer doesn’t get disintermediated. It gets more valuable as the system grows.

Media thrived because it turned value into a machine. Creative struggled because it never built one.

AI doesn’t automatically fix that problem. But it makes it fixable. Creativity can now be persistent, adaptive and systematic. It can be infrastructure instead of a deliverable. It can generate revenue that compounds, instead of resetting every quarter.

The question isn’t whether creative matters. It’s whether creative agencies can finally build a business model that matches the value they claim to create.

The ones that do will print money. The ones that don’t will keep moaning as media gets an even bigger seat at the table.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​