Holding companies are killing creative agencies to protect margins and calling it efficiency.

The great agency names, the ones that defined eras, built brands, changed culture, are disappearing. Merged. Absorbed. Diluted into networks where the priority is cost, not craft.

The greats who built this industry understood something we've forgotten. Advertising was never about buying space or producing assets. It was about ideas that made people feel something. Ideas that travelled. Ideas that built brands over decades.

That required creativity. And creativity doesn't live in a department. It lives in how you think about the whole problem - the message, the medium, the moment.

We've been tempted to think of agencies as either "creative" or "media." As if you can separate the idea from where it runs. As if the message and the medium are different disciplines.

They're not. They never were.

The split happened for commercial reasons, not effectiveness reasons. Procurement wanted to negotiate separately. Holding companies wanted to monetise both. And somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves this was how it should work.

Now both sides are being commoditised. Al can generate ads. Platforms can buy media. The execution layer is collapsing into automation.

So what do we have left?

Taste. Judgment. A point of view that actually stands for something.

In short, creativity, applied everywhere.

Not just in the ad. In the media strategy. In the placement. In the timing. In the format. In the way a brand shows up across every touchpoint.

A media agency that doesn't think creatively is just a buying desk. A creative agency that doesn't understand media is just making art for award shows.

The future belongs to agencies that refuse to choose.

The ones who understand that distinctiveness is the only moat. That brand is the only thing that can't be automated. That great advertising has always been about creative use of media, not creative versus media.

The industry spent decades splitting something that should never have been split.

The question now is whether we're brave enough to put it back together.