A friend's thread on LinkedIn got me thinking about something I have carried for a while: how creative teams evolve. It is an eternal memory-less cycle that, just like agency and in-house macro structures, rolls and rolls over itself, like Sisyphus' stone, up the hill only to come tumbling back down to the same place. We seem unable to learn from our own failures as an industry, and just repeat them in endless cycles.

Work often moves to a brand's in-house team, or is brought intra-agency, because of new democratizing tools like AI. This can trigger creative struggles under admin models that were built for different goals and outputs. When the work is forced in-house by the brand or the agency for financial opportunities, and not because of the skill or tools needed, it can become a slippery slide in quality.

Every new tool brings the same question back to the foreground: do the work ourselves or outsource it? Structural and economic limits keep tainting that judgment, until it becomes more and more unreasonable and the work, the brand, or the service quietly gets worse and worse. Sound familiar? We saw it with affordable HD cameras and desktop editing, WYSIWYG social and web design, and now it is a growing problem with all the AI tools. All of these forced the same challenge: being able to do the work is not the same as being positioned to do the best work.

"Being able to do the work is not the same as being positioned to do the best work."

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There was a time when creativity, when ideas, were practically free. It was bundled into the agency's media commission. For decades, agencies got paid a commission on media spend, so creative rode along apparently free, timesheets didn't exist. When media started consolidating into independent companies to beat out agency generalists and gain purchasing clout, agencies lost the billing, and by the mid-nineties creative was well on its way to being paid for hourly while media was being bought elsewhere. Deciding where it lives and repricing it have been a non-stop challenge ever since: how much is a good idea actually worth? Thirty years later, we are blaming AI for a bill that came due long before it showed up.

Every operating model since has answered the same question differently: where should the thinking live, how much is it worth? And where should the making happen? Who pays for them? Each new structure just made the right audience journey, the right investment, the synchronization of the big idea, that much harder to pull off.

In-house often becomes the preferred answer: bring it inside, skip the markup, reduce the layers, quicken the response. But the team is often not fully built, and reports to people that do not have the right skills to foster and defend the ideas. Brand in-house or agency, what often decides the quality is not the overall model, it is the internal structure: whether a creative sits at the table as an equal or not. Starbucks looked to unify its marketing team, creative, and digital under one senior seat, a real structural move, but if the person holding it is not from a creative background, how unique or bold is the move really? Not a verdict on the move, just the open question many may be asking: does the seat carry creative authority, or just move the same reporting line one way or another? In-house creative works when whoever runs it has a real voice, not when they are stuck between a CFO counting hours, a CMO unwilling or unable to take creative risks or even maybe a CEO that does not see any difference.

Some networks seem to be returning to the model they left behind. Bayer last year handed IPG over $700 million of media and creative as a single unified relationship. So some see re-consolidation as the path. We know we need the ideas, the challenge is that if AI turns a twenty-hour job into a five-hour job and you are still billing by the hour, you just lost seventy-five percent of the revenue for the same result. The jury is still out on what is the best answer.

Independent is often considered the cleanest version of the experiment, because nothing external is forcing the question: no board, no stockholders, no external powers. What happens is simply the result of a shop choosing their own destiny. Mother never sold. It was built with roughly half its staff in the creative department, no traditional account leads, and creatives talking to the client directly. The result: 21 percent revenue growth in 2024 and Marketing Week's Agency of the Year. Obsidianworks just bought back the minority stake it sold in 2021; its CEO said the point was moving faster and setting their own trajectory. Not nostalgia. A business choice looking for a payoff. For all parties, but most especially the independents, the real bet beyond agility and efficiency may be the longevity of their culture as they grow: how well they protect what makes them who they are, and how well they can carry it into whoever leads next. What can we learn from Ogilvy and Leo Burnett's experiences and evolution? Articulating that culture is only the first step. The harder part is teaching it, passing it on beyond one person or one founding team, into the next generation of teams and leaders. Mother's newest move looks like the beginning of that bet in practice: four new global leadership roles, none of them its founder, spreading the responsibility for the culture instead of leaving it to rest on one person.

"Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy."

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— Jack Welch

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None of the three models has a simple way of being right. Big brands seem to need big agencies, but what conceptual and monetary price do they pay for the service? And how long will they be willing to pay it? The org chart in many ways is defined by who pays for the thinking, and what thinking do they value most. What changes is that the bill that has been itemized in so many different ways for decades is once again coming due, and every system is struggling to answer how it's paid.

The real question may not be in-house, network, or independent. It may be deeper: what you believe in, and how you measure success. You may only be building for the next quick win, moving on to the next gig as soon as possible (what I've decided to call Locust Leadership*), or you may be invested in defending what the client's brand and the agency's name represent, and what they'll be worth three, five, ten years down the line. It comes down to where the client and the agency are willing to place their time and money, who participates when the decisions are being made, and which discipline's judgment decides what idea moves forward, or even how things are actually made.

*I will get deeper into this concept in another article.

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