Why I think it’s time
for a new kind of advertising agency. By Richard Huntington
1. Advertising isn’t dead but the ad agency as we know it may be
2. Our work may work, but our economics do not
3. We do not earn value in proportion to the value that we create
for our clients
4. Even if our agency is successful, we aren’t paid a fair price for the
value we create
5. The situation is challenging for our owners but it’s tragic for our
people and their mental health
6. Agency consolidation is an admission of defeat not a strategy for
growth
7. Those selling AI agents so they can get rid of their staff are like
the person sawing off the branch of a tree while sitting on the bit
that’s going to fall
8. If we want to save something of this business and our people, we
must get to ‘higher ground’ fast, but this will mean dumping
many of the things we love
9. The high ground only has room for the things that client
organisations really value – transformational strategy and
nosebleed altitude creativity
10. Making endless assets with benchmark performance is for the
machines
11. There is no business left in churning out content – clients can do
that themselves
12. We used to make money from the plumbing, our only future is
to make money from the architecture
13. We need to understand we create solutions, we are not here to
provide a service
14. If we are to have any self-respect and bargaining power, we need
to value our solutions as much as our clients do
15. Solutions are ideas that change clients’ businesses for the better
16. We have spent over a century giving away those solutions, that
stops on 1st January 2026
17. No ifs or buts, pitches must go,
18. Pitches are the lifeblood of agency life, but they have destroyed
our value
19. It is rank idiocy to give away the solutions our clients value most
for free
20. If it takes a year of profit on a client to earn back the cost of
acquiring that client something has gone very wrong
21. For the people at the back, I’ll say it again. We must never again
pitch with solutions that should be paid for
22. Paid for pitches are not the answer – they defray costs rather than
respect our value
23. Giving it all away in a pitch worked when we made money in
production - that approach is as obsolete as a U-matic tape
24. We used to laugh at businesses charging project fees when we had
retainers, now the joke is on us
25. Retainers are only valuable if they retain some value
26. Talented people should never be happy about a negative margin
on their business – they are working for nothing
27. We need to be paid to deliver growth not deliver timesheets
28. Delivering growth is the only thing clients should care about, not
how many FTEs they have running around
29. We have moaned about time-based fees since commission died
but our inability to move on from them is pathetic
30. Time based fees bear no relation to the work the agency does or
the quality of the solution
31. True talent should never be blended on a rate card – clients should
not just get what they pay for but pay for what they get
32. If a client is happy paying an agency according to the number of
FTEs on a spread sheet, they deserve to have mediocre talent on
their business
33. No client ever needed 40% of an account handler, they need real
people who are exceptional making exceptional work
34. If clients don’t want to pay for the value they get, we can always
work pro bono, but they better have a cause we want to work on
35. The day we started calling ourselves ‘creative agencies’ was the day
we signed our own death warrant
36. For one thing creative is an adjective not a noun - how many
‘creative agencies’ are creative?
37. Strategy is now the value unlock for our business, because it’s the
value unlock for our client’s businesses
38. Strategy needs to move from the support act to the headline in
any agency that wants to survive
39. In the agency of the future most people will be strategists
supported by high altitude creative partners
40. Creativity needs to mean wild, wonderful, liberated human
expression not the cowed, tame, paint by numbers product that
dominates our industry
41. Furry mascot anyone?
42. Imagination is a more helpful word than creativity, AI finds it
harder to master
43. There is an infinite demand for people who can imagine a new
future for the organisations we work for – that’s the only business
to be in
44. Our imagination is the reason to hire us because it’s hard to in
house or automate
45. Sadly, the brand word may need to take a turn on the naughty
step too
46. We are here to create growth not build brands – ‘brand’ is a
strategy we use to deliver growth
47. It’s to our eternal shame that no client Exco understands this, but
we are wasting our breath explaining it
48. To be valuable we must liberate ourselves from nostalgia,
orthodoxy, dogma, servility, best practice and cowardice
49. The future belongs to those free and brave enough to experiment
with completely different ways to deliver value to clients and
derive value from them
50. The future belongs to you, if you can get to the high ground
quickly
