New growth after the fire
Why the collapse of big agencies is giving rise to a better creative model
Firstly, forgive a little navel-gazing. If you’re a business searching for a creative partner, my hope is that this offers a clearer view of where agencies are headed — and why.
Thick smoke billows across the landscape. A hot, vicious forest fire is tearing through the creative industry, burning down agency after agency. Well-respected names have disappeared, with many more likely to follow.
The creative industries are being rapidly reshaped through destruction and regrowth. What we’re witnessing is a mass-extinction event for large network agencies — and, at the same time, an explosion of new independent studios, uniquely suited to the moment.
This crisis has been twenty years in the making. It’s the natural cycle of things. As conditions change, organisations either adapt or die. Unfortunately, the biggest animals in the forest have found adaptation hardest. Scale, once an advantage, has become a liability. But as with all cycles — new growth follows.
As holding companies fail to adapt and instead consolidate themselves into oblivion, smaller, independent agencies are emerging from the ashes. Built for modern challenges. Designed for speed, clarity and relevance. While the decline of the old guard is sad, the rise of what comes next is genuinely exciting.
A view of the terrain
More than any other creative discipline, advertising is bearing the brunt of this change.
Holding-company-owned ad agencies have endured wave after wave of mergers, restructures and redundancies. In 2025 alone, WPP reportedly cut around 7,000 roles. Later that year, the Omnicom–IPG merger erased respected names like DDB, FCB and MullenLowe, with more than 4,000 redundancies. I expect 2026 will bring more of the same.
New Zealand hasn’t been spared. A stagnating economy, government layoffs, vanishing budgets and a persistent lack of business confidence have hit large agencies particularly hard. It’s simply not a good time to be a big agency.
This story is personal. I was made redundant from a large advertising agency in early 2023. I was angry and frustrated — but not surprised. The ship was sinking. Their methods, structures and outputs had barely changed in decades, and the distance between leadership and the work had grown too wide. Starting Semper Semper wasn’t a leap of faith so much as a necessary correction.
Branding agencies, by contrast, appear to be faring better.
Naturally smaller, and often founder-owned, branding studios are better able to outmanoeuvre the fire that’s ravaging advertising. Smaller teams can retool, upskill and adapt faster. That’s not to say they’re immune to pressure — most are delivering more with less — but they’re still standing. Even after a little local pruning (an agency in New Zealand doesn’t need more than one office — just saying).
The forces driving the fire
Several strong winds are feeding this blaze.
Always on
The nature of business has fundamentally changed. Where, when and how brands need to show up has exploded — particularly across digital channels. This has placed enormous strain on large agencies attempting to service entire multinational pipelines.
Brands are now omnipresent and always on. In response, agencies have been pushed away from depth and quality toward speed and reactivity. When this collides with a holding company’s need for ever-increasing shareholder returns, creativity inevitably takes a back seat to spreadsheets.
Playing it safe
To squeeze more output from fewer people, risk has been engineered out of the system. Risky work builds brands — but it scares boardrooms. There’s no guaranteed ROI. So large agencies default to what can be justified with data, dashboards and post-rationalisation. Safe work gets approved. Memorable work rarely does.
Slow to act, hard to deliver
Big agencies are slow by nature. Large teams, multiple time zones, competing priorities and long chains of command make decisiveness difficult. Add internal politics and the ambition to be everything to everyone, and delivery starts to suffer.
Complex, multi-disciplinary projects break down when leadership doesn’t truly understand the services being sold — especially when that leadership comes from client services or finance rather than craft.
Failure to differentiate
Especially in advertising, many large agencies failed to meaningfully differentiate themselves. They sound the same. They look the same. Often, they produce the same work. Staff and freelancers rotate through a closed circuit. From a client’s perspective, it’s increasingly hard to tell one from another — and harder still to justify the premium.
AI
Finally, the biggest accelerant of all: AI.
AI hasn’t killed creativity, but it has exposed inefficiency. It has collapsed the value of volume work, templated thinking and bloated production pipelines. Much of what agencies once charged handsomely for can now be done faster, cheaper and often better by smaller teams using smarter tools.
For holding companies, this is existential. Their business model depends on scale, headcount and utilisation — none of which AI rewards. AI favours clarity, taste, judgment and speed. These qualities tend to live close to the work, not high up the org chart.
For clients, it raises uncomfortable questions. If ideas and execution can move this quickly, why so much friction? Why so many layers? Why does it take weeks to do what now takes days? AI doesn’t replace agencies. But it brutally punishes those that haven’t earned their place.
The new growth creative practices
Out of the smoke, three forms of new growth are already taking hold. These aren’t theories — they’re realities.
Independent agencies and studios
This is where most of the energy is. New agencies are being founded by senior practitioners who’ve seen the inside of the machine and chosen to build something better. They’re not recreating the old model at a smaller scale — they’re rejecting it outright.
These studios are:
Purpose-built for modern problems, not legacy retainers
Specialist by design, with a clear point of view
Small, fast and responsive, without layers of approval
Directly connected to their clients — the people you speak to make the work
Rather than hoarding capability, they collaborate. They maintain deep networks of trusted specialists and assemble the right team for the problem at hand. A strong core crew, scaling up and down as needed, keeps overheads low and standards high.
Most importantly, they experiment. They adopt new tools early. They adapt in real time. They don’t wait for permission. This isn’t a downgrade from the big-agency model. It’s an evolution.
Consultants and freelancers
We’re also seeing a steady exodus of senior talent into independent consulting.
Highly experienced strategists, designers and creatives are offering their expertise directly to businesses — embedded for a period, or leading defined projects. Many work using a film-crew model: assemble, deliver, disband, repeat.
The benefits are clear:
Lower overheads
Clear accountability
Access to senior expertise without paying for layers you don’t need
For businesses, this opens access to a wider, more flexible talent pool. For creatives, it restores autonomy and craft. The challenge, as ever, is orchestration.
In-house
More companies are also building in-house creative teams — and for good reason.
Always-on brands benefit from dedicated internal resources that can move quickly and build deep institutional knowledge. But in-house isn’t a cure-all. These teams struggle without strong leadership, or when specialist skills are scarce locally. The most effective setups are hybrid: capable in-house teams, partnered with independent studios for brand strategy, major launches and specialist firepower when it matters most.
Semper Semper is built for what comes next
Semper Semper exists because this shift is happening. After years inside large agencies, it became clear that the methods weren’t keeping pace with the world they were meant to serve. Too much inertia. Too much compromise. Too much distance between thinking and doing.
We’re deliberately small, independent and founder-led. We work with a senior core team and a wide, trusted network. We stay in our lane — branding, design and related technology — and collaborate deeply when projects demand it. We keep overheads low and standards high. We value craft, but we’re obsessed with outcomes. And we design our ways of working for modern businesses, not agency legacy.
There are no shareholders. No growth-at-all-costs mandate. Just the work, the client and our own consciences. This isn’t a reaction to the industry burning down. It’s a studio designed for what comes next.
Choosing the agency that’s right for you
In 2026, size is no longer an advantage. Speed is. Agility is. Judgment is.
The ‘safest’ choice on paper is often the riskiest in practice — slow to move, expensive to change, and structurally misaligned with modern business.
When choosing a creative partner, ask yourself:
Do they specialise, or claim to do everything?
Will senior people actually work on my business?
Can they adapt as my needs change?
Do they understand my constraints and ambition?
Are they building for the future — or protecting the past?
There’s no single right answer. Big agencies will still make sense for some organisations, some of the time. But for many businesses navigating change, growth or reinvention, independent studios now offer a safer, sharper and more relevant path forward.
If you’re questioning whether your current agency model is still serving you — or you’re curious about what a more modern approach could look like — let’s talk.