I never wanted to run a marketing agency. I wanted to build machines that did the marketing for me.
That isn't the standard way to open an essay on creative leadership, but it’s the truth. The entire agency model, built on the billable hour and armies of junior staff, struck me as fundamentally broken from day one. It incentivises inefficiency. It rewards bloat. It is a relic of a pre-computing, pre-internet, and certainly pre-AI era.
Today, that model is not just broken; it is a death sentence. For the founders and leaders clinging to the idea that their agency’s value lies in the combined brainpower of their creative department, the asteroid is already in the atmosphere. The age of Mad Men, of Don Draper’s abstract genius and gut-feel pitches, is over. We are now in the era of the Machine Man, and the transition will be brutal.
In astrophysics, the Great Filter is the idea that some step in the development of life is so improbable that it prevents most potential civilisations from ever becoming interstellar. Marketing has its own Great Filter: the non-negotiable, paradigm-destroying technological shift that renders all previous models obsolete.
For decades, that filter was the internet. Then social media. Now, it is agentic artificial intelligence. This is not the fluffy, chatbot-and-ChatGPT-wrapper ‘AI’ that most agencies are currently slapping onto their credentials decks. This is the real thing: autonomous, goal-driven systems that can strategise, create, execute, and optimise marketing campaigns from end to end with minimal human intervention.
This is the Great Filter that will wipe out 90% of incumbent agencies. Their entire business model is predicated on selling human time to execute tasks that machines can now do better, faster, and for a fraction of the cost. The 90-9-1 rule of agency business applies here: 90% will go bust, 9% will be acquired for their client list by the 1% who actually build or master the new technology. The survivors will not look like agencies; they will look like software companies.
Leadership in this new world is not about managing people. It is about designing systems. The new creative director does not brainstorm slogans; they define the parameters and goals for an AI agent that will generate and test ten thousand of them in the time it takes to make a cup of tea.
The most painful truth for many creative leaders to accept is this: their creativity was never the unique selling proposition they believed it to be. For the most part, what passed for ‘creativity’ in marketing was a combination of pattern recognition, remixing old ideas, and applying a known tactical framework to a new brief. It felt magical, but it was largely algorithmic.
And anything algorithmic can, and will, be replicated and surpassed by machines.
The real moat, the actual value a true leader provides, has always been the ability to correctly diagnose the commercial problem. To look past the client’s stated request—“We need a new TV ad”—and identify the root issue—“Our cost of customer acquisition is 30% too high because we’re targeting the wrong demographic on the wrong platforms.”
Creativity is a powerful tool for solving that problem, but it is not the solution itself. An award-winning ad that doesn’t move the commercial needle is a beautifully crafted failure. An unglamorous but effective automated email sequence that plugs a leaky sales funnel is a work of genius. The Machine Man understands this. The Mad Man does not.
Let’s take a real-world UK example: Ocado. A fascinating, complex business. Is it a supermarket? A logistics company? A technology platform? Its core challenge is not a lack of brand awareness or a need for a clever new campaign strapline. Its problem is a complex, multi-layered systems challenge involving logistics, user experience, customer retention, and fierce competition from Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and the encroaching Amazon Fresh.