I need to admit something uncomfortable about this brilliant post on dying agencies.
I was there. Not as a bystander. As one of the senior people making the decisions.
CP+B London, 2014-2016. Managing Partner. I watched exceptional strategists get made redundant. Sat in meetings where "operational efficiency" trumped giving people three weeks to crack a brief properly. Nodded along when we prioritized launch dates over getting the thinking right.
Every pitch where I said "we need to move faster" instead of "we need to think better." Every creative review where I approved work that was good enough rather than fighting for great. Every budget conversation where I didn't push back hard enough on why thinking takes time and costs money.
I knew what we were losing. I'd seen it before at other agencies. The slow erosion of the space where uncomfortable, brilliant, properly weird thinking happens.
And I still made those calls. Because the spreadsheet logic was relentless. Because clients wanted faster and cheaper. Because the holding company targets weren't going to hit themselves.
Here's what haunts me: the gorilla-playing-drums example in the original post. That only happened because someone senior had the institutional authority to be unreasonable. To fight for the irrational. To risk looking stupid in service of being remembered.
I had that authority. Sometimes I used it. More often, I compromised.
The great agencies didn't just fail. They failed gloriously. Big bets. Spectacular losses. But they built memory and wisdom in the process. Modern agencies fail efficiently. No lessons learned because no risks taken.
We created that. I created that.
I've written before about failing gloriously in my own career. Co-founding startups that provided eye-watering ways to lose spectacular amounts of money. Making choices that looked suicidal but taught me more than any sensible pathway could.
But this failure wasn't glorious. It was just... wasteful.
We didn't kill these agencies through dramatic disasters. We killed them through a thousand small, sensible compromises. Death by a thousand "let's be realistic" conversations.
The question that keeps me up: could we have fought harder? Or was the economic logic so overwhelming that the outcome was inevitable regardless?
I suspect it's the former. Which is harder to accept.
At 60, recently redundant, I find myself asking what institutional knowledge actually survives when the institutions are gone. What do I carry in my head that nobody thought to write down?
Turns out it's not the processes or the frameworks. It's the memory of what it felt like when we had the courage to be unreasonable. When "that tested well but it's shit" was something you could actually say out loud.
The agencies that might matter next won't rebuild the old cathedrals. They'll be started by people who remember what those cathedrals felt like and have the appetite for the kind of spectacular, instructive failure that made them matter.
But we need to be honest about what we lost. And who lost it.
Some callings don't respect business models.
Creativity is one of them.
Wish I'd remembered that more often when it mattered.
