MAA 2024 Review of the Year: what’s creativity got to do with it?

No prizes for guessing this year’s big event, the mooted $30bn takeover of IPG by Omnicom.

Whichever sector of the ad industry you want to talk about this is going to have a big impact, not least on all those people who are going to be looking for jobs in 2025. The announcement itself was a classic case of Sherlock Holmes’ “dog that didn’t bark.” Barely a mention of creative as respective bosses Omnicom’s John Wren and IPG’s Philippe Krakowsky hymned the benefits of tech-driven media (below, looking rather glum.)

It was much the same holding company story in the UK with WPP’s Mark Read bigging up the transformational qualities of AI as the one-time global market leader tried to be more Publicis, currently the (pre Omnicom/IPG) biggest by revenue and market cap. WPP may find itself the story of 2025 as chatter that it may be taken private – to give some reward to shareholders – gets louder.

So what did happen to creativity and what does its future look like in 2025? At the moment agencies charge by the hour for creative, It’s been that way since the full service model was fractured, in which payment was by media commission. In that respect creative was free and, some say, it’s getting that way again among the holding companies with more or less free creative being a way to lure clients into media deals. The platforms – Google, Facebook, Amazon et al – have always existed on commission.

But that’s not an option for the vast majority of independent agencies or smaller groupings. Arguably we’re seeing the early days of a two-tier industry where there’s a premium paid-for level of ads and the majority churned out with the assistance of AI. That, in turn, will create new opportunities for those clever enough to devise work that advertisers actually want.

As with most revolutions it will be grim at times. But the industry needs to change if it’s going to stay relevant and still provide, at its best, something other than relentless algorithm-driven assault and battery for consumers. An ad world dominated by AI and influencers is most definitely not something to look forward to in 2025.