Simon Gawn - author If you’re in an agency right now, it’s hard to avoid the truth. It’s a bit grim.I don’t hear many growth stories. What I hear, over and over, is rapid decline. Shrinking margins. Fewer big bets. And a natural (if slightly unpleasant) instinct for leadership to protect themselves inside corporate structures, which slowly drains the joy and hope out of everyone below.Layer in cost-of-living and the maths gets uglier. The “best” agencies are clustered in expensive cities. Life is expensive. Salomons are expensive. Ketamine is expensive. The cultural payoff of agency life starts to feel paper thin.So if you’re doing career calculus, and you love creativity, teamwork, strategic, lateral thinking, and thriving in chaos, here’s what I’m seeing people do next.ADVERTISEMENT Stay: Be passionate and try to be part of the solution. Play the long game and build substance into your personal brand.Jump to a platform: One with arguably cleaner balance sheets and more certainty. Freedom of the soul and financial freedom are more closely linked than we sometimes admit.Back yourself and start being independent: It’s hard but rewarding — but make sure you have deep relationships, a strong point of difference, and a high tolerance for stress.Go in-house: In reality, the market is brutal and roles are more competitive than people admit.Use your skills to build a product or brand: Stop renting out your skills and start applying them. Learn e-commerce. Get serious about social media and distribution.Get into martech: This is a spot where creativity and strategy are still undervalued — but you might have to rethink your feelings toward the word “sales”.None of these paths are inherently right or wrong. They are simply different trade-offs.If you are going to stay, here are some things I would be doing to stand out and help your agency thrive.Learn the language of customer and consumer strategyCMOs increasingly answer to GMs of consumer, CFOs and CEOs who don’t own marketing, but absolutely dictate direction. This sits alongside a battle cry: get upstream or get commoditised. If you live purely in delivery, you will get squeezed. Own the brief earlier and tie yourself to outcomes, not outputs.Please, stop selling hoursProcurement is better at that game than you are, and it will undervalue your IP every time.People want agencies with great people supported by productised capability — tools, IP, repeatable systems, AI workflows. That is what allows you to get in the fight alongside clients in the constant battle for efficiency.By understanding your clients’ pressure to change, you reduce the effort, risk and political cost of that change — and you become extremely hard to replace.At the very least, understand what agentic AI meansYou don’t need to build it for clients, but you do need to understand who they’re using it with and where it fits into their operating model. Many organisations will adopt a new operating system within 18 months. If you don’t speak the language, you won’t be invited into the room.Another thing that will get you into the room is measurement to justify decisions. The era of “trust me, I’m a creative genius” is over. Measurement, projected outcomes and first-party data can sit comfortably alongside world-class creative leadership. In fact, they make it stronger.Finally, treat your brand as a moatPitches are won before ChatGPT or Midjourney is ever opened — we just pretend they aren’t.Experience, reputation and desire are worth investing in. Superficial positioning and thinly veiled corporate greed are not. Agencies aren’t being punished because creativity doesn’t matter. It’s because too much behaviour is not in line with today’s requirements.AI is easy to blame. But you rarely bleed out from one dramatic blow, it’s usually from the cuts you kept telling yourself didn’t matter. Related Content Opinion Smart curators are the antidote to content overload News Out-of-home measurement system Move is finally live SUBSCRIBE Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing. Topics agencies ai artificial intelligence Have your say Login with:Continue with LinkedIn Or comment anonymously Your comment will be marked as unverified Name Comment Δ Latest TV ratings: Who won the big weekend of sports? Cultured masses: Ritson on the great yoghurt shortage of 2026 Australia Post celebrates the cultural cache of postcodes in new nationwide campaign The other pay gap: Digital giants leaving media and agencies behind Radio Survivor: Jackie blindsided Kyle, and ARN blindsided both of them