DIGIDAY, JUNE 2026

Bose CMO Jim Mollica hasn’t used a creative agency in four or five years, he told Digiday. One CPG CMO, overheard at a dinner this week, said they no longer believe in agencies of record. They want ideas to come from anywhere — a creative agency, a creator, even AI. Creator-owned StudioB’s Olly Lewis met with several CMOs this week who want creator-made shows, not TV ads, as the baseline for their advertising.

These are small examples but they point to something bigger.

For the first time, a growing number of CMOs are thinking about creative more broadly than creative agencies. Those businesses don’t have a monopoly on it anymore. “What we see from our own agency partners when we collaborate from the same starting point are more relevant campaigns that enhance the consumers’ in-the-moment experience — faster iteration, sharper formats, and work that adapts as audiences do,” said Corey Rados, head of global creative studio at Uber Advertising. “When AI is optimizing placements against real-time behaviors in milliseconds, brands need to build campaigns that can move fluidly with those signals.

This makes closer collaboration across creative and media necessary.”That’s a polite way of describing a much blunter shift: the standalone ad is losing its footing as the unit advertising gets built. It’s happening for two reasons, and they compound each other.

The first is cadence. Mass moments big enough to justify one hero ad — a World Cup or a Super Bowl — are rarer simply because attention has fragmented past the point where anything else can reach that many people at once.

Everywhere else, search, content, and creator work are collapsing into one continuous funnel: an ongoing flow of assets reacting to real signals, not a single placement to optimize. The second is discovery breaking down.

People increasingly find things through conversations with LLMs rather than search, fed largely by creator content the platforms never pay for or attribute. Both shifts are pushing CMOs toward the same kind of partner: one that can move as fast as the data and stay close to culture at the same time. That’s a different axis of judgment than “who makes the best ad,” and it’s pulling in expertise that never used to be in the room for this kind of brief.

“The landscape shift is making every brand builder a direct to consumer founder with their hands right on the creative wheel,” said P&G’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard on stage earlier this week. For his agencies, it’s no longer a one-stop shop, he continued. It’s a more modular one, where partners work in tandem and leverage each other’s superpowers. “We find the most valuable creative partners, or what we call MVPs, with the best skills and experiences and desire,” said Pritchard. “These MVPs flow to the work, and they’re indispensable in creating big brand ideas like Real laundry magic and sprinting with us and with our inhouse team to generate the volume and variety of assets that we need to win.”

That doesn’t mean CMOs are turning their backs on creative agencies entirely. Mother and Uncommon, among others, continue to do great work for brands like Anthropic and Electronic Arts. But so do creator agencies, production studios, hell, even AI. Because brilliant ideas and distribution increasingly come from different places, not just the agency holding the AOR contract. “The key message has been that creators are no longer just a part of the media plan; they are creative partners who can support brands in creating a sustained momentum using always-on storytelling,” said Olly Lewis, the commercial boss of StudioB, the creative studio owned by creator Brandon Baum. “There hasn’t been a panel or session that I’ve seen this week that hasn’t come back to creators — and that really says something.”

What it says is the definition of creativity is changing. Creativity is arguably the only job left in knowledge work that can’t be automated away. Anyone can generate content from a prompt now. The brands that break through will be the ones who out-think the noise, not outproduce it.

“I launched Platform13 in 2017 because of a gap I’d seen from the inside: brands that build cultural relevance and authority beyond their category have a clear competitive advantage, and yet almost none of the systems around them were set up to deliver it – and no external partners were built to close that gap either,” said the marketing consultancy’s founder  Leila Fataar, who also held senior marketing roles at Diageo and Adidas.

Before those ventures, she spent a decade running Spin, her first company, doing early integrated comms and guerrilla-style activations for cultural brands like a young VICE and Carhartt. They used flyposting because they couldn’t afford out-of-home ads, built shared audiences through collaboration and worked with up-and-coming creatives because that’s how culture and conversations actually travelled. She took that outsider approach brand-side and had to rebuild internal processes from the inside to make it work.

“Because what I found was that large organisations are still structured around the hero campaign that justifies both the production and media spend,” said Fataar. “But the conversations shaping how people felt about those brands were happening somewhere else entirely, in ways, places and spaces those traditional systems couldn’t track or respond to fast enough.”

The agencies with that mix of speed, cultural intuition and corporate know-how are the ones that will win the next decade of this business. Everyone else will be stuck justifying a hero campaign to a culture that’s already moved on.

“What we’re hearing consistently this week is that marketers aren’t just raising the bar on what creative looks like, they’re fundamentally rethinking who they want to build with and how they want to build,” said Johnny Rohrbach, co-founder of global partnerships and operations at Silverside AI. 

The agencies that understand that will be the ones that adjust their whole business model accordingly. Pricing built on guessing a client’s budget rather than scoping real costs is a bad foundation for any relationship and fixed deliverables can’t survive a marketing cycle that now moves week to week.

CMOs increasingly show up with their own scripts and ideas already worked out, not a blank brief. The old agency posture — disappear for three weeks, come back with three options — doesn’t fit how clients want to work anymore. What’s needed is a reset on both sides: cmos more open to handing over a rough idea instead of a finished script, agencies more willing to collaborate rather than disappear and present.

“CMOs today are showing up with a clear initial vision,” said Rohrbach. “They know the direction they want to go. What they need now is a partner who can run alongside them, help refine and enhance that vision, and build from that starting point together, not an agency that retreats into a black box and comes back as the sole arbiter of the idea.” Granted, he’s got skin in the game. After all, his company helps some of the biggest brands produce ads with generative AI in minutes.

But,there’s truth in it regardless, backed up by what plenty of others have said this week. “We’re going back to the origin of the advertising industry,” said Joe Maglio CEO Cheil Agency Network. “Things that will separate agencies are: Creativity and Trust.”