I spent years at Adam&EveDDB in London and DDB Group Singapore. Watched some of the finest creative minds in the business do genuinely impossible things—make people feel something about fuel, for God’s sake.

Those agencies aren’t really there anymore. The names remain. The buildings.

Even some of the people. But the thing that made them them? Gone.

Here’s what nobody wants to say out loud:

We didn’t just cut costs. We performed an inadvertent lobotomy on institutional knowledge.

DDB knew how to make Volkswagen loveable. BBH understood how to turn
Levi’s into a religion. Wieden+Kennedy could sell authenticity without it feeling like a hostage video.

That knowledge wasn’t in a PowerPoint deck. It was in the heads of expensive, bloody-minded senior people who’d take three weeks to crack a brief, then deliver something that worked for three decades.

We sacked them. Replaced them with people who are very good at optimising
Tuesday’s Instagram carousel.

The great agencies died the same way brands died—by becoming efficiently mediocre.

They stopped teaching juniors the dark arts (strategy, psychology, culture) and started teaching them the bright arts (dashboards, metrics, “performance”).

And now AI can do all that bright stuff faster and cheaper. Turns out we engineered agencies into a shape that machines can replace.

The tragic irony? The skills AI can’t replicate—cultural intuition, taste, understanding why humans do illogical things—those were precisely the skills we decided we couldn’t afford.

What dies when great agencies die?

Not just jobs. The accumulated wisdom of what actually works.

The uncomfortable conversations where someone senior says “that tested well but it’s shit.”

The irrational confidence to spend £2m on a 90-second film about a gorilla playing drums.

The willingness to look stupid in service of being remembered.

When I started, agencies were universities for commercial creativity. Now they’re button factories wondering why AI keeps eating their syllabus.

You can rebuild offices. You can’t rebuild culture.

And that’s what we lost. The culture that believed marketing was hard, important, and worth doing brilliantly.

We traded it for efficiency. Got exactly what we paid for.

Watching it happen from inside was like watching someone sell their grandmother’s wedding ring to buy scratch cards.

The networks will survive, obviously. The names are too valuable. But the thing those names used to mean?

That’s already gone.