Mondays in the ad industry just aren’t what they used to be. They come with an aching feeling. That sensation that sets in right after your dog jumps on your lap and accidentally crushes one of your testicles. It’s the sting of loving something that’s stopped loving you back. The realisation that our industry might have fallen out of love with creativity.

It wasn’t a big explosive bust up, it was a slow march to apathy and a steady rise in anti-industry sentiment from within. Over two articles, Ben Phillips, Creative Director, Films and Content, Monks, explores the influences that have shaped our world over the past 20 years and more importantly, what could the future of our beloved occupation look like? 

The Broken Toy Factory

One of my favourite festive routines is rewatching Santa Claus: the Movie, starring Dudley Moore as Patch the elf. There’s a scene that always stuck with me, where Patch attempts to multiply toy production in an effort to become Santa’s assistant. His high speed production line creates a surge in output, but when the toys fall apart on Christmas morning, a disgraced Patch leaves the North Pole.

It’s hard to ignore the parallels with advertising today. In the last 20 years, marketing has become a numbers game. More content, more channels, more choice. Marketeers got lost in the headlights, the media platforms dictated what works and agencies ate the costs of trying to keep up. We kept clients and shareholders satisfied for brief moments as efficiency took over, but the magic felt like it evaporated.

There’s another Dudley Moore film that offers a glimmer of hope. Crazy People is a film about advertising, where brutally honest ads accidentally succeed. Can we rediscover honesty, craft and resonance? Can we use innovation to create quality at speed?

The efficiency trap

For the last 20 years agencies have adopted new models to thrive. We merged, integrated, offshored and shrank. In Madison Avenue Manslaughter, Michael Farmer calls it ‘suicide in slow motion.’ Which sounds a bit harsh, having just flirted with the joys of Christmas.

We became faster and cheaper by adapting and upgrading the tools. I’ve seen foamboard presentations replaced by collaborative decks. Debate over art and copy became “the client changed the headline”. The size of the delivery matrix became more important than its quality. Every small change felt smart in the moment, but chipped away at craft. Technology gave birth to more competition too. The iPhone and, consequently, social media turned everyone into content creators. 15 minutes of fame became 15 seconds. Why would a brand spend 500k on a crafted TVC when they can get more reach from 50 average influencers? AI can now spit out a page of passable headlines before you’ve had your morning brew, thus the race to the messy middle is upon us. When everyone has the tools to create, and ‘good enough’ suffices, it’s harder to charge a premium for creativity.

The replication race

The social media explosion felt exciting, right? More channels, more tribes, more ways to matter. But the algorithms took over, without a care for connection and meaning. Systems that reward outrage, repeatability and consistency. TikTok even made copycatting a virtue. A great idea becomes a flattened trend, stripped of context, until the originator is just another participant.

We tried to ‘join the conversation,’ using data and insights to compete for eroding attention spans. But an industry that once prized originality can’t out-meme meme culture. Our delivery matrixes multiplied. Attention, originality and budgets did not.

Even the brands that once treated craft as a competitive edge have shifted focus. W+K would drop epic films like “Write the Future” that became cultural events both online and off. These moments have been replaced by modular, remixable content built for trend cycles. It’s smart. But it’s like replacing fine dining with a buffet. One is an authored, unforgettable experience. The other is a high-volume, low-stakes pile-up of options. 

‘Best practice’ says a cultural moment cannot compete with a full content calendar.

The effects of all this can be most felt in the annual plethora of awards shows. When we put egos aside, we know deep down that work rewarded for being “brave” this year would have been wallpaper back in 2001. The growing number of fake entries is quite telling. And when ADCN decided not to award a Grand Prix for the first time since its inception, that cut deep. 

Creativity as a commodity

Could it be that the way the industry operates has become void of originality? The holding companies bought up the hotshops. Weird and wonderful cultures were restructured and templated. Creativity became inventory. To ease the pain, we told ourselves that we’re ‘culture agencies’, riding the tsunami of daily content. But still pitches were lost on hourly rates. Procurement agents pushed clients toward the next big promise of faster and cheaper.

The winners of this current model are the consultancy firms like McKinsey and Forrester, who repackage and resell the same playbooks to agencies trying to defend their slice of the advertising pie, which is getting increasingly smaller. Media spend fuels platforms not ideas. Usage rights have escalated with rising channels. We’ve arrived at a crossroads where we need more consolidation and AI powered automation to keep margins steady and the lights on and does it even matter? 

We’re not building cathedrals. We’re selling sneakers, soap, seasonal specials. People avoid ads like they’re running from a swarm of killer bees. Wouldn’t it be easier to just crank up production, keep the social media feeds warm, and stop pretending this matters?

History says no.

Before the 1950s, ads were blunt: “Gets clothes cleaner!” “Fights bad breath!” Then Bernbach taught us to “make people feel something”. Think Small. Lemon. “We Try Harder”. By the 80s and 00s, craft was currency. ‘Launderette’ made Levi’s iconic. ‘Surfer’ turned Guinness into poetry. Those weren’t interruptions; they were invitations. This was the time when the average person was exposed to between only 3,000 and 5,000 ad messages per day. Today it’s way past the 10,000 mark.

It’s comforting to know that volume is decreasing the value of output in other sectors too. We’re so lucky to be spoiled by such abundance, but streaming audiences have become fatigued and platforms have resorted to data to generate more “guaranteed” hits. Spoiler, that means more average crime thrillers. In football, the number of matches has also multiplied, meaning the magicians have been replaced by machines who can endure the most minutes over a season. The beautiful game has lost its shine. And music, automobiles, architecture? Well, that could be an entirely separate article on its own.

Sales will always be the goal, but can craft and entertainment still be the difference between a transaction and a franchise? The guy who inspired Don Draper once said, “Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make”. All killer. No filler.

The craft counter-culture

There are other commercial enterprises who are not playing along with this game. Rockstar Games will spend a decade building worlds that engulf millions. In an era obsessed with quarterly returns, they’re proof that patience can be a growth strategy. Create something people love and the fans will fill the feeds for you.

IKEA invests in the craft upfront, engineering every product with care. The waste and friction is reduced across the product life cycle. Volume doesn’t cheapen the experience because the foundation is solid.

Maximum Effort, Ryan Reynolds’ studio, makes speed look elegant. They write, shoot, and post within days. But the trick isn’t pace, its authorship. The tone, humour and humanity are all unmistakably theirs. Lightening-fast turnaround with the craft baked in at the source.

Speed and volume are not the villains in this story. They’re the byproduct of a shrinking bottom line. They only work when we build solid foundations that support immediacy and meaning. There’s something thrilling about that. With a core idea and a clean objective, speed strips away committees and nervous polish. It forces clarity and freedom to be sharp, funny, brutally honest. Without it, we’re just making more broken toys.