Three of Canada’s largest CPG brands cut their agency rosters last quarter. None saw a sales lift.
The industry is over-optimized for speed and under-invested in judgment. This singular focus on efficiency without competence creates faster systems for weaker decisions, not better outcomes.
The relentless drive for “efficiency” and the in-housing debate too often miss the fundamental problem. It is not about where work happens, but how well it is conceived and executed. Speed only amplifies the quality of thinking already present in the system, good or bad. Many organizations, in their pursuit of control or cost savings, simply relocate their problems, rather than solving the underlying issue of strategic and creative competence.
Marketers are drowning in content. Most of it is ignored. It lacks a point of view, tension, or memory structure. This “filler work” cannot move numbers. Worse, neutral creative requires significantly more media spend to perform at the same level as distinctive, memorable creative. This creates an “efficiency illusion” where volume masks a lack of impact.
The real currency in a fragmented media landscape is attentive seconds, not impressions alone. The best work earns attention before paid media amplifies it. This means crafting ideas designed to stop people, stick in memory, and spread through culture and conversation. Creativity is not decoration. It is business leverage.
This level of impact is not accidental. It relies on strategic intelligence and deep cultural fluency. AI-powered cultural intelligence platforms—Cultural Current is one—spot non-obvious segments, emerging patterns, and cultural tensions that traditional research often misses. Similarly, AI-assisted creative analysis systems evaluate attention potential, emotional response, and visual distinctiveness before assets deploy, significantly improving pre-flight creative evaluation and reducing risk.
Agencies and brands must adopt a challenger mindset. This means deliberately breaking category conventions, rejecting industry sameness, and creating new criteria for choice. It is about competing through distinctiveness, not scale. This approach, paired with commercial clarity, allows brands to punch above their weight.
The future belongs to competent systems, not simply efficient ones. This demands senior leadership and deep commercial understanding on every account. The people in the pitch must be the people on the account, eliminating the “junior-handoff theatre” that plagues many larger firms.
This is why agencies like King Ursa are built on a model of fierce independence and fully integrated creative and media capabilities. They are founder-led and senior-run, delivering commercial creativity and emotional effectiveness, not just process theatre. They understand that strategy should simplify, not complicate, and that emotional resonance creates disproportionate business growth.
The future of agencies is not about headcount or cheapness. It is about strategic intelligence, cultural fluency, creative bravery, and commercial effectiveness. It is about improving judgment, not just faster systems for weak decisions.
Stop measuring agency rosters by headcount. Start measuring them by signals owned.
About the Author
Paulo Salomão is the Founder & CEO of King Ursa, an independent Canadian creative agency. He writes on culture, challenger brand strategy, AI in advertising, and the gap between creative effort and commercial outcome.
Connect with Paulo on LinkedIn.
