Creative has become a commodity. Is the ad-holdco model on the brink in a world of production at scale?

It’s time to ask whether the old giants can really switch up their game to match the pace of commoditised creativity. Because what was once admired for its sophistication now lacks the competitive edge to stay relevant. And their lethargic evolution does not bode well.

Sure, legacy ad empires still tout their global reach and decades of expertise. They can still churn out an epic 60-second brand ad or a memorable global tagline with theatrical flair. But today, technology is rewriting the rules of creative production.

Generative AI will draft a headline before you can blink. Automation suites can spit out a thousand resizes, a thousand translations, a thousand data-driven tweaks while a human resource is still adjusting the kerning on slide one. Content, once artisanal, is now industrial: abundant, cheap, and, to be honest, largely good enough for an algorithmic feed where modern attention spans last mere seconds.

When abundance explodes, price implodes. And you can’t really bill by the hour anymore. The playing field of creativity is being levelled while the traditional gatekeepers of advertising are feeling the ground shift beneath them.

Creative production is shifting from irreplaceable craft to off-the-shelf commodity

There was a time when great advertising felt almost magical. Late-night brainstorms with teams huddled around storyboards in glass-walled suites banging out billable hours, big reveals in the boardroom to rounds of applause, ensuing prerequisite flights to Cannnes, and invoices that insulated all that breathtaking madness behind a healthy profit margin. In that world, astonishing creative output was priceless. Genius. And human.

Fast-forward and scarcity has flipped to surplus.

A WFA study published in January 2025 found that 78 % of global advertisers are now using some form of AI-assisted content production, claiming an average 35 % reduction in asset-development timelines. Global ad volume has exploded 28 % in the past three years (MAGNA Global Ad Forecast – December 2024). In effect, creativity has become a commodity – abundant. Accessible, and increasingly algorithmic. In this abundance economy, “good enough” frequently beats “perfectly crafted”.

A vast array of semi-polished content now floods our feeds, much of it produced by in-house teams or lean startups. For brands focused on efficiency and speed, the old guard appear painfully sluggish and costly. A boardroom question once unthinkable is now common: “What exactly are we still paying an agency for?”

Too often the answer is simply nostalgic prestige.

Technology is putting ad-holdcos on the endangered list

The immediate casualty of this new reality is the holding company model itself. Massive conglomerates housing dozens of agency brands under one umbrella thrived for decades by offering one-stop access to creative talent across the globe. But no more.

Organisational scale to leverage production at scale is no longer viable. Marketers are expected to do more with less. Under this pressure they’re looking at the layers of management and production overheads and seeing fat. Scandals over opaque billing and media kickbacks haven’t helped. Stock prices tell a story of anaemic growth with investor patience thinning. Talent tells an even clearer one. Creative stars now defect to tech start-ups, in-house studios, or solo consultancies. Reliability belongs to platforms. An algorithm never leaves for a competitor or gets poached by a start-up offering equity.

Household big-name brands that once poured fortunes into agency coffers are in search of modern efficiencies, trimming and redirecting budgets. Even opting to go it themselves. Independent and in-house teams have scooped 47 % of major festival trophies since 2022 (Cannes Lions Creativity Report 2024).

Brands are taking back creative control

Brands building their own internal creative and content teams is one of the clearest signs of this shift in the boom to in-housing. What started as a trickle a decade ago is now a full-blown global movement.

Savvy marketers, especially across Europe and the US, have been leading the charge to reclaim control of their creative work. After all, who understands a brand’s voice better than the brand itself? And if the tools exist to produce ads and content with less dependency on outside agencies, why not use them? The value of this model isn’t just cost saving – it’s agility and brand intimacy. The creatives sit at the heart of the company, steeped in its products and ethos, not on the periphery.

Take Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch consumer goods behemoth, as an example. A few years back, Unilever set up in-house content studios (known as U-Studios) across its markets to handle everything from social media visuals to local ad adaptations. Reports say Unilever’s U-Studio network cut content costs by around 30% in its first year, while also drastically speeding up turnaround times. Instead of briefing an external agency and waiting weeks for executions, Unilever’s marketers can ideate and produce on the fly with their embedded creative teams.

Or consider Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, which has adopted a hybrid in-house approach. Nestlé pulled top talent from its roster of agency partners directly into a dedicated internal digital hub overseen by Nestlé’s own leaders. By doing so, they gained immediate transparency and real-time control over campaigns. Their internal team focuses on areas like dynamic content creation, data-driven ad targeting, and optimising media spend – all critical in a digital world. It’s telling that Nestlé didn’t simply task an agency with these tech-centric jobs. They built an internal capability to own them.

These are not isolated anecdotes. L’Oréal’s Beauty Tech Labs prototype TikTok riffs overnight, riding trends before they expire. PepsiCo’s Content Engine cut social-video costs by nearly half. Even famously risk-averse FMCGs like Kraft Heinz run dynamic-video programmes directly from the Chicago HQ, not the Fifth-Avenue floor. During Covid’s peak disruption, Forrester logged a 40 % shorter average campaign lead time for brands with mature in-house units versus those still chained to external hand-offs.

Today nearly 80% of large advertisers have some form of in-house agency capability. The once edgy innovation of a brand making its own ads is now mainstream. To the disadvantage of ad-holdcos. The proof is there. Why pay a constellation of agencies to do what a nimble in-house crew, equipped with the right tech stack, can achieve more efficiently?

Technology is no longer a plug-in, it’s the linchpin around which process and people revolve

It’s a mistake to view this primarily as a story of cost-cutting or expediency. At its core, the shift we’re witnessing is about technology enabling a fundamentally different operating model for creative work.

Typically, ad-holdcos have fallen into the trap of slapping a new piece of software on top of redundant processes. The core model remains the same. Elaborate briefing processes, creatives crafting a big idea, refined through layers of review, rolled out in set piece campaigns. Modern creative production is a real‑time content loop fuelled by data feedback, personalisation, and localisation. At scale. Manual ideation and iterations, paid by the hour, are being replaced by AI-assisted variant engines, underpinned by performance‑based fees. Craft that once resided behind agency walls is being replaced by brand-owned templatization backed by human sense checking. Labour intensive orchestration fails in turnaround. If you can’t meme the moment, you lose it.

This is where legacy giants are struggling the most, because this change cuts to the heart of their identities as much as their bottom line. They can buy the latest MarTech, but if they try to bolt it onto a sprawling 20th-century process, it won’t get 21st-century results.

In this new model:

• Creative teams are always-on content factories: Operating like hyper-efficient newsrooms fed by real-time insights dashboards that ensure continuous outputs in the moment.
• Ideation is algorithm-first: LLMs drafting vast copy permutations for creatives to curate, sharpen, and inject brand nuance instead of having to generate everything from the ground up.
• Dynamic distribution: Machine-learning systems optimising and auto-routing assets to micro-audiences on the fly, while legacy teams are still debating storyboards.

Crucially, it scales in a way humans alone never could. Responsiveness, speed, and scale are the new currency in marketing, and technology gives in-house teams the edge in all three. Even though old school agencies are investing heavily in AI and automation, their legacy structures prevent them from using tech to its full, disruptive potential.

The truth is that real transformation is damn uncomfortable. It demands rethinking roles, revenue models, and what creative value means. Adapting means possibly earning less per project, automating tasks that used to be done by billable staff, and retraining teams before their expertise becomes obsolete. So often ad-holdcos end up tinkering around the edges while the core model remains unchanged.

Can the ad-holcos pivot?

Possibly — if they attack four pillars without flinching:

1. Productise intellectual property: Build proprietary automation, dynamic-templating systems, and data-insight engines that clients license rather than approximate in-house.
2. Collapse silos into sprint loops: Strategy, media, and production must iterate inside a single pod, not pass the baton downstream through three separate units.
3. Link payment to performance: Move from hour-based retainers to outcomes, equity participation, or subscription models where automation dividends are shared.
4. Upsell high-craft moments: Agencies still have license to own the mystique and importance behind overarching brand identity strategy and campaign concepts, provided they jettison bureaucratic ballast in favour of algorithms that churn the long tail of production.

They must acknowledge that history isn’t kind to industries that choose comfort over course-correction. And act with furious intent.

A future beyond the stoic status quo

All signs point to a creative industry at a crossroads. Every industry hits that Kodak moment, where you evolve or get replaced. Advertising’s titans now hover near theirs. They are not guaranteed a role in the future of marketing and advertising unless they actively shape it.

The market is bifurcating. You have hyper-scale production through in-house studios, automation vendors, and AI-native independents. And you have small, agile, high-insight boutiques of culturally fluent teams that solve strategic puzzles nobody can template. Lumbering giants can do neither without ripping up charters and fundamentally reinventing themselves. There is still a place for them, but only where they can add value that software cannot.

We are living through a grand shift in how marketing gets made, one as significant as the advent of the internet or the rise of social media. The landscape ahead demands a choice. Do you cling to the tried-and-true methods because they’re comfortable and time-tested, or do you reimagine your approach to stay relevant in this new era?

It’s both a reflective and a decisive moment. Reflective, because it urges us to consider what truly matters in creative work: the idea or the execution, the human touch or the algorithmic optimisation, the brand consistency or the daring innovation. Decisive, because the market is moving, with or without us, and the future will not wait for those stuck in debate.

The creative revolution is underway, and it favours those willing to evolve. For those bold enough to embrace the new creative order, there’s an exciting world emerging beyond the ad-holdco model. For the rest, the risk is being left as a footnote, reminiscing about the glory days while the new era marches on.

ManMachine: Your partner in unlocking creative at scale

At ManMachine, we help brands, studios, and marketing teams pivot from legacy agency dependencies to agile, tech-powered creative systems. We don’t just patch over the old model — we help you build what comes next for your Creative Ops.

We work side-by-side with you to:

• Prioritise and deploy the right technology: We assess your current MarTech stack, identify gaps and redundancies, and implement fit-for-purpose tools that support scale, automation, and measurable impact across your creative operations.
• Evolve and implement your process: We audit workflows end-to-end, remove inefficiencies, and design operational models that enable agility, reduce lead times, and support high-volume content production without compromising quality.
• Upskill and integrate your people: We embed change through structured enablement — aligning roles to new capabilities, closing skills gaps, and ensuring your teams can confidently operate within modern, tech-enabled content ecosystems.

If your current setup is holding you back, it’s time to fix it and get your production back on the front foot. Let’s talk.