After the Pyre Comes the Rising

When I was still new to the industry, I congratulated a colleague after an awards ceremony. He had just won the Horizont Award. He said something I have never forgotten: “The award is a great honour, but it also marks the peak. After that, things have almost always gone downhill.” Probably because you start to believe you have arrived somewhere. That mindset is fatal.

Far beyond awards, this points to something fundamental: the trap of arrival. The idea that there is ever a point at which you can stop asking yourself what comes next.

As an industry, we are currently talking a lot about the need to reinvent ourselves. The phoenix is the image that keeps coming up. Rising from the ashes. It sounds powerful. I just think we are telling the myth the wrong way.

The cliché focuses on the rising, as if that were the real achievement. In the traditional story, it is not. At the end of its long life, the phoenix builds its own funeral pyre, from cinnamon bark, myrrh and frankincense. And then it sets it alight. The rising is the consequence. The brave act is the pyre.

The question “Are agencies lost?” is not new. It returns in waves. In 1997, Nicholas Negroponte argued in his Wired column that the internet would make intermediaries disappear, but might also create new ones. His advice was: reintermediate yourself. Agencies translated that into digital capability as the new layer they needed to own.

In 2009, Wayne Arnold, founder of the digital agency Profero, wrote in AdAge what many were thinking at the time: digital was the decisive lever, “the biggest single agent of change today, tomorrow and for the foreseeable future.” Those who mastered it would make agencies once again what they had once been: creative business partners to their clients. The key was technology. The industry believed him. Rightly so, for 2009.

In 2026, AI is calling precisely that layer into question. The capability layer that agencies have built since then, data, strategy, transformation, content, is suddenly automatable. Negroponte’s column had a punchline we did not fully hear at the time: eventually, computers will do that, too. Eventually is now.

The question keeps returning because we keep answering it too narrowly.

The incomplete answer is: we need to learn the next tool. Make the next pivot. That is not wrong. But if we treat that as the core task, we treat the question as a technological one, as if the essence of our work were an instrument that can simply be updated. Then the panic is justified. Then the competition is a language model.

But the core of our work was never the tool.

That is the real point of the phoenix myth: the difficult decision is not to begin. Most people can begin. The difficult decision is to stop, to let go of the familiar, of what still works for now, of the model we trust because we know it. Those who avoid the burning will not get the rising.

And a lot is burning right now: business models, production processes, pricing. And the very idea of what an agency actually is. That can be frightening. Most of the time, it is. But I notice that we are looking too much at what is disappearing, and not nearly enough at what is becoming possible.

AI changes processes. Roles. Production. It takes away things we spent years presenting as core competencies. But it does not take away what is genuinely irreplaceable: conviction. Taste. Curiosity. A feel for people and their needs before those needs can be measured.

In the last issue, I asked whether organisations lose their distinctiveness through AI. The answer I hinted at there applies even more directly to agencies: what cannot be trained into existence is judgement. A model learns what has been expressed in previous texts. What makes an agency unique is what has not been expressed: the question asked against the obvious. The instinct that appears in no strategy deck. These things do not exist as training text.

Perhaps that is precisely why it is becoming visible again what creativity really is: not a decorative part of business, but its most unfair competitive advantage. Agencies that take this seriously do not need to be afraid of AI. They only need the courage not to be smaller than they are. More entrepreneurs than administrators. More advisers than executors. More originality than mediocrity.

I do not believe in the end of creative agencies. I believe in what may be their most important era. But only for those willing to light the fire themselves.

After the pyre comes the rising.