We used to love this job.
The next creative reset must be emotional, not just operational.
What Advertising Needs Now Isn’t Just a Reboot. It’s a Rewilding.
When someone inside the machine hits Ctrl + Alt + Del, you pay attention.
Samit Malkani's recent essay is clear-eyed, insider-sharp, and coming from someone who clearly cares. I feel seen. It’s a much-needed diagnostic on what’s broken in advertising: the way we staff, the way we work, the talent we keep losing. I nodded vigorously at many of his points. Especially the bit about AI done right, because we all need to move faster, better, and more cost-effectively.
He’s absolutely right: there’s a hard reset underway. But for me, that’s only half the story. Because even if we fix the resourcing, the tooling, the bloat… there’s still something missing.
We lost the fun. And when we lost the fun, we lost the joy.
Whatever Happened to the Fun?
I say this not from a place of nostalgia, but from experience. I’ve lived through the tectonic shifts of this industry, from radio spots, which were the first ads I could recall, to digital, from big ideas to media-neutral platforms, from Creative That Mattered to TikTok virality. I’m not here to romanticise the past. But I am here to say that the soul of this industry, the thrill of making something weird, wonderful, or wildly resonant, has been squeezed out by too many dashboards, too much data, and not enough belief in the work itself.
We’ve become very good at building for algorithms. But we’ve forgotten how to build for people. And with that, we have forgotten to have fun.
Last night, I watched Episode 8 of that Wrexham show. Owner/Chairman Rob McElhenney is asked to give a pep talk before the lads go out on the pitch. While I will try not to ruin it for you, the core of what he said is so perfect for this moment in advertising. He asked the players to remember the joy of the sport, not the winning, not the training, not the heartbreaks, but the pure joy - the reason they lace up their boots every day.
I often think about this in our industry. I was in a board meeting when one of the members asked, “Where did the fun go in our work?” To quote Samit’s article:
“Nobody’s excited about making Reels.”
The tools are here. Now what?
Samit rightly includes AI in the conversation about tooling and operational efficiency, a way to unlock real value for clients and streamline the work. And I’d add that it’s more than that. Used well, AI isn’t just an efficiency play, it’s a creative accelerant.
I have been writing about this for 18 months now and have been using these constantly improving tools for almost four years. The proper tooling, in the right hands, can genuinely unlock cost efficiencies and speed. I work in AI every day, and I see it transform the way people think, create, and collaborate. But here’s the problem: most agencies are still approaching AI as a way to produce more, faster. Not better. Not more joyfully. Just more.
The winners in this next era won’t be the ones who scale output. They’ll be the ones who scale ingenuity.
AI, for me, and for other creatives I speak with, is jazz, not automation. It’s iteration at the speed of thought. It’s the freedom to explore ten directions before lunch, to storyboard a mad idea and see it come to life before the coffee goes cold.
But it only works when you put it in the hands of people who are trusted to use it well. Not process monkeys. Not content mills. People. Talented, curious, emotionally intelligent people who still get a kick out of surprising themselves.
We often discuss talent enablement, but rarely talk about talent liberation. What’s the point of giving creatives new tools if you won’t let them run?
The revenue issue is real. But the joy crisis is deeper.
Samit rightly points out that advertising doesn’t pay as well as it used to. And when revenue dries up, talent walks. To new shops. To startups. To the client side. They’re not just surviving. Many are thriving. Because they’ve left behind the layers, the limits, the leadership constraints that plague the big networks today, and we are now witnesses to that daily.
But here’s what I want to add: yes, money matters. But what people miss, what I hear over and over, is that they miss the joy and the fun.
That feeling of chasing an idea that makes the whole room lean in. Of writing a line that gives you goosebumps. Of staying up late, not because you were forced to, but because you were in flow.
We used to make things we loved. Now we make things the algorithm loves. We used to push for the idea. Now we push the format.
Everyone still wants to do that long-form emotional film, not because it’s long, but because it connects. It stirs. It moves people. But those stories are being sidelined for “snackable” content, endlessly A/B tested until nothing remains but the statistical average of something once great.
Clever is in hibernation. And joy has become a luxury we no longer allow ourselves.
Dashboards don’t build brands. People do.
One of the most significant shifts in recent years is that senior marketing leaders have gradually stopped discussing the work and instead focus solely on the results.
The dashboards. The metrics. The ROI. The view-through rates.
None of those things ever inspired anyone. They don’t make people fall in love with your brand. They don’t make people choose you, remember you, fight for you, or forgive you.
Work does that. Ideas do that. Culture does that.
And yet, we’ve trained an entire generation of leaders to stare at the dashboard instead of the work. We’ve made creativity subservient to the spreadsheet. And then we wonder why the best people leave. Or why the people who stay seem burned out, checked out, or just vaguely sad.
There’s a line in Samit’s piece that really hit me:
“So many of those that are left don’t want to be in advertising. This to me feels like the saddest part.”
He’s right. That is the saddest part.
Not because people are leaving. But because we have stopped giving them a reason to stay.
It’s time to rewild, not just reboot.
We need this reset. We need to fix the economic model. We need to embrace new tools. We need to move fast and smart and lean. But we also need to make space for something wilder. Something stranger. Something fun.
We need to rewild our industry, not in the anarchic sense, but in the creative sense.
Let the creatives be weird again. Let the strategists poke at problems no one asked them to solve. Let the work be messy before it’s magnificent.
What if we:
Stopped briefing in formats and started briefing in feelings?
Made space for one piece of work a quarter that’s just pure creative joy — no rationale, no metrics?
Celebrated the work that surprised us, not just the work that performed?
What if we treated fun as an OKR?
A Final Thought
Let’s put the fun back. Let’s chase ideas again. Let’s fall in love with the work again.
Let’s remember that we didn’t get into advertising because we loved media plans or funnel metrics. We got into it because we believed that stories could move people. That brands could matter. That a line, a look, a laugh could make someone care.
Samit’s right: this is a Ctrl + Alt + Del moment. But let’s not stop there. Let’s also hit Play. Because joy is the real unlock. Always has been.
Always will be.
Let’s Play. Seriously.
RockPaperScissors wasn’t named after a strategy framework. It was named after a game my niece loves, one that’s fast, unpredictable, and full of joy. Just like the best creative work.
At RPS, we bring that same spirit to everything we do: Ideas that move fast, tools that make you sharper, work that actually feels good to make.