The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Some people have their moments of clarity in the shower or 45 minutes into a transcendental meditation or purging ayahuasca into a bucket deep in the Peruvian Amazon, but mine came on the fringes of a circle pit during Machine Head’s set at Good Things a few weeks ago as they belted out ‘Ten Ton Hammer’ from their seminal album, ‘The more things change… (the more they stay the same)’.

What a fucking year 2025 was. You’re probably wondering where I’ve been since this is my first post in a few months. Well, to be perfectly frank, I’d felt like I’d already lived 24 months by October. It was a long crawl from there to the finish line and some pressure valves needed to be released - with living as a constant content machine being one of them. But don’t worry, DTSA is still alive.

“That’s going to allow us to meet and exceed the synergies that we promised the marketplace…” - Omincom CEO John Wren’s heartfelt statement on the thousands upon thousands of redundancies right before Christmas.

Like many reading this, I started the year wondering what the hell we were even doing anymore and what the future (if any) might hold for this industry. But after failing to sell any pictures of my feet on OnlyFans, I realised I was probably stuck here. Luckily, as the year rolled on, those concerns began to dissipate. (Not that people didn’t like my feet, I mean that we weren’t about to be obliterated by Skynet.) Our client roster, and our remit, wasn’t shrinking - it was expanding. We won more business, were introduced to more new people, deepened our existing relationships, were handed the keys to more brands, pushed the limits of our new office after only 12 months, and even launched a brand of our own.

And whilst the heels were wearing off the shoes of those frantically ‘pivoting’ in an attempt to allay the wolves at the door, our success seemed to actually come from digging in to what we do best. Keeping things simple, and simply caring more.

Because as much as it appears so on the surface, advertising is not a ‘transactional business’ for those that do the actual work. We don’t have assets and machinery and equipment and products, just people. People who build relationships, solve problems, and care about what they put out into the world. Even if it’s just an ad. That’s the glue that still holds this whole thing together. Not synergies. I’m not sure anything has ever been held together with ‘synergies’. Maybe a 1995 Land Rover Discovery.

It’s why the Omnicom statement above feels so tone deaf. You can’t be an organisation that declares itself a champion of human creativity and a custodian of brands while taking a scythe to your own in the name of ‘delivering synergies to the marketplace’. (Aren’t we supposed to be in the ‘communication’ business?)

Change is coming, it’s already here. The elastic band is snapping. We’re seeing it in every corner of commercial creativity. Advertising is in crisis. Hollywood is in crisis. The gaming industry is in crisis. The music business is in crisis. But something that tends to navigate a crisis quite well is creativity. Nothing stokes the coals of innovation quite like constraints, urgency and necessity, and in turn, gives birth to new perspectives. (And anxiety. Which is quite the fuel. And no-one does anxiety like creatives.)

A24 is making some of the most interesting films in the world by rolling the dice on visionaries and storytellers and new IPs with inherent friction. Bands are pulling from streaming services and leaning into DTC methods of interacting with fans, with physical media having a resurgence (even cassette tapes are back!). The three most interesting (and highly awarded) games I played this year were Clair Obscur : Expedition 33, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, and Dispatch. All indie games made with mind boggling care and craft. In a category that has previously been utterly dominated by big developers, it’s smaller groups of people with an idea and a will and a way that are breaking out.

And I think we’re seeing the same pattern in advertising. All of these businesses utilise and are influenced by technology to some degree - but they aren’t autonomously driven by it.

Corporations are giant echo chambers. The only reason advertising agencies ever existed in the first place is because of their need for independent thought. And as more and more organisations outsource their thinking to generic aggregations and technological parity, that need is going to remain if they’re to attain, hold, or increase any distinctive position in the market. Agencies used to house rebels, misfits, and pirates. The privateers of the business world. And maybe it’s time they did again.

The old models are collapsing, and its certainly scary. Humans don’t do well with uncertainty. I still have my days of nervous trepidation with where all of this is headed. But maybe we can take some solace in the husky gravelled words of Rob Flynn:

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”