Where Will Your Senior Creatives Come From in 2030?

The most successful independent creative agencies in the world right now share something easy to miss.

Greg Hahn co-founded Mischief in 2020 after fifteen years at BBDO New York, where he was Creative Vice Chairman of BBDO Worldwide. Mischief is now Ad Age A-List number one agency. Alvin Lim built Good People Basically in Hong Kong after years inside agency systems across Asia. David Droga founded Droga5 after establishing his reputation as ECD at Saatchi and Saatchi Singapore. Droga5 was acquired by Accenture in 2019. Droga served as CEO of Accenture Song until September 2025, when he stepped down to become Vice Chair of Accenture, with Ndidi Oteh succeeding him as CEO. In Australia, Micah Walker spent five years at Wieden and Kennedy Portland before launching Bear Meets Eagle on Fire in 2019. Aden Hepburn was co-CEO of VMLY&R before founding Akcelo in 2020.

Five founders. Five different markets. One pattern. Every one of them was developed inside a holding company or established agency system before they left to build something independent. Their craft, their judgement, their creative instincts, their ability to win Cannes Lions, all of it was shaped by infrastructure that holding companies funded.

That infrastructure is no longer there at the scale that produced them.

This is not a criticism of cost discipline. The decisions that contracted training and development investment across the major holding companies between 2014 and 2018 were made for sound reasons. Cost pressures were real. Margins were compressing. In-house creative capability was emerging as a credible alternative. The shift toward integrated agency models meant rethinking what holding companies were actually for.

But the cumulative effect of those decisions has not been fully priced into the talent strategies of the brands and holding companies that still depend on senior creative leadership.

What Has Quietly Disappeared

A senior talent leader who was inside Ogilvy APAC during the relevant period describes a commitment that ran from the mid-nineties through the early twenty-tens: one percent of revenue, not profit, dedicated to training and development across the region. By 2014 to 2015, that commitment had been abandoned. Similar systematic training investments at Saatchi and Saatchi, BBDO, Wieden and Kennedy, and other major networks contracted in the same period.

The portfolio schools that fed the agency system have gone the same way. Miami Ad School, once the dominant pipeline for junior creatives entering the industry, has shrunk. Watford and Creative Circus, which trained generations of creatives in the UK and US, are shadows of their former scale. The WPP Fellowship, once a flagship global talent initiative, was paused in 2019 and has not been restarted in its original form. The Ogilvy School, Saatchi Mavericks, BBDO's structured ECD development programmes, most have either disappeared or been replaced by leaner, more targeted alternatives.

What remains is real but limited. Omnicom University and WPP Maestro continue to operate, but both focus on leadership and capability development for senior managers, not on systematic creative craft training for emerging talent. They address the question of how to develop the next generation of business leaders. They do not address the question of how to develop the next generation of creatives.

The most recent and largest example of this pattern is Omnicom Oceania's announcement, in May 2026, of a multi-year partnership with Mark Ritson's MiniMBA in Marketing. More than a thousand client-facing leaders across Australia and New Zealand will go through the programme. The investment is real and the framing is striking. The CEO, Nick Garrett, describes it as embedding capability across the entire client-facing leadership rather than a few. This is genuine commitment to rebuilding capability. But the MiniMBA is brand strategy, ROI, and evidence-based decision-making for senior leaders. It is the right thing to do for the people who decide what to spend on. It is not the multi-year apprenticeship that produces senior creatives. The leadership-effectiveness gap is being closed. The creative craft gap is not.

The data confirms what the structural picture suggests. Junior advertising and creative roles dropped seven percent year-on-year between 2024 and 2025. Entry-level positions are at their lowest levels since 2020. Stanford's Digital Economies Lab found that early-career workers in advertising-adjacent fields experienced a relative thirteen percent decline in employment compared to peers in less AI-exposed fields. The apprentice system that used to move creatives from junior to mid-level to senior is no longer functioning at the scale required to sustain the industry.

Why This Has Not Yet Become a Crisis

The reason this is not yet visible as a crisis is that the senior creative talent currently powering the industry, at holding companies, in independent agencies, and inside in-house creative teams, was developed inside the system that has now contracted. The pipeline appears to be working because the people who came through it a decade ago are still active.

This is what makes the structural problem easy to overlook. The brands building strong in-house creative capability are hiring senior creatives who learned their craft elsewhere. The independent agencies winning major awards are founded by people who were trained inside holding companies. The next generation of senior leaders, in five to seven years' time, will need to come from somewhere. Where that somewhere is, when the systematic training infrastructure has contracted across the entire industry, is the question that has not yet been answered.

Where Talent Is Actually Being Developed Now

Part of the answer is that creative talent development has migrated to a parallel economy entirely. The creator economy is now the primary place where young creative talent is building portfolios, learning audience-driven craft, and developing the kind of creative judgement that used to be developed inside agencies. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have replaced the portfolio school. Direct audience feedback has replaced the senior creative mentor.

This is not a fad. It is a structural migration. The generation of young creatives who would have entered the agency world a decade ago are now building independent careers in a different ecosystem. They have audiences, leverage, and revenue models that do not depend on agency structures. They are not waiting for an entry-level role at a holding company that may no longer exist.

The implication for holding companies and brands is significant. The talent you may need to recruit in three to five years is currently building skills outside the institutions that used to develop it. Your existing recruitment models, designed around hiring from agencies and portfolio schools, are increasingly aimed at a shrinking pool. The creator economy is producing a different kind of creative talent, more independent, more entrepreneurial, less institutionally trained, and the question is whether your organisation is set up to integrate that talent or whether you will continue to compete for an increasingly scarce pool of conventionally trained creatives.

What This Means for Your Strategy

This is not a problem with a single solution. But it is a problem that benefits from being named and considered.

There are three plausible scenarios for how this plays out over the next five years.

In the first scenario, the holding companies and brands that depend most heavily on senior creative talent rebuild systematic training capability, either internally, through partnerships with educational institutions, or through new collective structures. This requires meaningful investment, long-term commitment, and the political will to treat training as a strategic asset rather than a cost centre.

In the second scenario, the industry continues to compete for a shrinking pool of conventionally trained creative talent. Salaries inflate at the senior end. Acquisitions and poaching intensify. The cost of senior creative talent rises significantly while the pipeline continues to thin. This is the default trajectory if no deliberate action is taken.

In the third scenario, AI-driven creative tooling, Canva, WPP Open, Google's generative AI suite, Netter, and a growing field of competitors, becomes a credible substitute for human creative production at sufficient scale that the demand for trained creatives reduces structurally. The technology companies developing these tools are explicitly betting on this outcome.

All three scenarios are possible. The first requires deliberate action. The second is the path of least resistance. The third is being actively engineered by tech companies whose business models depend on it.

The strategic question for holding company leaders and CMOs is which of these scenarios you want to plan for, and whether your current talent and recruitment strategy is consistent with that planning. The next generation of senior creative talent will come from somewhere. Identifying where, and securing access to it, is now a competitive issue.

Read the full report, The Talent Pipeline Myth: The Unmeasured Cost of Abandoning Creative Training, which examines the infrastructure that has contracted, the data behind the migration, and the choices that are now in front of decision-makers across the industry.