GOOD CEOs: Issue 7

These are the ideas that changed my mind in Q1.

• You don’t sell time. Stop pricing it

• Faster, cheaper… irrelevant?

• You might be sitting in the wrong part of the market

After three GOOD CEO sessions and 3,000 conversations, here’s what I’ve learned so far in 2026

I had hip surgery in December (getcha violins out) Four days prior, I was in a pub with 15 creative industry CEOs pontificating... What lies ahead for 2026? 

What followed was one of the most honest conversations about our industry I’ve heard. Just some of the sharpest minds cracked open… telling each other the truth. The message: the tectonic plates of the creative economy are shifting before our eyes.

The bigger picture: Many businesses are in danger of falling into the cracks, being eaten or becoming irrelevant. For others, the shifts in our industry are the best opportunity since they set up.

LESSON 1:
The Creative Economy’s
Letter Rip Moment

We don’t tend to break Chatham House rules unless it’s to give credit where it’s due. In this case, it’s to give We Are Social Global CEO Toby Southgate his dues, after he called the shrinking of big holding companies.

“Six holding companies
will become three” 

He said. And so they did.

• Omnicom swallowed IPG

• WPP dropped out of the FTSE 100 and called McKinsey

• Dentsu struggled to find a buyer for its international business 


Leland Maschmeyer co-founded brand experience and design company COLLINS, restyled Instagram and turned Chobani into a billion-dollar brand through design alone. He also helped me put a frame around what’s going on:

The creative economy is turning K-shaped, he explained. It’s happening everywhere, not just in our world. The top of the K accelerates upward and the bottom drops away. And the middle – the good agency doing good work for okay money… That’s where things get rough. 

The lesson from that is simple and brutal. 

For entrepreneurs, it’s to pick a side, stand for something, or get swallowed by the yawning gap. 

For career builders, it’s to specialise: get genuinely, distinctly, irreplaceably good at one thing.

LESSON 2:
When the House is on Fire,
Talent Builds a New One


With so much in flux, the risk and costs of starting a new firm have collapsed to almost nothing. Real talent is escaping those old collapsing structures.

Everywhere we looked it was the same pattern:

• Talent flooding out of giants.

• Agencies branching off from networks.

• PE backing indie collectives at scale.

• Indies getting into rooms with bigger clients than ever.

Former-DDB CEO Alex Lubar walked away from an 8,000-strong team and one of advertising’s most powerful jobs to join a fifty-person consultancy. His explanation:

“We’re returning
to cottage economics” 

Alex told me.

He went on to say that we’re now in a pre-industrial dynamic, running on post-industrial tools. Small teams doing things that used to require enormous ones.

Founders are building fast, lean, and specific. By doing just that, Laura Tannenbaum grew her social-first creative agency Fabric Social by 300% in a year. The golden rule is to be ruthless about who your agency is and say no to anything that falls outside of that (even if turning down money feels wrong), Laura told me.

Also: congratulations to Laura for overseeing her agency to an acquisition by Publicis Groupe. 🎉

LESSON 3:
You Charge for Effort.
They Pay for Value. Do the Maths

All these new agencies and PE-backed indie groups are bursting with talent and ambition, but they run straight into the same wall as their predecessors. Pricing.

“Pricing is a creative act” 
Leland Maschmeyer

The bottom line, Leland Maschmeyer said as he sat across from me, is that the creative industry is bad at it.

• Most agencies default to cost-plus – or what it costs me, plus margin. It feels safe.

• But they don’t count on the buyer making their own calculation that their profit boils down to how much they need you, minus your fee.

• There’s a gap there and it’s where the real leverage lives. Ignore it and you’re leaving money on the table and selling yourself short.

Leland’s prediction: knowing how to price will become one of the most valuable growth skills of the next decade. The same goes for individuals building careers. Rather than hours logged, talk about your commercial value. We’re in an industry of messaging, so use the right one.

LESSON 4:
AI Walked In and
Split the Room in Two

First, some numbers:

• AI consultancy Spark said last year that 80% of agencies are already using AI

• But only 5% have moved beyond experimentation

• Research agency Forrester says that 15% of US creative agency jobs will be automated by the end of this year

The existential battle to figure out how to respond to AI has divided the industry into two camps. One camp has used AI to produce more, quicker and less expensively. The other, as Queen of Swords founder Jenny Nicholson puts it:

“I work with AI to do what I couldn’t have done before"

Apologies to readers who’ve seen me bang this drum over and over this quarter, but I can’t overstate its importance. You have two options in this marketplace and it’s become pretty clear which one will keep you alive.

Efficiency:
AI makes you faster and cheaper – a commodity.
This way lies dwindling profits and irrelevance.

Elevation:
Doing what you couldn’t before.
Right now, we’re in a window before mass adoption is total and it’s already closing. Alex Lubar calls this the opportunity of the decade.

It’s like a ‘choose your own adventure’ game. Or funeral. With your livelihood.

LESSON 5:
People Want Rough
Edges. Who Knew

On the flip side to the ‘thousand indies’ trend, M&A is fusing agencies together to give more illusion to our sense of choice. Plus, AI – when used badly as it so often is – is steamrolling the personality out of creative work. As the industry makes itself anew, perhaps the oldest and simplest idea still rings true: consumers want to feel something real.

Laura Tannenbaum calls it ‘jankiness’ — that rough-cut authenticity that tells audiences that a human was involved.

Brands want their integrity to be on show. There’s still polish, it’s just on the inside.

“Jankiness is winning –
because it proves
a human made it” 
Laura Tannenbaum

Alex talked to me about the ‘dialectic effect’ or that the deeper technology pushes into our lives, the more intensely we seek IRL experiences.

• The Sidemen sold out Wembley in three hours. Ninety thousand people wanted to be somewhere together and experience something real.

And Leland Maschmeyer brings the top arm of the K-shaped economy into focus when he talks about design as the cost of entry. People are paying for cultural capital and emotional resonance.

• Think of Liquid Death’s punk-rock-inspired cans of water. You can reverse-engineer the design, but you can’t reverse-engineer what it means to the people who love it.

TLDR:
What’s The Bottom
Line, then?

Holding companies are shrinking, independents are booming, and pricing models across the industry need to be fixed. AI is pulling the industry in two directions. And genuine human resonance across projects and brands is getting more valuable — and more scarce — by the day. It’s ironic, but the creative economy is being undervalued and undersold by the very people who make it.

What does all that mean for you in Q2?

It’s harder than ever to know who is talented and trustworthy. If you’re talented, hard working, and know what you want, now is the time to back yourself.

Ask yourself three questions:

1. What drains me?

2. What energises me?

3. Who has a wealth of what I don’t and a poverty of what I do?

Someone out there has the problems you enjoy solving. The door is open. 

It’s time to stop complaining about the draught and walk through it instead.