Are creative agencies now building campaigns or businesses?

The pitch deck has started to look different. Where agencies once walked into a client's boardroom armed with a campaign concept and a media plan, they are now as likely to walk out with a growth roadmap, a customer data framework or a commerce integration blueprint. 

According to WPP Media's This Year Next Year 2026 report, the next leg of growth in Indian advertising is being shaped less by incremental ad spending and more by structural rewiring, with artificial intelligence, commerce platforms, cultural ecosystems and data infrastructure increasingly functioning as one connected system rather than separate levers, a shift the report ties to India's ad market moving toward roughly ₹2.02 lakh crore this year.

The pressure cutting into the old campaign-first model is sharper still on the global stage. eMarketer's Ad Agency Trends 2026 report notes that while worldwide ad spending grew 8.6% year on year in 2025, holding company revenues actually fell 1.2% over the same period, a gap that explains why legacy, campaign led business models are cracking, and why the agencies expected to defend both relevance and margin are the ones pivoting toward data, strategy and scalable services rather than one off creative output. 

The direction of travel, in India and globally, points to the same question now sitting on agency leadership tables: are clients hiring agencies to make ads, or are they hiring them to fix business problems that ads used to be the default answer to?

The brief has started to read differently

Sit in on enough client conversations today, and the word campaign comes up less often than the word outcome. Marketers are asking their agency partners to move customers through funnels, bring down acquisition costs, build owned commerce layers, and prove attribution, asks that sit closer to a management consultant's brief than a creative director's. It is not that the advertisement has disappeared from the table; it is that the advertisement has stopped being the entire ask.

Ashish Khazanchi, Managing Partner at Enormous, the independent creative agency known for its consumer-first brand work, argues that the structure of an engagement matters far less than the discipline of diagnosis that precedes it. “It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a partnership, a project or a long-term mandate. The point is never to impose an agency’s point of view on the client. The first step is to understand the problem,” he said. That diagnosis, in his framework, usually points an agency in one of two directions: either the task is retaining an existing customer base, or the business is staring at a disruption it cannot solve with more of the same. 

“If you don’t understand the problem, you’ll only end up making advertising for advertising’s sake,” he added, a line that could double as a mission statement for the entire business versus campaign debate.

Khazanchi is careful to draw a line most industry commentary skips over. “Not every brand is a challenger brand,” he said, arguing that many clients simply need incremental movement built into an existing narrative rather than a wholesale reinvention, and that the call on which path to take has to be rooted in what he describes as “a deep understanding of the market and consumer behaviour.” Without that grounding, he warned, “it’s impossible to create meaningful work,” whether the mandate on the table is a single ad film or a three-year brand transformation.

Building the business, not just the ad

If Khazanchi’s framework is about diagnosis, Ashish Chakravarty’s is about structure, specifically, what kind of engagement a client is actually signing up for. 

Chakravarty, Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Garage Worldwide, the independent shop he set up after years across network agencies, believes the business versus campaign question is really a question about the nature of the mandate. 

“Whether agencies are building businesses or campaigns depends largely on what the client is seeking,” he said. When an agency holds the agency of record status, he explained, it effectively functions as an extension of the client’s marketing team, developing a depth of brand understanding across markets and years that project-based work cannot replicate. But he is equally clear that project-only mandates are not a lesser choice, simply a different one. “If an agency is brought in only for a project, then it’s really in the market to deliver a campaign rather than build a business,” he said.

Chakravarty points to CRED’s early pitch process as the clearest illustration of how a business’s actual need, rather than the agency’s ambition, should decide the brief. When the fintech brand launched, what it needed was not patient brand building but instant cultural noise. “What it really needed at that stage wasn’t long-term brand building; it needed immediate attention, curiosity and downloads,” he said of the campaign that followed. The trouble, in his reading, begins when even legacy brands start treating every engagement like a CRED-style sprint. 

“When brand custodians become too transactional and start chasing the quickest, biggest bang, they’re choosing a short-term jump over a long-term game,” he said, adding that this is as much a client-side decision as an agency-side one.

Where creativity fits into the new mandate

That tension between visibility and long-term brand building was also very much the subject at this year's Pitch Madison Advertising Report unveiling, where Ajit Varghese, Partner and Group CEO at Madison World, devoted an entire keynote to reshaping the agency's advantage for the next decade, framing technological transformation as the industry's central challenge rather than a side conversation. It is against that backdrop that Shradha Agarwal, Co-Founder and Global CEO of Grapes Worldwide, the integrated agency, makes an argument that cuts through much of the anxiety around whether creativity still matters once an agency starts calling itself a business partner.

Her point is blunt: award-worthy campaigns were never meant to represent the whole business in the first place. “What is happening today is that every agency owner, whether independent, integrated or a network agency, is working towards building thriving businesses,” she said, pointing out that if an agency enters twenty pieces of work into award shows in a year, the unique campaigns behind those entries usually number no more than three or four. That is not because agencies are only producing three or four campaigns annually, she argued, but because visibility itself is a deliberate, resourced strategy that sits alongside the actual business of client work. 

“Only about 10% of your overall creative business is focused on campaigns that drive visibility, and those campaigns need a very strong go-to-market strategy,” she said, describing her own preference for entering the right awards over paying for event sponsorships. “I’ve never believed in taking sponsorships for events. I believe in entering awards and letting the work speak for itself,” she added.

Taken together, the three views suggest the business versus campaign framing might itself be slightly dated. Agencies are not choosing one identity over the other, they are being asked to hold both, understanding a client's problem well enough to know when a campaign is the answer and when it is not, structuring the engagement so both sides know what kind of commitment is actually on the table, and treating the award worthy, headline grabbing work as one visible layer within a much larger, less glamorous business of client service.

Whether that adds up to agencies becoming business consultants with a design team attached, or simply forces the industry to be more honest about what a brief actually is, is likely to be the real story the next few years of AdEx growth end up telling.