Is creative excellence losing its currency?

There was a time when an agency walked into a pitch room carrying one currency: the idea. If the idea was big enough, sharp enough, and disruptive enough, the rest tended to follow. That old scoreboard is starting to look outdated. India's advertising economy has swelled past ₹1.55 lakh crore, with digital now commanding 60% of every rupee spent, according to the Pitch Madison Advertising Report (PMAR) 2026.

Managing that scale, across data, commerce, AI and a dozen platforms at once, has turned the average pitch into something that looks a lot closer to a business consulting exercise than a pure creative shootout. And that shift is forcing the industry to ask an uncomfortable question: Is creative excellence, the one currency agencies have always banked on, losing its value?

The deciding factor in the room

Ask anyone who has sat on either side of a pitch table over the last couple of years and the answer is fairly consistent: the work is no longer the only variable being scored. Shortlists today are routinely stacked with agencies capable of producing genuinely strong creative, which means the differentiator has quietly moved elsewhere, into an agency's ability to solve the client's underlying business problem rather than just answer the communication brief in front of it.

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Pramod Sharma, National Creative Director at Rediffusion, frames it as a shift in what clients are actually testing for. “The quality of the work will always matter, but the work alone is increasingly not enough,” he says. “When several agencies can put strong creative ideas on the table, the deciding factor becomes the agency's ability to demonstrate that it can turn an idea into an outcome.”

That outcome-first lens is showing up in how creative leaders talk about their own craft. The vocabulary has shifted from defending “the idea” to defending “the business case for the idea,” a change that mirrors how clients themselves are now briefing agencies in the first place.

“Creative is the entry ticket now, not the differentiator,” says Sumit Chaurasia, Creative Director at Famous Innovations. “Every agency in the room will show you a good idea. What tips the scale is whether they understand the client's business problem better than the others do.”

AI, data and the bigger ask

Globally, the numbers back up what agency leaders are feeling on the ground. 63% of companies are now using generative AI in their marketing, up from 45% the year before, according to research by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). Yet 80% of brand owners admit they remain uneasy about how their creative and media agencies deploy that technology on their behalf, citing legal, ethical and reputational risk as their biggest worries. That tension, leaning on AI while staying wary of it, is precisely the space Indian agencies are now expected to operate in, on top of everything else a pitch already demands.

Sharma sees this as the natural fallout of client complexity rather than a rejection of the craft itself. “Clients are dealing with a much more fragmented consumer journey, enormous amounts of data, rapidly evolving technology and AI, and pressure to deliver business results faster,” he explains. “Naturally, they want agencies that can participate in that complexity.” He is careful, though, not to frame this as creativity being pushed aside. “Clients aren't necessarily replacing creativity with AI, data or technology,” he adds. “They are expecting creativity to work with all of them.”

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Chaurasia reads the same shift through a harder commercial lens, the one clients are now applying to every partner on their roster, agency or otherwise. “AI and data are baseline expectations now, not add-ons,” he says. “That doesn't make creativity less important; it just means it's no longer enough on its own. The agencies winning today have made both work together, not just bolted tech onto their creative offering.”

The gap he is describing is not new; it has simply widened. Back in 2022, a WFA study found that 82% of marketers called creativity their most powerful business tool, yet only 28% actually treated it as business critical. The gap has barely narrowed since. WFA and LIONS' Clients and Creativity 2026 report, drawn from over 160 senior marketers globally, found that only three in ten multinational marketers said their teams consistently deliver creative excellence, even though 53% said they valued it. Intent and follow-through, in other words, still don't quite match, and that mismatch is exactly the space agencies are being asked to fill with proof of capability.

Can an idea still win it alone

Given how long that checklist has grown, it would be easy to assume the big idea has been demoted to a hygiene factor. Both creative leaders push back on that reading, insisting a genuinely strong idea can still flip the room, even if it can no longer do the job alone.

“A truly powerful creative idea can still change the entire dynamic of a pitch,” Sharma says. “When a client sees an idea that makes them say, ‘This is what our brand should be saying,’ a lot of the conversation changes.” He is quick to add a caveat, though, one that sounds close to a mantra for his own team: “Creative excellence can win you the pitch; creative excellence plus the ability to deliver can win you the relationship.”

Chaurasia is more circumspect about how often that moment actually arrives at the pitches that matter most. “Rarely, and only in specific situations, mostly brand- or campaign-led briefs with a client who genuinely values craft above all else,” he says. “For most large pitches today, especially ones tied to business transformation or long retainers, creative alone won't close it. It might get you shortlisted, even remembered, but the final call usually comes down to trust: does the client believe you can be a real partner, not just a vendor of good ideas.”

That distinction, partner versus vendor, is really where this debate lands. It is less about creativity losing ground and more about what clients now expect creativity to be bundled with before they'll trust an agency with the business. “So, has creative excellence lost its currency? No,” Sharma says. “The currency has simply become more valuable, and the market is demanding that you know how to spend it.”

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The other side of the brief

There is, however, a friction in this story that rarely gets discussed at the pitch table itself: the freedom agencies are actually given once they've won the business they fought so hard for.

Vaibhav Mishra, Founder of Famesroot Management, an influencer and talent management firm that works with brands on creator-led collaborations and campaigns, points to exactly this gap. “Everyone wants innovation, but no one wants to give creative freedom,” he says. “Campaigns are pre-approved, budgets are pre-fixed, and even captions are pre-written. Then you ask: ‘Why didn't the campaign work?’ Because you didn't let the experts work.”

His larger point runs counter to the grain of an industry busy adding capabilities to its pitch decks. “Agencies today are forced to follow when they should be leading the narrative,” he says. “In this digital era, give your marketing partners freedom, and watch what real brand growth looks like.”

That is, perhaps, the more honest version of the story. Creative excellence has not lost its currency; it has simply been asked to prove itself alongside a longer list of capabilities before a client is willing to spend it. Whether agencies get the room to actually cash that currency in, once the contract is signed and the AI decks are filed away, might be the more interesting question the industry still needs to answer.