When algorithms scale and creativity doesn’t: Advertising’s value crisis

For much of the last century, the world’s biggest advertising agencies did more than sell products. They shaped culture, taught capitalism how to tell stories, and helped brands differentiate in crowded markets. Creativity was their currency—and scale came from people, process and persuasion.

Today, that equation is breaking down.

On this week’s Storyboard18 Deep Dives, we unpack what marketing leader and columnist Shubhranshu Singh describes as “the physics of advertising”—a sharp diagnosis of why the industry’s most powerful storytellers are struggling to tell their own story to markets, investors and talent.

The verdict from the market has been unforgiving. While technology companies have learned to make value compound through code, platforms and systems that learn, advertising holding companies remain tied to models built on manpower. Creativity, once a multiplier, increasingly behaves like a cost line. Decks age quickly. Talent doesn’t scale. And the old promise of differentiation feels harder to sustain.

So what went wrong?

Singh’s argument cuts uncomfortably close to home: that the world’s great brand-builders have failed to build a compelling value narrative for themselves. In chasing service revenue and billable hours, agencies built empires of people—but not systems, memory or reusable creative capital. As algorithms now optimize attention at scale, creativity finds itself competing not just with other agencies, but with platforms that never sleep, forget or demand margins.

This conversation goes beyond nostalgia for the “golden age” of advertising. It asks harder questions about whether creativity can coexist with algorithmic efficiency—and whether agencies are equipped, structurally and culturally, to reinvent themselves for a world where scale no longer comes from headcount.

What does it mean to move from renting genius to owning systems? Can storytelling be engineered to compound again? And does the industry’s current leadership have the appetite—or even the language—to attempt that shift?

In an age where algorithms learn and decks decay, this Storyboard18 deep dive explores whether advertising has forgotten how to scale its own imagination—or whether its next chapter simply needs to be written differently.

Watch the full conversation and decide for yourself where creativity goes next.