Has media traded its creative imagination for efficiency and automation? Jonathan Rigby, global chief strategy officer at Initiative, argues it's time for a reset. To realize media’s true potential, agencies must reconnect with their creative partners and design ideas that shape culture rather than simply buying attention.
Recently, I had the chance to serve as a juror for the inaugural Creativity in Media category at the London International Awards, or LIAs as they are better known. The awards are proudly “created for creatives,” and we wanted this new category to make a statement: to show what creativity in media actually looks like.
What we found was equal parts inspiring and sobering. There’s no doubting media creativity has come a long way, but it still has a long way to go, and I believe there are a number of factors contributing to the problem.
Rather than being treated as an invaluable marketing force, creativity in media is often seen as a bolt-on. It’s something used to differentiate one agency’s ‘vibe’ from another, and media agencies have reinforced this perception by substituting creativity with scale, automation, and efficiency.
When we do show up with ‘big ideas,’ we’re repackaging creativity as a cultural accessory, showing up with plug-and-play partnerships. They’re clever and can be impactful, but they rent someone else’s attention rather than create new value.
The result is an industry that celebrates bursts of ingenuity while quietly conceding that media’s true creative potential (and the exponential effects it can unlock) remains untapped. True creativity in media is not about benefiting from another platform’s cultural halo. It’s about designing how people, platforms, and culture interlock in original ways.
We’ve also made media’s aperture too wide. An early debate on ‘what is media?’ is unavoidable in the jury room and inevitably an expansive owned, earned, shared, paid definition is discussed. If everything communicates, then everything is media, and plenty of entries really stretched the imagination, but with this, we risk distracting ourselves – diluting recognition for genuine media craft and overlooking its unique contribution.
Before proposing some useful remedies, let’s take a moment to highlight the breakthrough ideas and campaigns that captured the jury’s attention and deserve adulation.
Across the winning campaigns, four distinct types of media creativity emerged. Each had something worth celebrating, but also a ceiling that revealed where the industry still limits itself.
This is where the medium becomes a tool, often one that saves lives or solves a social problem.
In the Dominican Republic, Chevrolet transformed daytime billboards into reflective road signage at night to make highways safer. In Guatemala, Shell created a late-night radio station to keep truckers awake.
Judges admired the simplicity, humanity, and repeatability of these ideas. Yet they also raised a question: are we rewarding usefulness over distinctiveness? If brand-building depends on distinctive assets applied with consistency, then swapping the logo on these ideas should not deliver the same impact. In most cases, it probably would.
Here, brands turn owned or ambient spaces into storytelling platforms.
In Mexico, Coca-Cola replaced sun-bleached awnings above small businesses, transforming them into community artefacts and woven tapestries celebrating local pride. In Spain, JCDecaux handed its prime Madrid inventory to flood-stricken small businesses to help them recover.
These are beautifully crafted and ownable distinctive media assets. Yet, with a few exceptions, they risk feeling like advertising talking to itself, a nostalgic love letter to media craft that may go over consumers’ heads.
This is where creative ambition and media power truly meet.
Rocket Mortgage used the Super Bowl to bend reality, turning a patriotic TV ode to the American dream into a live sing-along in the Superdome. And Angel Soft encouraged viewers to take a ‘bio break’ so they wouldn’t miss the game’s best moments.
These moments show what is possible when placement and idea are inseparable; when media creates emotion rather than simply delivering it. However, as high-effort, high-cost, and high-stakes undertakings, were they truly more effective than the creative-led broadcast work, or just more expensive proof of concepts? In many cases, they remain single-serve, brilliant for the moment but rarely repeatable or systemic.
I have an aversion to the idea of brands creating culture, but hijacking it with perfect timing deserves praise.
When fans noticed that Deadpool and Wolverine’s costumes resembled ketchup and mustard, Heinz turned the online chatter into a full-blown multi-channel phenomenon. In Brazil, as the country’s first Oscar-nominated film, I’m Still Here made headlines, Heinz cheekily reminded consumers that those leftover sachets in the fridge were ”still here too.”
While these ideas are fast, funny, and unforgettable – flashes of instinctive brilliance that prove media can still surprise – they are lightning in a bottle, not systems that can be scaled.
Each of these examples displayed exceptional media craft, but of the 43 statues awarded, only two went to media agencies. We did not award a Grand Prix.
That is the uncomfortable truth for media agencies: it is not that media cannot be creative, but that media agencies are not at the vanguard of creative endeavor in the industry.
Creativity in media doesn’t need to reject tentpoles, partnerships, or format hacks. Those moments still matter. They create visibility, energy, and cultural relevance. The opportunity is in turning isolated activations into a coherent system that compounds over time. Borrowing cultural stages will always be part of the job, but if the ideas aren’t scalable, distinctive, or ownable, they build familiarity alone, not lasting fame.
True creativity in media is about designing how people, platforms, and culture interlock in original, enduring ways. It’s not window dressing at the beginning of a plan or ‘value add’ decoration bolted on at the end – it’s the framework that determines how brands earn, extend, and sustain attention.
That requires media agencies to stop chasing efficiency for its own sake. The relentless focus on optimization and value creation has distracted the industry from its creative potential – and clients, conditioned by procurement logic, have grown addicted to those same metrics. Unlocking growth will mean building bolder relationships: ones where experimentation is encouraged, risk is budgeted for, and paid media is allowed to act as a creative lever, not just a delivery system.
Ultimately, connection design is the new creative act. But to make it real, media and creative partners have to come back together – to understand each other’s goals, empathize with each other’s craft, and rebuild the connective tissue that once made great campaigns truly whole.
We need to stop treating ideas as assets in a spreadsheet and return to a story, a message, and a mission – then find the most compelling and innovative way and place to bring them to life. That will take humility, respect, and empathy on all sides. Clients need it. Consumers deserve it. And AI won’t solve it.
