The agency landscape is shifting fast, and if you are paying attention, there has never been a more interesting time to be building a career in the creative industry.

This question was answered by Nick Hunter, an independent agency owner and industry leader with direct experience of winning work from large agencies, and Aimee Davies, a mental health expert whose work sits at the intersection of wellbeing and professional life in the creative sector. Andy Wright, host of Asking For A Friend on Never Not Creative, guided the conversation.

Small and senior is the new model

Nick is clear about what he is seeing on the ground: lean, senior-heavy independent shops are growing, and they are doing it by removing the bureaucracy that has long been a frustration inside large agency networks. With AI doing more of the heavy lifting on production and process, small teams can move at a speed that bigger organisations simply cannot match. Nick's own agency is a case in point, regularly picking up work that once would have gone to the big players.

Big agencies won't vanish, but they will look very different

That said, Nick is not predicting the total collapse of large agencies. They will still exist, but the golden era of the sprawling, headcount-heavy agency of the eighties and nineties is well and truly behind us. The change is already well underway, and the direction of travel is not reversing.

The opportunity for juniors is real

For those coming into the industry now, Nick sees genuine cause for excitement. AI is compressing learning curves in ways that simply were not possible before. In smaller agencies where teams move from strategy all the way through to market implementation, a junior can gain experience in months that might once have taken years. The pace of the environment accelerates everything.

Taste is the differentiator

Nick's advice for anyone starting out is pointed: be hungry, be fast, and invest in developing your taste. That means going beyond the scroll. Art galleries, great cinema, broad cultural curiosity. These are the things that separate the candidates who catch his eye from those who do not.

The industry is reorganising itself, and for those who are genuinely curious and willing to move quickly, the timing could hardly be better.