Magdalina Triantafyllidis: Credit: Leo Australia
The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2025 and forward to next year.
Magdalina Triantafyllidis, chief client partner, Leo Australia
As 2025 draws to a close, it’s time to retire one of the year’s most overused terms: Quiet quitting. For all the talk, inside our creative agencies we’ve seen a different story unfold - not one of retreat but of remarkable quiet resilience.
Economic uncertainty and market volatility has strained agency budgets, leading to more cautious agency planning. From paused briefs to project delays, 2025 has been challenging. How could teams bring their best creatively, and motivate partners and Clients, when the ground moved beneath them?
Though far from fading, agency culture found its footing - and grew stronger for it. We turned pressures into prompts for reassessing workload, focusing on collaboration and collective purpose. Survival turned into stamina, and stamina into strength.
Endurance over Escape, and creativity under pressure
The early 2020s were marked by whiplash - hybrid upheaval, dwindling budgets and an uncertainty that seemed endless. Then, more recently, came the long and boring conversation of just how many days a week working from home actually worked. In 2025, something clicked. There was a cultural shift - we stopped merely surviving and started mastering endurance.
The last five years were the training runs, while 2025 marked the starting gun.
Behind the scenes, teams found their rhythm again. Energising, adapting, and creating amid market conditions that kept changing. Instead of being distracted by these forces, agency professionals leaned into the ambiguity, turning shrinking budgets into thoughtful ideas.
Modular, budget-smart creative that still delivers big impact is now the default, and those encyclopaedic strategies that reflected a commitment to depth and detail have matured into more focused and actionable thinking.
What also shifted in 2025 was a renewed respect for operational clarity. Agencies sharpened their prioritisation, set firmer guardrails, and stopped chasing work that didn’t align with capability or capacity.
We became more thoughtful about how we structured our weeks; interrogating our briefs and how our time was invested, creating the conditions for better ideas to land. A commitment to working with intention, not adrenaline.
What’s emerged is a new kind of creative muscle memory: A collective determination to make every idea count in a way I haven’t seen in previous years.
And underpinning all of this has been a fresh commitment to invest in people. Resilience isn’t spontaneously created - it’s nurtured. Agencies doubled down on people, mentoring talent, clarifying career pathways and coaching with intent. This
investment in people became the foundation for resilience, ensuring that creativity could thrive, even under pressure.
The forecast for 2026
As 2026 approaches, the mood around me is of grounded optimism. Challenges remain, but agencies are better equipped and ready to navigate them.
Gone are the days of senior creatives ripping briefs that weren’t perfectly sewn up and endless pitch marathons fuelled by pizza and panic. In place of this, we got tighter on qualification criteria, set clearer boundaries and instead of ‘big reveal moments’, we collaborated more closely with Clients.
Our hope for 2026 isn’t pinned on endless growth, as much as that would be nice, but to something more durable: the confidence that comes from steadily strengthening our resilience muscle. Creativity is in our DNA, but is only part of what defines us; it’s our adaptability and endurance that keeps the spark alive when conditions tighten.
Resilience isn’t a buzzword – it’s the backbone of creativity.
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