Carl Moggridge.
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Carl Moggridge, Creative Partner at Hopeful Monsters.
Last year, I opened this column with a simple call to arms: “Let’s punch average in the face.”
At the time, it felt true. The work was polished, functional, but somehow… flat. I couldn’t quite say why.
12 months later, I can.
If 2024 was a year of sameness, 2025 showed the forces behind it. And here’s the point: average wasn’t a creative problem. It was a stress response to an uncertain economic, geopolitical and societal environment.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked through recessions, restructures and global shocks before. But nothing has felt quite as strange, unpredictable or structural as this period. It’s not that we’re dealing with just a ‘bit’ of uncertainty, it’s a fundamentally different operating climate.
Nearly every client conversation this year has carried the same undertone: ‘We don’t know what’s next’. The result? Budgets have been cautious, forecasts have been hazy and even the biggest global brands - traditionally the most forward-planned, most stable - seem to be working in the dark.
When you can’t see your revenue line clearly, you don’t swing big. You protect. You repeat what’s “safe”. You copy-paste.
So yes - we did see some incredible work this year. There were some standout award-winners and clever moments. I saw some genuine sparks of creativity. But overall, we felt the hesitancy. We felt the grip tightening.
So the agency job shifted. Less “be brave”. More “be steady”. Help clients make calls in the fog. Help them waste less time. Help them find a way forward.
Aside from that, the biggest shift for me has been watching the industry turn inward.
Scroll LinkedIn or sit through a conference, you’ll see creatives, strategists, consultants and marketers all obsessing over the same things; AI slop, attention metrics, distinctive assets, marketing-science formulas. On and on it goes.
We’ve become like tiny birds pecking at breadcrumbs, completely unaware of the hawk circling above.
While we’ve been fixated on optimisation, measurement and methodology, enormous macro changes are happening outside our industry that have been reshaping economies, companies and consumer behaviour en masse.
These shifts determine how businesses operate, shape competitiveness and dictate how brands grow (or don’t).
But unfortunately, our industry isn’t talking about these shifts. Instead, our briefs increasingly sound like internal memos: “Increase mental availability”; “maximise attention”; “build salience”.
Those aren’t business problems. They’re industry challenges we’re projecting onto clients.
At some point, we stopped asking the most important questions: What’s actually going on in your category? Why aren’t people buying? Where is value being eroded? What is the real competitive pressure?
I believe creativity can solve business problems. But not if we only look inward.
That’s why, if I had to pick one word for 2026, it’s efficiency. Not the LinkedIn version. The boardroom version.
If a business can spend 10% of revenue on advertising to maybe grow a little, or spend 10% on tech that promises to run the place twice as lean, boards will choose the second option.
So the year of efficiency has already started. You just have to look at two Christmas ads - Woolworths reusing last year’s campaign and Coca-Cola using AI for a second year, to see it in full effect.
Christmas campaigns have long been the barometer for creativity in our industry, and seeing efficiency take hold here shows just how deeply it’s starting to influence even the moments we’ve traditionally seen as the chance to be bold and imaginative.
But when everything becomes streamlined, templated and automated, it becomes, by definition, average.
Which brings us back to where we started. But don’t worry - there is a bright side.
When big brands start building for themselves, not customers, value gets stripped out. Prices rise. Quality drops. Service thins out.
You only have to fly Qantas to feel it. High prices. Less value. The world’s most expensive budget airline.
While that’s terrible for customers, it is an enormous opportunity for challenger brands. When incumbents chase efficiency to the point of erosion, gaps appear. People get fed up. They look around. That’s when the guard can genuinely change.
So the job to do in 2026 isn’t to preach bravery. And it isn’t to worship at the altar of efficiency. It’s to do one thing: solve real problems again.
Look up from the breadcrumbs. Ask bigger questions. Read the economy. Watch behaviour. Find the gap between what companies optimise for and what people actually need. Then use creativity - genuine, human, imaginative creativity - to bridge it.
Average won’t disappear on its own. Efficiency will make more of it. Which is exactly why the opportunity for difference has never been bigger.
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