A strategist friend of mine (smart, senior, works at one of the large agencies you’d recognize) was three drinks into a Tuesday when he finally said the thing everyone in this business thinks and almost nobody has the nerve to say out loud.
“Is this all there is? One more brand refresh? One more campaign that’s just lipstick on a pig?”
I haven’t stopped thinking about that line. It wasn’t really about a client, or a category, or even the work itself. It was quieter and sharper than that. It was the sound of someone asking whether the whole enterprise, and maybe the entire agency category, still adds up to anything.
The excuse everyone knows
Everyone who’s spent real time in an agency knows the same quiet assumption, even if nobody says it plainly: someone above you must be thinking about where all of this is going, so you don’t have to. You’ve got a deck due at 9 AM Monday and it’s 11PM on Sunday. Another round of revisions to a headline for an ad that will appear for 6 seconds on IG. There’s no room left over to also wonder whether the whole model needs fixing, so you assume, reasonably, that’s somebody else’s job, somebody with more altitude and a better view of the whole picture. That assumption is the real alibi. It lets the people doing the work off the hook, and it lets the people running the business off the hook too, because as long as everyone assumes someone else is minding the store, nobody has to prove they actually are.
The people I’m talking about aren’t the burnout cases you read about in trend pieces. They’re not quiet quitting. These people still care, which is the whole problem: nobody gets unsettled over a job they’ve already checked out of. These are the account people who care about doing the job right, the creatives who still think good work matters, the strategists who can see three moves ahead and hate that nobody asked them to. Give one of them thirty minutes of real quiet, away from the next deadline, and they’ll ask the question that actually matters: fine, the work pays the bills, but is it building toward anything, or is this just what the job is now?
Nobody’s asking you to quit the business
This isn’t a manifesto about torching capitalism, and the people having these conversations aren’t precious about it. They know exactly what business they’re in.
There’s a scene in The Godfather Part II where Michael Corleone presses Hyman Roth, an old man who’s spent his whole life laundering money through hotels and casinos, for a straight answer about money and loyalty. Roth doesn’t give him one. Instead he tells a story: about a kid he’d come up with decades earlier, headstrong and loud, who had the vision to build a city out of a stretch of desert. That kid built Las Vegas. Then one day he took a bullet through the eye, and nobody ever told Roth who gave the order. “When I heard it, I wasn’t angry,” he says. “I knew Moe, I knew he was headstrong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we’ve chosen. I didn’t ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business.” No inquiry. No reckoning. Just an old man teaching a younger one exactly which questions are safe to stop asking.
Agency leadership loves that line for the same reason Roth did. It ends the conversation. Long hours, thin margins, another round of layoffs disguised as “restructuring,” a review lost after everyone gave it everything they had: this is the business we have chosen. Case closed.
Except it isn’t. Nobody inside these agencies is asking to leave the business. They’re asking whether “the business we have chosen” has to mean the same grind, forever, on autopilot. Roth used the line to justify something that could never change. That’s the part worth stealing back. A business built on client services and campaigns doesn’t have to stay static just because someone in a corner office finds the alternative to change more terrifying than the status quo.
What people actually want
Talk to enough sharp, mid-career people inside agencies and the same pattern shows up every time. It isn’t comp. It isn’t even workload, though both get blamed because they’re safer to name. It’s direction. People want proof that someone above them has actually decided what the agency is for, beyond the next new-business pitch and the next round of cuts dressed up as “efficiency.” They want a business strategy worth believing in, the same way they were once asked to believe in the client’s brand strategy, back when the agency still expected that kind of conviction from them.
That’s the real discontent, and it’s quieter and more dangerous than a morale problem. It doesn’t sound like “I hate this job.” It sounds like “I would love this job if someone would just tell me where it’s going.” Smart people will absorb almost anything: brutal briefs, impossible clients, timelines that make no sense, if they believe it’s building toward something. What breaks them is the growing suspicion that it isn’t building toward anything at all. It’s just motion. Another refresh. Another pig, fresh lipstick. Same grind, dressed up as a strategy the agency never actually wrote.
The leadership gap
Some of this is on the people running the place. Motivation was never a perks problem or a town-hall problem. It’s a business strategy problem, and it’s been mislabeled for years because a business strategy problem is harder to solve and more dangerous to admit. If leadership wants people to stop asking “is this all there is” over a third drink, they need to answer it: a real business strategy, where the agency is actually headed, what it stands for, why the work matters past this quarter’s revenue.
But waiting for that memo is its own kind of surrender because nobody at the top is under any real pressure to write it. Not yet. Not as long as the people asking the question keep asking it quietly, into a glass, to one friend, and then showing up Monday and doing the work anyway.
This part is on you
So say it out loud. Not in an exit interview, but in the room, to the person who can actually do something about it. If you’re the account lead, the creative director, the strategist who sees three moves ahead: you are not powerless in this. You are, in fact, the only ones with enough proximity to the work and enough credibility with each other to force the question. Leadership doesn’t feel pressure from people who suffer in silence. It feels pressure from people who compare notes.
So compare notes. Talk to the people at the agency down the street who are having the exact same drink and the exact same conversation. You are not the only one who thinks the pig needs more than lipstick. Stop treating your discontent as a personal failing to manage privately and start treating it as information, information your leadership needs and currently doesn’t have, because nobody’s told them plainly enough, often enough, or loudly enough.
This isn’t a call to burn your agency down or quit on principle. It’s a call to stop being the alibi. Every time someone absorbs the grind without naming what it’s for, they’re doing leadership’s job for them, keeping the machine running without ever making it answer for itself. Stop doing that job for free. Ask the question in daylight. Ask it again when they change the subject. Ask it with enough people standing next to you that it can’t be written off as one burned-out agency person having a bad day.
The business we have chosen doesn’t have to stay exactly as we found it. But it will, for exactly as long as the smartest people in it keep having this conversation only at the bar, and never at the table.