In our quest to make advertising more efficient, I fear we took a shot at the wrong goal. For the past 20 years, it seems the battle cry from marketers and across agencies has been “Do more with less”. From the looks of it, we scored. In fact, while spend and ad volume have both been climbing, effectiveness has been falling for over two decades running, and now the industry is cutting even deeper into its own workforce.

We’re certainly doing more. It’s widely accepted that people are exposed to somewhere between 4,000 and 10,000 ads a day — though between distractions and ad blockers, they consciously register only about 100 of them. And we haven’t let up: WARC reports that global ad spend grew 8.9% in 2025. Friends, this is nothing less than an assault on our audiences. Volume makes for great meetings and looks great on dashboards, but where are the returns?

And we’re doing it with less. Forrester’s data shows agency headcount fell 8% in 2025, with job openings down 7.5% between 2022 and 2025 — led by cuts at the big holding companies. Dentsu alone eliminated 3,400 jobs this year, roughly 8% of its global staff, and it’s far from alone; the other major holding companies have been making comparable cuts of their own. And it’s not over: Forrester is forecasting an additional 15% of agency jobs will be eliminated in 2026.

But what did all that get us?

Less effective work. The IPA’s landmark “Crisis in Creative Effectiveness” report, drawing on nearly 600 case studies spanning 24 years, found that “creatively awarded campaigns are now less effective than they have been in 24 years of data analysis and now no more effective than non-awarded campaigns”. And it’s not an old problem that fixed itself — a 2025 WARC/Kantar analysis of over 5,600 award-tracked ideas since 2016 found only 21% of creatively awarded ideas also won for effectiveness.

And a demoralized workforce. When we all screamed “Gooooooaaaaalllll!!!”, we should have noticed that we were shooting at the wrong target. Yes, we got more efficient. Thank you, AI. Thank you, process tools. Thank you, “Optimization” consultants.

But there’s a better way. After the cuts, after the tech, it’s time to reframe the goal. Do more with less has had its day. Now it’s time to do better with less. And doing better starts with our people.

I believe it’s time to aim to get back to what made us successful in the first place: be smart, be creative, be provocative, inspire each other, surprise and delight our audience, and do things that are unexpected. Use the tools to handle the menial tasks (Let’s hear it for an agent that can handle timesheets for us!), and find out how much more effective our people can be. We can learn to be better together by refocusing on what sets us apart — our people and their extraordinary talents.

I can show you how. Call me, or subscribe below for more.