The advertising business has always had a weakness for lists that rank creative talent, and so another year brings another taxonomy of who is up, who is down, and who has decamped from a holding company outpost to open a shop in what used to be a flower store.

This year's roster of agency leaders, as compiled by the trade press, offers a useful snapshot of where the industry believes itself to be headed — which is to say, toward artificial intelligence, toward entertainment integration, and toward the kind of cultural stunts that generate the social media impressions that have become the coin of the realm.

Among the names drawing notice is Toby Bender, a British creative who spent six years at Wieden & Kennedy before joining Mother, the London independent shop. Mr. Bender's recent work for Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company, featured advertisements that criticized rival platforms for showing ads to users — a critique that Mr. Bender delivered, of course, in the form of an ad. (The irony appears to have gone unremarked upon in the award submissions.)

Elsewhere, the former leaders of Nike's global account at Wieden & Kennedy have started their own firm, quickly assembling a client roster that includes Lululemon, Moncler, and Maserati. Their work for Lululemon sought to reposition the brand beyond its yoga-pant origins by featuring a septuagenarian bodybuilder, which is one approach to the problem.

At R/GA, Tiffany Rolfe oversaw the agency's departure from IPG and a return to independent status, with a renewed emphasis on artificial intelligence that the agency says produced a 30 percent revenue gain in the latter half of 2025. At Gut Los Angeles, the creative chiefs Bruno Acanfora and Ariel Abramovici, who describe themselves as "proud ad nerds," rebranded DoorDash as "DoorDad" for Mother's Day, a stunt that propelled the delivery app to its highest-ever ranking in Apple's App Store.

The list suggests an industry that remains, as it has for decades, quite fond of itself — and quite certain that the next campaign, the next platform, the next integration will be the one that finally cracks the code. Whether any of this constitutes progress depends rather heavily on what one means by the word.

Original story published in Adweek: "The 2026 Creative 100: Agency Leaders Reclaiming the Narrative"