DIGIDAY, JUNE 2026

Before those ventures, she spent a decade running Spin, her first company, doing early integrated comms and guerrilla-style activations for cultural brands like a young VICE and Carhartt. They used flyposting because they couldn’t afford out-of-home ads, built shared audiences through collaboration and worked with up-and-coming creatives because that’s how culture and conversations actually travelled. She took that outsider approach brand-side and had to rebuild internal processes from the inside to make it work.

“Because what I found was that large organisations are still structured around the hero campaign that justifies both the production and media spend,” said Fataar. “But the conversations shaping how people felt about those brands were happening somewhere else entirely, in ways, places and spaces those traditional systems couldn’t track or respond to fast enough.”

The agencies with that mix of speed, cultural intuition and corporate know-how are the ones that will win the next decade of this business. Everyone else will be stuck justifying a hero campaign to a culture that’s already moved on.

“What we’re hearing consistently this week is that marketers aren’t just raising the bar on what creative looks like, they’re fundamentally rethinking who they want to build with and how they want to build,” said Johnny Rohrbach, co-founder of global partnerships and operations at Silverside AI. 

The agencies that understand that will be the ones that adjust their whole business model accordingly. Pricing built on guessing a client’s budget rather than scoping real costs is a bad foundation for any relationship and fixed deliverables can’t survive a marketing cycle that now moves week to week.

CMOs increasingly show up with their own scripts and ideas already worked out, not a blank brief. The old agency posture — disappear for three weeks, come back with three options — doesn’t fit how clients want to work anymore. What’s needed is a reset on both sides: cmos more open to handing over a rough idea instead of a finished script, agencies more willing to collaborate rather than disappear and present.

“CMOs today are showing up with a clear initial vision,” said Rohrbach. “They know the direction they want to go. What they need now is a partner who can run alongside them, help refine and enhance that vision, and build from that starting point together, not an agency that retreats into a black box and comes back as the sole arbiter of the idea.” Granted, he’s got skin in the game. After all, his company helps some of the biggest brands produce ads with generative AI in minutes.

But,there’s truth in it regardless, backed up by what plenty of others have said this week. “We’re going back to the origin of the advertising industry,” said Joe Maglio CEO Cheil Agency Network. “Things that will separate agencies are: Creativity and Trust.”