Long before electric wind turbines dotted our landscapes, windmills represented humanity's ingenuity in harnessing nature's raw power. When faced with an unstoppable force, our ancestors didn't just hunker down or drift aimlessly – they invented a way to capture that power and turn it into something productive.
The metaphor of winds as agents of change runs deep in human understanding. In ancient Greek mythology, the god Aeolus controlled the winds, which were seen as forces capable of bringing either destruction or renewal. The I Ching or "Book of Changes," dating back over 3,000 years, uses wind as one of its eight basic elements, symbolising gentle but persistent transformation.
Wind doesn't just blow things down – it also fills the sails that drive us forward.
In the marketing services industry today, we face our own unstoppable and unprecedented forces. The winds of change are howling, yet in the midst of this storm, too many leaders are making the wrong choice about how to respond.
Budget Compression: CMOs are under immense pressure to deliver more with less, as marketing budgets face unprecedented scrutiny in boardrooms worldwide.
Encroachment by the Consultancies: Strategy consultancies continue their march into traditional agency territory, offering integrated services that connect marketing directly to business transformation.
Platform Disintermediation: The tech giants – Meta, Google, Amazon – are building tools that allow brands to bypass their agencies entirely, going direct to consumers with increasingly sophisticated capabilities.
AI Acceleration: Generative AI is automating creative and analytical tasks that once required armies of specialists, fundamentally changing the economics of marketing production.
These aren't gentle breezes – they're gale-force winds. And they're not stopping anytime soon.
There are Three Responses to the Storm
In the face of these transformative forces, leadership responses fall into three distinct categories. Which one describes you and your organisation?
1. Building Bunkers: The Deniers
Some leaders respond to the winds of change by digging in deeper, building metaphorical bunkers to weather what they perceive as a passing storm. They double down on existing business models, dismiss new approaches as fads, and cling to the belief that their expertise and relationships will shield them from fundamental disruption.
"AI will never replace what we do – creativity is uniquely human" they say. This statement contains a grain of truth but misses the larger point. While AI may not replace human creativity entirely, it has already transformed how creative work gets produced, scaled, and delivered. Ignoring this reality isn't protection – it's self-deception.
Bunker-builders often cite quality concerns, ethical considerations, or client hesitancy as reasons for their caution. While these concerns have merit, they frequently mask the real issue: organisational fear of change.
Omnicom's choice to acquire and merge IPG falls squarely in this space - thinking that making your bunker bigger will help, that having the biggest bunker in the industry will somehow make things ok. It won't.
The problem with bunkers is that they offer only temporary protection. The winds keep blowing, and eventually, even the strongest bunker erodes. Meanwhile, those inside fall further behind with each passing day.
2. Drifting Like Leaves: The Talkers
A second group of leaders acknowledges the winds but responds by simply letting themselves be blown about. These are the industry's great talkers – endlessly discussing AI strategies, publishing thought leadership on transformation, and perhaps even investing in splashy innovation labs.
Yet beneath the surface, little changes. Their core operating model remains intact. Their talent strategy stays focused on traditional skills. Their organisation charts remain unaltered.
I've attended countless industry conferences where executives give impressive presentations about embracing change, only to return to organisations that operate exactly as they did five years ago. The gap between their rhetoric and reality grows wider with each passing quarter.
This approach is particularly dangerous because it creates the illusion of progress without the substance - perhaps therefore even more dangerous than building bunkers of ignorance. It placates boards and shareholders temporarily but solves nothing fundamental. Like leaves in the wind, these organisations may travel great distances, but they arrive at their destination battered, directionless, and unprepared.
3. Building Windmills: The Transformers
The third response – and the only sustainable one – is to build windmills. These leaders don't just acknowledge the winds of change; they actively harness them, transforming disruptive forces into engines of growth.
Windmill-builders share several distinctive traits:
They face reality unflinchingly, neither minimising the scale of change nor catastrophising it
They reimagine their core business from first principles, not just bolting on digital capabilities to analog models
They invest ahead of demand, building capabilities clients don't yet know they need
They embrace productive destruction of their own business models before competitors do it to them
They hire for adaptation, not just expertise, prioritising learning velocity over static knowledge
Most importantly, they recognise that technological adoption isn't a tech problem – it's a people problem.
It is culture, not technology, that is the foundation of every windmill. The technology required for transformation is widely available. Cloud computing, AI platforms, data infrastructure and now emerging agentic AI models – none of these are proprietary or inaccessible. What remains scarce is the cultural foundation necessary to implement them effectively.
Building windmills requires:
Psychological safety – Teams must feel safe to experiment, fail, and learn without fear of punishment. When WPP's Mark Read recently noted that they're "behind on AI adoption," the question isn't why their engineers failed – it's why their culture didn't empower those engineers to drive change faster.
Distributed decision-making – Transformation moves too quickly for traditional approval chains. Leaders must push authority to the edges of the organisation, where market signals are strongest. Publicis Groupe's "Power of One" model works precisely because it empowers client teams to draw on distributed capabilities without centralised bureaucracy.
Cross-functional collaboration – Windmills don't work if the builders don't talk to the operators. Similarly, transformation fails when technology, creative, strategy, and client teams operate in silos. The organisations winning today have dismantled these barriers, creating truly integrated teams focused on outcomes, not outputs.
Learning orientation – Perhaps most critically, windmill-building organisations treat learning as their primary competitive advantage. They recognise that specific technologies will come and go, but the ability to adapt quickly remains constant. They invest heavily in upskilling, cross-training, and continuous education.
This last point cannot be overstated. In my decades in this industry, I've never seen a more stark learning divide than exists today. Some organisations have built systematic approaches to building new capabilities, while others still rely on individuals to "figure it out" on their own time.
The former are thriving. The latter are barely surviving.
Here's the uncomfortable truth that few industry leaders want to face: Technology isn't disrupting our industry. The failure to adopt technology is.
AI isn't killing creative jobs – the inability to reimagine creative processes with AI is. Platforms aren't destroying agency value – agencies' reluctance to evolve their value proposition is. Data availability isn't commoditising strategy – strategists' hesitation to become data-fluent is.
This reframing matters profoundly. If technology itself is the disruptor, then disruption is something happening to us. If our response to technology is the real issue, then transformation becomes something we control.
The good news? Cultural transformation, while difficult, is entirely within our power. No one is stopping agencies and marketing organisations from building more adaptive cultures. No one is preventing them from implementing more agile operating models. No one is blocking them from rethinking organisational structures that date back to the Mad Men era.
Building windmills isn't easy. It requires vision, courage, and persistence. The foundations must be deep, the structures carefully engineered, and the mechanisms precisely calibrated. But in exchange for this effort, windmill-builders gain something invaluable: the ability to transform unstoppable forces from threats into opportunities.
Your Choice in the Storm
As you read this, I suspect you've already categorised your organisation – and perhaps yourself – into one of these three responses. You know whether you're building bunkers, drifting like leaves, or building windmills.
If you don't like your answer, remember this: Cultural transformation always begins with individual choice. One leader committed to building windmills can inspire an entire team. One team successfully harnessing change can transform an entire department. One department demonstrating results can shift an entire organisation.
The winds of change in our industry will only grow stronger. Budget pressures won't ease. Consultancies won't retreat. Platforms won't stop evolving. AI will only accelerate.
These forces are beyond your control. What remains entirely within your control is how you respond.
Will you build deeper bunkers? Will you drift with elegant commentary but no real change? Or will you build windmills that transform these powerful forces into energy for growth?
The storm is here. The choice is yours.
Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 5 March 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.