Article: Why your favourite ad agency is going under?

Why your favourite ad agency is going under?

In early June 2026, KesselsKramer went under. The Amsterdam agency behind "I amsterdam" and the gloriously irreverent Hans Brinker Budget Hotel, thirty years old and once the darling of the international ad world, was declared bankrupt after three big accounts wandered off in quick succession (NL Times; RTL Nieuws, 2026).

A year earlier, in October 2025, Woedend! closed its doors after a quarter of a century; postponed projects, missed pitches and mounting freelance bills did the rest (Adformatie, 2025). And in March 2025 the Amsterdam court declared BSUR bankrupt, the wilful agency behind MINI among others, after thirty years; covid had relieved it of eighty per cent of its revenue in one go (Adformatie; Mediamax, 2025). The list, regrettably, runs longer than three. In January 2026, Food Cabinet, the Amsterdam B Corp that spent thirteen years making campaigns for healthier and more sustainable food, filed for its own bankruptcy (Adformatie, 2026). That it can happen even to an agency with a stated mission makes the pattern sharper, not softer.

And KesselsKramer, Woedend! and BSUR are in good company; not every agency went out with such a bang. A fair chunk of the old guard simply slipped away with a sigh. StrawberryFrog, founded in Amsterdam in 1999 as a thorn in the side of the lumbering network agencies, shut its birthplace office almost without a sound and lives on as an address in New York (Campaign). And 180 Amsterdam, for twelve years the creative heart behind Adidas, was absorbed by Omnicom, promptly lost the Adidas account, and has been getting on with a quiet afterlife as a node in a network ever since (Campaign Asia).

Internationally, the dying is just as discreet. J. Walter Thompson, the oldest name in advertising, was retired as a brand in 2023 and folded into what is now called VML; Young & Rubicam (1923) met the same fate (Ad Age, 2023). And Crispin Porter + Bogusky, once nearly a thousand strong, shrank to some forty staff and two clients. "Time just passed them by," an insider told Ad Age (Adpulp, 2023). Which is a remarkably gentle way to describe a faceplant.

So there are two ways to disappear: with a bang or with a sigh, on the deathbed or in the museum. Anyone who merely mourns the lovely names is missing the bigger story. These aren't accidents. This is an industry being handed the bill for a mistake it has cherished for thirty years.

Not one agency, but a pattern

The numbers leave little room for doubt. Worldwide, ad spend grew by 8.6 per cent in 2025, while the revenue of the big agency networks actually shrank by 1.2 per cent (eMarketer, 2026). So more money is going into advertising, and the classic agencies are earning less of it. Funny, that. And it isn't some Amsterdam quirk: the number of ad agencies in the Netherlands fell from over 28,000 in 2014 to around 25,360 in 2023, with nearly a thousand closing their doors in a single year (Emerce/BoldData). The money is flowing somewhere else. The only question is where, and why.

The category error: mistaking the law for the broadcast logic

This is where it gets interesting, and a little uncomfortable. The popular story goes: mass communication is dead, the TV commercial is a fossil, reach is passé. It isn't true. The marketing science of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, distilled in the work of Byron Sharp, has shown for years that brands grow mainly through mental and physical availability; by being recognised quickly and being easy to buy. Reach and penetration do the work, and loyalty tricks are wildly overrated (Sharp, How Brands Grow; Ad Age, 2025). The SWOCC review of brand growth confirms this for Dutch practice: a brand grows chiefly because more people recognise it faster and can buy it more easily (SWOCC, 2023).

So the old guard's mistake was not believing in reach, nor was it the channel. Most agencies swapped the TV spot for social, online video and influencers long ago. The mistake ran deeper: they carried the broadcast logic of the TV spot into channels that were never built for it. The TV commercial was never the law; it was the delivery van. And strategists kept mimicking that delivery van, online too, long after the audience had started talking to one another. A video on social is still too often made as a shortened TV spot: broadcasting instead of joining in. That isn't a matter of style; it's a category error.

This category error is the heart of it, but rarely the direct cause of death. It left agencies vulnerable; it only turned fatal once three things changed fundamentally at once: the viewer, the client and the business model. Here are those three forces in turn, and then the accelerant that poured petrol on all of it.

The viewer has moved house, the agency stayed put

Young people no longer watch linear television as a matter of course; on-demand and online video make up the bulk of their viewing time, and they get their news mainly via Instagram (65 per cent), TikTok (40 per cent) and YouTube (38 per cent) (Nederlands Jeugdinstituut, 2024). Mind you, linear TV isn't dead. The share of young people who expect to have quit it within three years actually fell from 50 to 40 per cent (Marketingfacts, 2025). Reality, as ever, is messier than the obituary.

And that messiness is precisely the point. Attention hasn't vanished, it has splintered across interactive, horizontal channels driven by people talking to one another. Trust is earned in communities and among people who resemble each other, not via a monologue delivered from a canal-side office. The law of availability still holds. You simply have to earn it now in a thousand small, personal moments rather than in one big ad break. Which is harder, and a good deal more human.

The client is now at the controls

Meanwhile, the client has changed too. In 2023, 82 per cent of marketers had an in-house agency, up from 78 per cent in 2018, 58 per cent in 2013 and 42 per cent in 2008 (ANA, 2023). Seventy per cent of brands now have strategic capability under their own roof (WFA & Observatory International, 2023). The daily content and the quick reactions, clients now handle themselves. The steady monthly retainer, under which an agency was a trusted partner for years on end, has largely gone the way of the fax machine.

The pitch as slow assassin

What's left is a maze of one-off projects, and therefore of pitches. Agencies pour unpaid hours into a proposal for some modest campaign, time and again, with no commitment up front. Lose three accounts at once and the cash flow simply collapses. It's no coincidence that both KesselsKramer and Woedend! tripped over exactly that: vanishing accounts and pitch costs. A telling detail: Johan Kramer, co-founder of KesselsKramer, publicly refused unpaid pitches back in 2023 and argued for a fair pitch fee (Johan Kramer on LinkedIn, 2023). He saw it coming. It didn't help.

Research from SWOCC points the same way. Daan Muntinga PhD shows that the agency world is badly fragmented and that technology such as AI breeds misunderstandings between client and agency; what actually makes brands strong is a well-tended, durable partnership rather than an endless parade of one-off pitches (SWOCC, 2025).

AI has made the making almost free

And then comes the great accelerant. Generative AI is pushing the cost of production towards zero. McKinsey estimates that AI could lift marketing productivity by 5 to 15 per cent of total marketing spend, some 463 billion dollars a year (Forbes/McKinsey, 2024). A TV spot that once took weeks and a small fortune can now be made in days for a few thousand dollars; Kalshi's campaign for the NBA Finals was made with Google Veo 3 for roughly 2,000 dollars. WPP boss Mark Read called AI a development that would "completely upend our industry" (CNBC, 2025), and the Wall Street Journal expects AI to be directing some 80 per cent of digital media buying by 2030 (WSJ, 2025).

The conclusion is blunt but simple. Making the thing itself, the copy, the image, the edit, has become a commodity. Value shifts to what AI can't do: understanding how people feel, choose and behave, and distilling a direction for an organisation out of it. SWOCC draws the same line. Generative AI serves up concept variants in minutes, and predictive AI will even forecast which ideas are likely to land according to historical patterns; the original idea and the human choice, however, don't come out of a prompt (SWOCC).

The new rules of the game for agencies

So what does this mean for anyone who'd actually like to stick around? Start with one premise: people's behaviour is the brand. The value sits in what people, thanks to your work, come to feel, say and do differently.

• Sell change you can see in behaviour, not campaigns. A brand isn't built by announcing who you are, but by showing what people start doing, saying and choosing differently. That's work at the core of the organisation: purpose made concrete, culture and identity. Long programmes, not the odd flashy one-off. SWOCC shows that purpose only convinces when it's concrete and honest, a world away from the non-committal promise (Overmars & Kouwen, Purpose Oriëntatie, SWOCC, 2024).
• Bill for value, not hours. The hourly invoice punishes precisely the thinking that's now worth the most. Sell the effect, the ownership of an idea, and a lasting partnership.
• Small and close to the decision-maker. No thick layers of account management, but compact teams sitting directly at the table with whoever makes the call.
• Build on the human drives beneath behaviour. Anyone who knows what truly moves people, such as the 24 drives that 23plusone rests on, designs brands people feel rather than merely see.

Three scenarios for the future of the agency

Nobody knows the outcome, but the direction can be mapped. As making becomes nearly free and value shifts towards meaning, the trade splits roughly into three directions. Treat them as three sharp extremes to position yourself against. In its 2025 trend study, The brand as a compass in times of paradoxical tensions, SWOCC sketches six fundamental brand dilemmas for the years ahead; the three scenarios below are the strategic answers that follow from those tensions (SWOCC, 2025).

1. The algorithmic content factory. Large, tech-driven players combining data and AI into hyper-personalised campaigns at enormous scale and low cost. Here creativity is a statistical variable and it's all about volume and optimisation.

2. The strategic culture-builders. Agencies that think at the highest level: helping organisations sharpen their purpose and bring their internal culture into line with their external brand. This work is empathetic and human, and precisely for that reason not automatable. Relationships are built for the long term, on trust rather than on the next pitch. It's the strategic route we at BR-ND People deliberately choose.

3. The fluid collective. The end of the agency with fifty people on the payroll and an expensive building. In its place, networks of sharp specialists who convene per problem. Maximum agility, minimum overhead.

The truth will probably be a hybrid. The factory and the collective will fight over execution; the culture-builders will hold on to the relationship and the direction.

Whichever scenario wins, one condition applies unconditionally to all three. AI and agentic working belong at the heart of how the business runs, not as a separate innovation lab or a handy toy for the creatives on the sidelines. The workflows, the project management, the analysis, the strategy and the daily decisions will soon turn on cleverly deployed models and self-directed agents that take over the routine and free people up for judgement and direction. An agency that uses AI only to make pretty pictures faster has missed the point; an agency that designs its whole operation around it keeps the margin and the speed that others are busy losing. That's not a choice for later; it's the hard precondition for running an agency at all five years from now.

So, now what?

The demise of the great thematic agency is less a tragedy than a clear-out. Anyone who keeps believing a brand is built from an ad break, and keeps running on the treadmill of unpaid pitches, won't make it. Anyone who understands that a strong brand grows from the inside out, from the behaviour of the people who carry it, has the wind at their back.

The question isn't whether your agency survives the old campaign. The question is what you'll do now that the making has become free, and only the meaning still counts.

Sources

• NL Times (2026), Marketing firm behind iconic "I Amsterdam" campaign files for bankruptcy.
• RTL Nieuws (2026), Iconisch reclamebureau KesselsKramer failliet na wegvallen drie opdrachten.
• Adformatie (2025), Bureau Woedend failliet: 'Na 25 jaar moesten we het boek sluiten'.
• eMarketer (2026), Ad Agency Trends 2026.
• Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute); Ad Age (2025), Why reach matters more than loyalty.
• Nederlands Jeugdinstituut (2024) and Marketingfacts (2025), on young people's media use.
• ANA (2023), The Continued Rise of the In-House Agency; WFA & Observatory International (2023).
• Johan Kramer on LinkedIn (2023), on unpaid pitches.
• McKinsey via Forbes (2024) and CNBC (2025), on generative AI in advertising; WSJ (2025), on AI and media buying.
• Adformatie & Mediamax (2025), on the bankruptcy of BSUR; Campaign, StrawberryFrog shuts Amsterdam office; Campaign Asia, Adidas moves global ad account from 180 Amsterdam to Sid Lee.
• Adformatie (2026), Food Cabinet na 13 jaar failliet verklaard.
• Ad Age (2023), The J. Walter Thompson agency name is consigned to history; Adpulp/Ad Age (2023), on the decline of Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
• Emerce & BoldData (2024), on the decline in the number of Dutch ad agencies.
• Daan Muntinga (SWOCC, 2025), Bureausamenwerking: hoe werken klanten en bureaus effectief samen?; SWOCC (2025), Trendonderzoek 2025: Het merk als kompas in tijden van paradoxale spanningen.
• Esther Overmars & Amber Kouwen (SWOCC #89, 2024), Purpose Oriëntatie; SWOCC, Waarom komt echte creativiteit nooit uit een prompt?; SWOCC Selectie (2023) on brand growth.