From the compostable coffee cups we drink our flat whites out of to the solar panels on our office roofs, environmental sustainability is demanding a radical rehaul of production processes, consumption patterns and our way of life.

It’s easy to see the impact of this on the advertising and marketing industry: no brand today can shy away from investing in campaigns about sustainability and creative agencies are more than happy to jump on a climate change brief, especially if it can translate to a chance at impressing a Cannes Lions jury.

Which is why it is baffling to me how our industry is somehow completely unaware of another sustainability battle that we need to wake up to, one that could make or break the future of advertising agencies: creative sustainability.

Just as overconsumption of finite resources is destroying nature, driving climate change and impacting people’s health and wellbeing, the past 30 years have also seen a level of ‘creative inflation’ that has left agencies with less and less time to do more than ever – all while getting paid less.

It is baffling to me how our industry is unaware of another sustainability battle that we need to wake up to, one that could make or break agencies

This has contributed to building a more and more demanding, toxic and out-of-touch agency culture – where overworking has become the only way of working. This is alienating employees and driving young creative minds away from advertising.

As Gen Z and Gen Alpha are reshaping work culture by prioritising work-life balance, confronting the issue has never been more urgent – whether you want to keep attracting talent, build a financially healthy company, or walk away from the Croisette with a haul of Lions.

As CCO and partner of one of the leading independent creative agencies in Italy, I’ve been at the forefront of this fight for more than a decade. For independent agencies, who can’t rely on the support of a network or holding company but have the freedom to reshape their own creative processes, creative sustainability is more than a nice to have: it’s an essential survival tool.

The past 30 years have also seen a level of ‘creative inflation’ that has left agencies with less and less time to do more than ever – all while getting paid less

I find this to be a very simple but revealing metaphor: think of your agency as planet Earth. Your people are your source of energy. Burnouts, resignations, dramatic dips in employees’ performance, clients that become unprofitable: these are an agency’s version of droughts, fires, floods and other climate disasters.

Year after year, we’ve seen the ‘temperature’ rise all around us and, just like the proverbial frog in the pan, we’ve either ignored it or failed to notice. But now that the warming has become impossible to turn away from, it’s time to adapt or die.

Enter AI. We’ve been quick to label AI as either a threat to our jobs or an empowering creative tool, but I think its true potential is far more interesting. AI is the ultimate recycling tool: what it does, quite literally, is take all of our past and present culture (images, texts, videos, etc) and make it eternally reusable and renewable.

I want be extremely clear, though: I don’t think AI will come up with original ideas in place of humans. Quite the opposite. By making every other part of a creative agency’s work a bit simpler, a bit faster, a bit more sustainable, it will allow our teams to really focus on the most creative and valuable part of their work: creating impactful and successful campaign ideas for our clients.

We need to rethink processes and workflows from scratch. Build healthier and more transparent relationships with clients

Yet while AI offers the opportunity to start talking about and investing in creative sustainability, it’s not a silver bullet. To really kick off a new evolutionary stage we need to challenge the rules that have defined our industry for decades.

We need to rethink processes and workflows from scratch. Build healthier and more transparent relationships with clients, making them part of the solution. Empower junior employees to make a difference and play a key role in defining agency culture. Monetise our work in a way that values quality over quantity.

If it sounds ambitious and a bit optimistic, it’s because it is. But it’s the only approach that works if you want to save a doomed planet. Sorry, I meant ‘industry’.

Livio Basoli is CCO and partner at Dude; dude.it