Brands drive growth. Creativity drives brands. Keep hold of that, and let everything else change around it.

Denton-Clark was drawn in as a creative person and a writer who didn't want creativity for its own sake. He wanted creativity that could make a difference and earn a living, something business-y, and at the time that only meant advertising. Asked recently to explain the choice to students, he played them two of his favourites, Blackcurrant Tango and Levi's Odyssey, to make the case for the creative industries over the path of solicitor or doctor. It was the application of creativity in a business sense, with like-minded people, and a lot of fun. Still is.

When you've done it a while, you see the changes on a cyclical basis. At Bates Dolan they were putting media and creative together, then it came apart, then it comes back. Karmarama were integrated. So in 30 years the industry is at once completely different, in what it produces and its capabilities, and exactly the same, because it is still about how clients grow their brands. Creativity is still being applied to growth models, just in different ways.

When he first started, clients made many of the decisions themselves and arrived with a campaign brief: advertising, a TV campaign, direct marketing, digital. Now they come saying, I need to do this, I've got to grow by X, I've got this much money, what should I do. The agency gets to the same point, but the conversation is very different, and it opens up whether it is agent, consultant, partner or strategist.

There's a constant tussle between strategy and craft, how much sits on the front end versus the back end. In the early days agencies made their money on the back end because it was time and materials. Craft is still vitally important, but clients increasingly start before craft, asking for an aggressive growth strategy for a three-year earn-out. What hasn't changed in 30 years is the buzz: brands are integral to how businesses grow, and creativity powers them.

Agencies is a loaded word, and they haven't been agents between clients and media buying for a while. The thing you can't get away from is how you price your value. It was easy as a percentage of media spend, or by endeavour and time and materials. But now the processes have been shortcut, so the honest question is how you sell time and materials in an age of AI. You go back to the beginning: what value do you add to the client's business, and you share in their wins.

Everyone is moving to value pricing and outcome-based pricing, which is something consultants do. But quite often the consultants or agencies are more sophisticated at building those models than the clients, so getting it wrong can cost the client more than a time and materials model would. There is growing to do on all sides to find the right model, but the principle of sharing in the growth and outcome you add is here to stay.

Across the spectrum of what agencies do, from front-end thinking to back-end craft, there are new capabilities because of the technology, whether synthetic panels and research up front or agent clouds delivering orchestration at the back. There is always a learning curve, so the form and infrastructure of agencies changes. What runs all the way through is judgment, craft, human intelligence and human orchestration, and building those models is something everyone will lean into for years.

Reinvention comes down to mindset and legacy. Bigger companies struggle because of legacy infrastructure, while newer ones find it easier. The Mad Men era is over, and everyone has had to adapt. Denton-Clark likes Stagwell's challenger nature: only 10 years old by his account, a combination of high-end creative companies with technology and production, with no legacy infrastructure. It feels entrepreneurial and focused on client outcomes, with the human capability stepping up to a more consultancy-driven approach.

Karmarama decided early to be the most integrated agency in the UK, when integration was hard culturally, in infrastructure and in capability, because people in different disciplines have different brains. You drive integration by removing physical barriers, M&A, P&Ls, capability sets, teams, location, but also by driving cultural integration, people who are up for it with the same values. That, he says, is part of Stagwell's success too: top-of-their-game independents coming together with a shared, entrepreneurial, growth-focused mindset.

Karmarama was one of the first creative agencies to join a consultancy, after Fjord, in a big Accenture play to get into growth and marketing services. It took a while to lean into it, different brains and cultures, but once they did, the mind expands. Applying creativity to a much bigger train set was astonishing, and it changed his outlook. Going from a narrow aperture to a company with a much bigger one made the world of possibility expand exponentially, getting him out of Dean Street and into the world.

It was one of the first campaigns to properly connect data, using proprietary data to target and personalise before many were. Then two things mattered. First, an insight into the Army about belonging that opened the whole thing up. Second, the execution was really a PR campaign: advertising technically, but using paid media to drive earned attention. The task was to create enough conversation and noise around belonging, not to buy eyeballs, using posters predominantly to drive earned, and pushing the boundaries of provocation. Earned-first, social-first thinking is now almost default.

The balance is the trick. As thinking and orchestration machines get more intelligent, as targeting sharpens within regulation, and as personalisation and coding of messages improve, the discipline is retaining human judgment within it, the ghost in the machine. A derivative thinking machine can't do breakthrough thinking yet. So you build thinking machines that are data-powered, and apply human ingenuity and judgment to guide them, because both have value and you need both.

Brands follow the shiny thing and the numbers. A decade ago it was direct marketing and its ROI, now it's personalisation, orchestration and performance marketing, but the conversation is the same. Brands miss out on growth and intangible growth by coasting towards comfort levels in performance marketing. The grown-up move is to do both, so you can sow as well as harvest. They probably miss the same opportunities they did 20 or 30 years ago, only the tech has changed.

Before the C-suite you trust your own ability, and it's the account man fallacy that you think you're good at everything, the creative, the strategy, all of it. In a proper leadership role, when everything disappears around you, you realise you're at the behest of everyone else. You can't do it yourself, and you shouldn't. You buy the culture, the psychological safety and the collaboration, and it's all good until you disappear from it, then you're utterly reliant on it. So the only job is to create the conditions for talent to succeed, otherwise everybody fails.

Everyone claims not to look in the rear-view mirror, but everyone does. You compete by playing the cards on the table and answering the task. The Stagwell agency FMB has an idea that the boss is the task itself: like an army platoon, it's the person who sees the enemy and shouts point who controls the direction, whatever the hierarchy. The only thing to focus on is the task, applying the cool stuff you've got but pointing it at what you're there to solve. You win by not being distracted.

As the market bifurcates into platforms at one end and specialists at the other, Denton-Clark sees Stagwell sitting deliberately in the middle, which he argues is where the opportunity is. It's a hybrid system, flexible around infrastructure and products but able to bring the right people and capabilities to a problem, a startup mentality inside a big organisation. The juggernauts will keep bifurcating, but he calls Stagwell a bit of a market of one, and says that positioning is working well.

The creative industries are a huge British export, and he has watched the pathways into them drying up, with no clear, trackable route through school into industry. He sits on the board for Creative University and works with School House because people, and certainly parents, don't always know it's a real career. And he challenges an industry still living the lives of the Mad Men to lean in: creativity applied to business problems lets you walk into any room, so keep hold of that and let everything else change.