Creativepool

There’s an obvious problem with writing an article about old-school skills in 2026: it’s very easy to sound like somebody’s remarkably ill-informed dad. "Back in my day, we remembered phone numbers. We could find our way somewhere without a blue dot telling us we’d missed the turning. We wrote things down with pens.

For Felipe Hueb, creativity sits at the intersection of strategy, visual storytelling and a deep understanding of business. Based in Brasília, the Creative Director and Photographer has built a career that brings together engineering, commercial leadership, photography and creative direction, developing a distinctive approach shaped by both analytical thinking and visual sensitivity.

Building a successful creative agency takes more than producing visually impressive work. It requires a clear creative process, strong client relationships, strategic thinking and the ability to adapt as technology and market expectations evolve. For Dizz Agency, founded in 2012, this approach has helped the studio grow from its beginnings into an international creative agency with more than 800 projects across industries including SaaS, AI, fintech, healthcare, automotive and technology.

There’s a sentence that sounds slightly ridiculous today but probably won’t in a couple of years: your next customer might not actually visit your website. They might not see the homepage you spent six months redesigning. They might not scroll through the product photography, read the lovingly crafted About page, click your retargeting ad or sit through the 15% off pop-up that appears precisely 0.8 seconds after they arrive.

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!! Thank you to everyone in the community who voted! 3D Companies GoldFutureDeluxe Audi Rings ImaginedView project GoldStink Films Nike / THE FACE: The Heart SutraView project Gold / People's ChoiceFrantic Mercedes-AMG GTView project SilverPunctum Images Mercedes G63View project SilverINK Joby Aviation: The Golden Age of FlightView project SilverWonder Vision ASICS SUPERBLAST™ 3View project SilverWonder Vision ASICS Metaspeed™ TokyoView project...

As AI forces agencies to question not only how they make the work but where their value really lies, few leaders are pretending to have all the answers. Leith Managing Partner Richard Marsham has been thinking about what that uncertainty means in practical terms: for the agency model, for the relationship between clients and their creative partners, and for the kind of thinking businesses will still be willing to pay for when execution becomes increasingly accessible.

Creative agency growth is rarely just about winning new business. It is also about building strong client relationships, developing a distinctive creative culture and adapting to changes in technology and consumer behaviour without losing sight of what makes an agency different. For Osborne Pike Creative Director Tim Miness, curiosity, collaboration and long-term thinking are central to that approach.

For Berlin- and London-based director Anastasja Black, creativity is rooted in visual instinct, experimentation and the freedom to develop a distinctive point of view. With a background in fashion and a passion for film, Black has developed an avant-garde, underground style shaped by different cultures, subcultures and strong female characters. Her work reflects a desire to create imagery that feels powerful, distinctive and unmistakably her own.

There’s a very particular kind of agency presentation doing the rounds right now. The fonts are clean, the diagrams glow and somewhere around slide 17 there’s an impressive-looking ecosystem showing how strategy, creativity, data and production now flow seamlessly through a proprietary AI-enabled workflow. Words like “accelerate”, “augment” and “orchestrate” appear with suspicious frequency. Somebody has named an internal chatbot. Somebody else has probably put a little sparkle icon next to it.

Patrick Tichy is a Berlin-based Director of Photography whose work is shaped by a lifelong fascination with photography, film and experimental filmmaking. After studying Photography, Film and Video in London, Tichy worked his way through different film set departments, from grip and spark to camera assistant and assistant director, before developing his own body of work. Today, he works with clients across Europe and internationally, frequently travelling between Berlin, London and Vienna.