While the creative industry has evolved in the last few decades, it's by no means perfect. You'd be forgiven for thinking the creative industries have gotten nicer, but with staff exodus figures rising in the ad agency sphere, it seems the reality is a different story. The word on everyone's lips is, of course, AI – but GentleForces' founder and CEO Danni Mohammed thinks it's something else entirely. The industry has a deep-rooted structural problem.
With rigid, unchanging job roles constricting the industry, junior voices are being drowned out by "structural ignorance" – an invisible hierarchy that's segregating creative collaboration. To dive deeper into this issue, I caught up with Danni to dissect the current problem with creative agencies and discover how this power imbalance can be fixed.
Does the creative industry have an ageism problem?
The world has an ageism problem. And a sexism problem, a race problem, a class problem - a lot of problems. The creative industry doesn't exist in a vacuum, so of course, we’re exposed to these biases.
This is structural ignorance [...] rather than ageism
And age is an interesting concept. We say ‘age is nothing but a number’, but we draw lines around how old you are. In your 20’s and you don’t know enough about the topic; in your 50s and you’re too old to be relevant. So what happens is the middle gets stronger in power – but in fact the edges are where it becomes interesting. They challenge the story. An 80-year-old who works out. A 20-year-old who is already a professor. This doesn’t fit our picture of simplified storytelling, so we brutally cut out the top and bottom so we can feel comfortable with a uniform idea.
I actually think the more challenging issue in our industry isn’t age itself – it’s hierarchy, which is a cause of ageism. We’ve built systems that equate seniority with value and junior with execution. This is structural ignorance, in my opinion, rather than ageism.
When you reduce younger talent to formatting decks and writing status reports, you’re telling them their thinking doesn’t matter yet, which is not only absurd, it’s value-reductive. Cultural fluency doesn’t sit at the top of an org chart. Some of the sharpest, most instinctive thinking in a room often comes from the person who doesn’t conform to the structure you have in place, and often this is the youngest voice.
So yes, there’s bias. But the bigger problem is a model that ranks people instead of listening to them.
How has AI changed the hierarchy of creative agencies?
AI hasn’t changed hierarchy. It’s exposed it. If junior roles have primarily been defined by process, admin and production, then of course they’re vulnerable. And it’s worth bearing in mind that although AI might be making some roles redundant; we created that ourselves by inflating departments and not innovating quickly enough. We’ve let technology lead rather than being ready for change and using it strategically.
But this isn’t actually an AI story at all. This is a design flaw in how agencies were structured in the first place. If the bottom of your pyramid is task completion, AI will eat it. If the bottom of your organisation (as well as the middle and the top) is thinking, challenge and cultural instinct, that’s much harder to replace.
So I don’t think that the danger is automation. The danger is hollowing out. If we strip away early-career talent because we never let them contribute intellectually, we lose the friction that keeps ideas alive. And without friction, you don’t get innovation. You get beige.
And of course, who is going to be there to lead the next evolution of creativity when we don’t invest in them?
Why are junior staff so valuable for agencies?
Because they’re the future. I don’t mean in a sentimental way, though; this is a fact.
They’re valuable because they are closest to culture. They understand how communities move, how platforms shift, how language evolves. They question assumptions that senior people don’t even see anymore. Young people have a totally different experience from those in older generations – I imagine most people reading this know it, but we fail to extract it.
The industry has confused experience with authority. They’re not the same thing.
At GentleForces, we don’t see junior talent as “support”, we see them as a cultural signal – an early indicator of where the world is heading. They pick up on things faster, they challenge (if they’re allowed to), and they are much less conditioned by legacy thinking. If you treat junior practitioners as operational support, you get operational output. If you treat them as strategic and creative contributors, you get ideas.
The industry has confused experience with authority. They’re not the same thing.
Why is this hierarchical structure failing?
Because it was built for scale, not for creativity. The heritage agency model is essentially industrial. Clear layers. Clear reporting lines. Clear lanes. It worked when the world moved slower and media was simpler.
But now culture is chaotic, platforms fragment overnight, trends mutate in days. Brands go viral in moments, and lose iconic status just as fast. You can’t respond to that with a rigid pyramid.
Hierarchy slows down thinking and creates bottlenecks. It filters ideas through too many layers of approval. By the time something gets to the client, it’s been sanded down to death.
We talk a lot at GentleForces about chaos and order. It’s my firm belief that you need both. In simple terms: chaos for ideas and order for execution. Traditional agencies over-optimised for order and exited the chaos.
And when young people look up and see a ladder they don’t believe in, of course, they leave.
How can creative agencies ensure that all voices are heard and valued, regardless of age and role?
Simple, just design for it.
At GentleForces, we have two job titles. That’s it. Not because titles are bad in themselves, but because they distort behaviour. People start defending positions instead of contributing ideas.
We don’t “brainstorm” – we riff. Riffing is live. It’s messy. It’s collaborative. You build on each other’s thoughts instead of waiting for permission to speak or not speak at all
Open culture isn't about flexible working, or wellness days or communal eating – it's actually about how open the dialogue is, and how decisions are made. Who’s in the room? Who speaks first? Whose opinion carries weight? If you always default to the most senior voice, you’re ceremonial rather than collaborative. To hear all voices, you have to ignore status and listen for signal.
Anything else to add?
It’s so important to bear in mind that the staff exodus isn’t about AI. AI is just the headline.
What we’re really seeing is a loss of faith in a system that feels rigid, slow and disconnected from how people actually want to work.
Young talent doesn’t want to spend five years climbing a ladder. They want impact and to use their brains. They want to contribute right now.
If agencies want to survive, they need to redesign themselves so that thinking happens at every level. Or for more impact, reduce the amount of levels.
It’s actually good news – AI isn’t killing creativity – legacy structure is. And structure is something we can fix.
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