Innovation as an operating model

Creativity has never been in higher demand, yet agency margins are collapsing.

An industry built on the promise of differentiation risks drifting into a sea of sameness, squeezed by automation, technology, and efficiencies. The paradox is clear: As creative agencies are becoming commodities, they are falling victim to the very market forces clients pay them to escape. From my vantage point, the only way out is innovation.

Transient advantage: The new norm

I was recently introduced to the work of Columbia professor Rita McGrath, whose 2013 essay on transient advantage in Harvard Business Review helped crystallize what I’d already been feeling in our industry. Her premise is simple but urgent: Advantages no longer last. What once endured for decades may last only months.

Success doesn’t come from defending a moat, but from riding a wave—spotting opportunities early, scaling them quickly, and having the discipline to abandon what no longer serves. McGrath frames innovation as a cycle: launch, ramp up, exploit, reconfigure, disengage. Repeat.

In practice, when growth slows the instinct is to cut. Trim overhead, automate tasks, streamline workflows. But you can’t cost-cut your way to relevance. Cuts may buy time, but they don’t build a future.

Brands that made innovation an operating model

Chewy began as a pet-supply e-commerce site. But margins in retail are razor-thin. So they moved into care, not just commerce—launching televets, pet insurance, and vet clinics. By owning the pet lifecycle, Chewy expanded beyond boxes of kibble into services.

A24 could have remained “just” an indie studio. Instead it built a direct-to-consumer engine. AAA24 turns films into membership, merch, and magazines. Content fuels commerce, commerce fuels community, and the flywheel spins.

MUBI carved out a space in streaming by fusing curation with vertical integration. Beyond its niche platform, it acquired The Match Factory, expanded festival acquisitions, and added theatrical distribution. MUBI is more than a streamer—it’s a self-sustaining ecosystem of discovery and distribution.

Each of these companies refused to mistake early success for permanence. They reinvented themselves before the tide went out.

Scale hurts, independence helps

Large holding companies are engineered to squeeze every last drop from an old model, not retire it. Investors punish operating model shifts. Systems designed for predictability deter reinvention.

Independent companies, by contrast, can pivot faster, test freely, and shed legacy models when they no longer serve. Agility beats scale in a world of transient advantage.

A call to action

At MOCEAN, we’re making innovation our operating model. We’ve launched an Office of Innovation with dedicated leadership, time, and resources to continually test, scale, and retire approaches as the market evolves.

That’s also why I’m attending the Fast Company Innovation Festival, joining leaders across industries who are wrestling with the same challenge: How to escape commoditization when the old playbooks no longer apply.

From where I sit, the era of permanent advantage is gone. Reinvention must be systemic, not cosmetic. Independent agencies like MOCEAN have both the freedom and the responsibility to show what that looks like. Because in the end, the choice is simple: innovation or irrelevance.

Michael McIntyre is CEO of MOCEAN.