Everyone’s wigging out about creative agencies doing rebrands. They’re missing the point

Creative agencies are swimming upstream. Uncommon recently delivered JD Sports’ global rebrand—complete with a custom typeface, design toolkit, and a repositioning that’ll roll out across 38 markets. Traditional ad shops are suddenly doing the work that used to belong exclusively to us branding agencies. And some people are getting their knickers in a twist.

The think pieces write themselves: “Creative agencies are encroaching on brand territory.” “The lines are blurring.” “What does this mean for specialist studios?” Everyone’s treating this like a turf war, like someone’s stealing lunch money.

But here’s what we’re not seeing: this isn’t about expansion. It’s about correction.

For years, we’ve operated in this artificial separation—brand agencies do strategy and identity, creative agencies do campaigns. It made no sense then, and it makes even less sense now. Because brand and campaign work are the same thing, they’re different expressions of the same strategic problem. Separating them was always an industry construct, not a client need.

When a creative agency builds a brand from scratch, they’re not “moving upstream”—they’re acknowledging that you can’t make brilliant work without understanding the fundamental strategic truth of what something is and why it matters. And conversely, when brand agencies stop at a logo and guidelines without thinking about how this thing moves through culture, they’re only doing half the job.

The JD Sports work demonstrates this perfectly. The new identity features a logo angled at 10 degrees to represent forward momentum, with a custom font and motion elements designed to position JD as a driving force behind youth culture. That’s not just pretty pictures—it’s strategic positioning made visible, then activated through every customer touchpoint. You can’t separate the brand thinking from the creative expression. They’re one thing.

Arguably, more creative agencies are now making this “land grab” than ever before because AI is making production easier, quicker, and cheaper. They need to follow the money.

But what clients actually need isn’t specialists who stay in their lane—it’s people who understand the full spectrum of how brands exist in culture, from the strategic bedrock through to how it shows up in a TikTok comment section. The best work has always come from places that refuse to respect arbitrary boundaries.

So maybe the real story isn’t that creative agencies are doing brand work. It’s that the distinction was always nonsense. Good agencies—whatever you want to call them—understand that brand is behaviour, campaigns are manifestations of strategy, and you can’t do one well without deeply understanding the other.

The industry’s obsession with categorisation has always been more about billing models than what actually produces great work. “Brand agencies” and “creative agencies” are financial models, not creative philosophies. What matters is whether you can solve the problem in front of you—whether that’s defining what something stands for or making a piece of culture that shifts perception.

The agencies winning right now are the ones who stopped asking “is this brand work or campaign work?” and started asking “is this the right answer?” Because at the end of the day, clients don’t care about our org charts. They care about work that changes their business. Yes, it’s become more of a bun-fight, but creative / brand agencies like Mother have been straddling this territory for decades.

The lanes were always imaginary. Welcome to the merge.