Next wave of creativity: What's in store for 2026?

The creative industry is at a pivotal moment. As 2026 approaches, agencies and brands face unprecedented opportunities and challenges from rapid technological advances, shifting audience expectations, and the accelerating pace of culture. AI is no longer experimental, it’s embedded in how ideas are conceived, produced, and delivered.

Brands must act not just as marketers, but as cultural contributors, creating work that resonates authentically across communities and platforms. Yet technology alone won’t drive creativity; human insight, cultural intuition, and storytelling remain what make campaigns memorable. Success lies in balancing the speed and scale AI enables with the originality, empathy, and nuance only humans can provide.

To understand where the industry is headed, we spoke with Singapore’s leading creative thinkers. From AI-augmented workflows to culture-driven brand ecosystems, here’s how they see the focal points of creativity in 2026.

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Fiona Bartholomeusz, managing director, Formul8

The next wave of change in the creative industry will be driven by AI and intelligent automation. AI-augmented creativity is set to become more pervasive, reshaping how we work and sparking concerns about redundancies in certain roles. Yet, human accountability, authenticity, and insight remain irreplaceable, providing the depth and nuance in storytelling that AI cannot replicate.

The key focus moving forward is integrating AI-enabled tools and processes without losing the human creative touch. Creativity has always been a people-and-passion business, and that must remain constant. While AI is a powerful enabler, the agencies and individuals who master its application will define the next evolution of advertising and the broader creative industry.

Ultimately, success lies not in replacing humans with AI, but in leveraging technology to amplify human creativity, preserving the originality, emotion, and insight that form the backbone of meaningful and memorable campaigns.

Munas van Boonstra, managing director, Monks SEA

The next big wave for creativity in 2026 is the shift from AI-assisted to AI-accelerated creativity; where ideas scale instantly, production compresses from weeks to hours, and brands move at the speed of culture without losing craft or humanity. The real magic sits in the sweet spot between traditional creative thinking grounded in strong insights and strategy, and the power of agentic AI tools, adaptive content engines and real-time insight platforms that let us prototype, test and personalise at scale across Southeast Asia.

This transformation succeeds when clients embrace experimentation. The journey includes wins, misses and rapid learnings, because AI today is the worst it will ever be - it’s evolving, not yet perfect, and requires hybrid human-AI models with the right talent, tools and time. In 2026, we’re investing where creativity compounds: people, technology and measurable impact.

My priority remains constant: creativity that feels unmistakably human driven by empathy, culture and purpose, powered by AI and technology.

Paul Soon, CEO, Mullen Lowe Singapore and China

In 2026, the creative industry faces not a single disruption, but a cascading sequence of shifts that require orchestration over fragmentation. As marketers increasingly lean on creators and influencers to drive reach, the real opportunity lies in reclaiming brand influence—elevating it from tactical placement to a designed system of trust, experience, and cultural relevance.

At MullenLowe Singapore, we’re actively shaping this narrative with a point of view we call “Radical transparency,” where brands must now consider how they appear in LLMs and browsers such as Comet, how they influence in synchrony with agentic commerce and live-stream ecosystems.

Our focus is on scalable innovation: co-developing Adobe’s AI platforms such as Firefly and Harmonize, and deepening integration with Salesforce to build GenAI-powered, citizen-first brand experiences. Underpinning this is a renewed commitment to talent—retaining, rewarding, and inspiring people who want to do work that performs and resonates. We are investing ahead, acquiring differentiated tools and data sources to remain strategically valuable to our clients.

Our north star remains unchanged: to build admired, effective work grounded in intelligence, creativity, and shared belief—where influence is earned, not assumed.

Kunal Jeswani, CEO, Ogilvy ASEAN

Marketing communication is always changing. The difference, however, is that the degree of change we would see in a decade, we are now seeing every couple of years. And that’s exciting. So here’s what I think we’ll see in 2026. One, greater client budget shifts to social, influencer marketing and large, client specific, built-to-purpose multi-brand content studios. Two, greater use of AI across the board through the full strategy and creative development process. This will lead to more average, templated, tick-all-the-boxes lower funnel work, which will in turn lead to more similar, easily forgettable content. Many clients will struggle with this.

Three, strong strategists and creative leaders who consistently upskill, work with AI, and have the ability to lift and differentiate both the always-on content and critical brand campaigns with sticky, memorable ideas - will continue to be in demand for clients with enough experience to understand the value of differentiation & memorability in the expanding sea of sameness. WPP Open, our AI-powered operating system, is primed to be a transformational differentiator in the way we show up as an agency for our clients. WPP Open is an enabler of excellence.

For us, the focus is on attracting and retaining the best strategists and the best creatives in the business – and equipping them with the strongest AI tool in the market to deliver the best work of our lives.

Lesley John, CEO, Virtue Asia

In 2026, the creative industry will be defined by a new world order: culture leads brands. Audiences expect brands to be active contributors, not opportunistic hijackers.

The next big wave isn’t a single technology; it’s the convergence of AI, community, and creativity into entirely new cultural ecosystems.

Relevance will be earned through constant creation, community resonance, co-authorship, and the ability to move at cultural speed. For marketers, this shift unlocks enormous opportunity: the brands that win will invest in cultural capital, versus just buying media.

At VIRTUE Asia, we help brands seize this advantage by merging cultural foresight, creativity, and scalable production. Our intelligence tools decode emerging behaviours, micro-movements, and creator economies, pinpointing where culture is forming and where it’s headed, enabling brands to build work that feels native to culture and capable of travelling across formats and markets. As AI automates the more functional layers of marketing, the next frontier is brand-funded entertainment that allows brands to create their own worlds, stories, and signature cultural IP.

Asia is now shaping what the world wants next, reversing decades of West-to-East cultural dominance. Our priority in 2026 is clear: to help brands design their place in the future of culture, building stories, experiences, and entertainment-led IP - via our proprietary partnerships across film, music & gaming - that cross markets, generate real resonance, and unlock sustained business impact and value for brands.

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