In this episode of the AW360 Podcast, we sit down with Richard Exon, Co-Founder of London-based creative agency Joint, for an expansive conversation on where the creative industry stands in 2025—and where it’s headed. From navigating the rise of generative AI to evolving client-agency relationships, Exon shares sharp insights on how agencies can stay indispensable in an era of automation, fragmentation, and unpredictability.
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Richard, welcome to the AW360 podcast. I’m so pleased to have you on today.
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. It’s a two Richard show today, so we should do fairly well, I would hope.
To kick things off, tell us about Joint and what you do there.
Sure. Great. So my business partner and I started Joint just over 13 years ago, based in central London, but always international from day one. So we develop creative campaigns, brand thinking, brand ideas for brand design and strategy for advertising in every possible channel, social and content, right across the world for different clients of different types.
Excellent. Well, let’s start with sort of a broad question. How would you describe the creative industries health in 2025? And what’s keeping agency leaders up at night right now?
Well, I’m an optimist, so I think it’s a great industry. I love the industry. I get still very excited about the future and about the prospects. Every 10 years or so, there’s a big moment where we all focus on the same opportunity slash challenge. And clearly at the moment, that’s AI. We’ve been to South by Southwest this year. We’ve been to Cannes this year and other events. And clearly AI is the discussion topic. How do you make the most of it? How do we make it brilliant for our people’s careers? How do we make it really add value to our clients’ businesses? And we’re all still learning, I think is the thing. No one’s got the answers, that’s for sure. And it’s exciting. It’s galvanizing. It can be a little bit scary, but that’s kind of the life we choose, I guess.
Let’s dive into that a little bit because AI continues to surge across the creative sector. I mean, there’s no denying everybody I talk to is talking about AI for better or for worse. Where do you see AI enhancing your work? And where do you see things like ethical red flags appearing?
Sure, sure. So the first question, where are we using it? We’re already using it a lot. And it’s in different applications, in different stages of our process, right? So probably where we’re using it most is in the front end, strategy, gathering insights, doing research, trying to get our strategists and creative people when they collaborate with them really up to speed as soon as possible on companies, on culture, on different channels, et cetera. So we feel it’s a way of moving further faster to really understand the context that one’s operating in when responding to a client brief or partnering a client in writing a brief. So we’re using it a lot there.
We’re using it around stimulus within the creative part of our process. We’re a long way from asking it to have ideas for us. And I think we’re very clear at this stage that it is a brilliant tool to help thinking, but it’s not a replacement for thinking. And honestly, I don’t think anyone’s trying to pretend it is that at this stage. And a lot of our production partners use it extensively in what used to be called special effects, then became CGI. And clearly it’s a really, really powerful tool for, again, doing incredible things in production quickly. So we’re using it broadly. It’s changing every week, every month, the way we use it. We’re learning where some of the boundaries are in terms of the stuff you just can’t ask it to do yet. And it’s exciting. It feels like it’s a big discussion point in our community here at Joint. We love talking about it. We love experimenting with it. And we’re also doing increasingly doing experiments with our clients in different areas of their process and our process.
I think the ethical red flags are important, right? So there’s a lot of heat over here in the UK around IP, rightly. I think it’s a big question about how do we protect creators and the work they’ve put in and the work they’ll put in in the future. I think we have to accept that there were the same challenges when digital first came along around thinking about music, think about video streaming 10, 15, 20 years ago. And the industry and government is active around it. Human beings are amazing, right? We will figure a way to get it done. But rightly, I think clients and agencies are being very cautious about cutting humans out of the real core of production or being very careful about rights when it comes to images, music,particular action elements. And that’s right because I’ve never met a client who acts in anything other than good faith when it comes to usage and rights and IP. No brand wants to be accused of passing off or of shortchanging artists or creators. So it is a red alert. We’re all watching and all trying to figure out our way around it. But I’ve never met at, if you like, the blue chip end of the market. There are no bad actors trying to shortcut their way around IP that I’m aware of.
Yeah, it feels like a lot of that and a lot of the early fears about it replacing everybody’s job are largely kind of extreme views. I mean, when you think back to things like a friend of mine recently taught, you know, use the analogy of, hey, remember Photoshop and what that did to revolutionize how we worked with photos? And, you know, everybody thought, well, this is going to put all the photographers out of business. And actually, I think what it did was it made more of us photographers. So, you know, it’s kind of the same thing. Is that your kind of assessment?
Yeah, I would say so. And if you look at the really powerful tech over the last 25 years, from the obvious things like the iPhone or to YouTube, it’s taken the means of production and the means of amplification out of the hands of the few and into the hands of the many. So one optimistic way to look at AI is as something that levels the playing field.
Now, what that means is, and we do exercises here, right? We have account people, we have producers, we have strategists, we have creatives and designers. We’re all having a go at a bit of AI creation. And guess who’s best at it? The creative people, the people who are by training, by skill, by experience. They’re writers, they’re art directors, they’re designers, they’re creative directors. And of course, it just becomes a very powerful tool for them.
And I think it becomes very exciting to think about a future where agencies, we’re 50 people based in London, from all over the world, will be increasingly capable of moving even further, faster, better when our creatives, our strats, our producers and our designers and our account people are increasingly AI powered.
And there’s a little couplet we talk about, which is human powered AI and AI powered humans. That feels like where agencies, not just independent agencies, but in our case, an independent agency is moving towards.
And I think that there’s a sort of, there’s an airline analogy, right? Which is, you know, as airplanes have got more and more sophisticated over the last 30 years, the role of the pilot is nevertheless more important. And you would never occur to you to invest in an airplane and stick it in the air without a pilot, at least not yet. Not yet.
Let’s move over to some of the more, let’s call it the cultural side of the industry. DEI has been in headlines for years, but in 2025, do you feel that the industry is still walking the walk? Or have we seen a retreat in those sorts of commitments and progress?
I think it’s a good question and it’s an important question. If I think about the industry I joined in 1993, my first job a long, long time ago, the strides towards more inclusion are very, very clear. There’s no question about that. Is there still systemic disparity and bias within the industry? Absolutely, for sure. But things are moving in the right direction.
Now, clearly, if you think about some of the headlines that have been hugely impactful in the last five or six years, from the Black Lives Matter movement around George Floyd to the change of policy from the US government relatively recently, it can feel like there’s contested areas. My experience, our industry, what I’ve seen talking to other agency leaders, when I interview people, being at events like South by Southwest or Cannes, it is absolutely on the agenda of the creative industry to try and keep the process moving forward.
And there may be bumps in the road around certain issues, there may be some of the questions change, but I have absolutely no doubt when I think of the pitches we’ve been involved in in the last six months, the questions we get asked about the way that we treat people, the way that we think about DEI within our business, it’s still very, very high up on clients’ agendasand very high up on agencies’ agendas. So I accept and recognize there’s been a slight change of context and a slight change of environment, particularly from the news media. But if I think about the reality of people working in the creative industry that I see and witness and I’m part of, and particularly client-side as well, I think there is still a huge impetus behind it and focus on it. And that’s a great thing. Let’s dive into that a little bit.
Branching off to things like political and economic volatility, from the US elections to various global conflicts, how are these broader forces changing or shaping what clients want and your strategies and things of that nature? Sure, sure. So there’s lots of different ways to answer that. I guess there’s no doubt that as a generation of leaders, let’s imagine people who were starting to get senior and have exec-level roles in 2008 with that financial crash when Lehman Brothers went down, then you go through Brexit over here in the UK, or you go through Trump 1, then you go through COVID, then Ukraine, and now Israel, Gaza. We have been educated to recognize that not every major global crisis or incident has a direct and immediate impact on the effort we’re making on behalf of our clients or the businesses that we’re leading. However, there is no doubt that there is more caution. In my mind, the biggest thing is around budget setting.
So I’ve seen organizations understandably take a much harsher view of long-term planning, of we are sure of next year’s budget this year, and we’re sure of the year after next year’s budget this year. Let’s plan on a three-year cycle. That is harder for senior marketers to do because they feel the impact on supply chain, they feel the impact of consumer confidence, of interest rates, of currency fluctuations, much more immediately than one might imagine. So you have to balance caution with resilience and try and plot your way through. So that’s a kind of business perspective.
I think we’ve just done some really interesting research as part of a pitch, which was successful, looking at Gen Z. And it’s really interesting how that generation, there’s always trends and counter-trends, but being simplistic about it for a minute, they’re really one of our young strategies. They had a great slide, which is this is no pity party. And this idea of they’re celebrating the fact that life is for living. They had a pretty crap time through COVID at a critical time of their development, and they don’t want to get too introspective. They want to go out, they want to meet people, have fun, grow their networks, get their learning going, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And again, that feels like a real sort of how we were worried about, for the safety of argument, people who were 18 five years ago who are now 23 coming into the job market, economically viable. They’ve been on an incredible journey through the first five years of their adulthood, if you like. And as they become consumers, workers, and blink, and they’ll be the leaders, I think that will be very telling in the way that we think about them and address their needs.
The traditional agency model has been challenged on multiple fronts, and this has kind of sparked from, you know, you were discussing budgets. You know, when there’s tighter budgets, there’s hybrid work, shifting client relationships. Do you think that the full-service agency still has a future, or are we looking, or should we be looking for a new blueprint for all of this? I think that change is happening and change has happened radically, okay? So again, if I think about, I’m lucky enough to work at some brilliant agencies, big agencies for a long time, and they had inbuilt huge amounts of production, income, and profit, and that has left the creative industry, you know, the creative agency bit of the industry quite a long time ago. If you go back even further, they had media, again, that’s been disintermediated. So there’s always change. What we believe at Joint is that it’s about the quality and the combination of people that you bring together, whether you’redoing sprints or scrums in squads to address a client opportunity or address a client problem with them and move through collaboration and creativity and good spirits through to great work really, really quickly. And that attitude feels more important and gives you a greater chance of success than some other kind of guaranteed retainer-based relationships. The sense that we did this last year, so we’re going to do it next year and probably the year after. That’s gone, and that probably went quite a long time ago.
So I see right now a really thriving independent sector within the creative industry: lots of entrepreneurialism, lots of can-do attitude, lots of if I can find the right people and bring them together, we will do amazing things together. And when I mean people, I mean people who are currently in agencies, they can be freelancers, they can be production company people, they can be clients, researchers, whoever they are. That sense of get people together, move faster as a squad, which is what Joint was founded on in 2012, feels like it’s absolutely directional for what success can be like, given all the changes that we are facing and have faced recently.
With respect to all of these challenges—technology, politics, culture—all of these things that are shaping and reshaping the playing field, what advice would you give to young creatives entering the industry today? I think that the most important thing is to really invest in your skills, really look for experiences, look to be challenged. You’ve got an amazing time of life when you’re full of energy, you’ve got nothing but growth ahead of you, and really look to be challenged and look to hoover up as much insight, as much experience as possible.
And I think really importantly is do that. You’ve got to do two things at the same time, which can be hard sometimes, but really, really go deep on your skill set in your chosen function and look to your side to what’s going on in the adjacent disciplines. So if you want to be a creative, understand strategy, understand account management, understand production early and keep that going so that you don’t end up too siloed or isolated because there will be the partnerships and friendships that really, really help as the world continues to move on, progress and change.
I always like to end every episode of the AW360 podcast with what I call the crystal ball question. Looking ahead, what does the next year or the next five years, up to you to pick which one you want to go with, what does that look like for creative agencies? What are the opportunities that you think we’ll see and what are the challenges?
I think that all the changes in technology, all the trends that have been with us for a while and will accelerate are pointing towards clients recognizing that they need partners who do the primary thinking on a joint. We talk a lot about the primary thinking supported by AI, but it’s going to be brilliant human beings working together that create primary thinking around strategies, around brands, around campaigns and around production and design. The primary thinking is something that clients need to go to agencies for as some of the secondary elements of what agencies have done, do now, do in the future, will be more automated, will go in-house.
So it’s partners who can do primary thinking with clients to move brands forward is I think where, well, I tell you now, it’s where joint is going to be focused in the next 12 to five years, 12 months to five years. And it feels like it’s where the industry is pushing itself.
If one wanted to find out more about joint, where would you send them? jointlondon.com, our website. Check us out on the socials as well. And you’ll find out all about us there.
Well, from one Richard to another, I thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show today. This was absolutely brilliant. Thank you so much. Thanks for your time.
