By Ryan Romans; Director, Creative Partnerships at MAKE
Everybody's job description is wrong now. Not fired-for-it wrong, just quietly and structurally outdated. Brands are building creative teams that used to live at agencies. Studios are showing up to strategy conversations that used to happen without them. Agencies are picking up production and technology work that used to get handed off. The org chart everyone agreed to twenty years ago no longer describes how the work actually gets made. I think that's a good thing.
I've danced on all three sides of this triangle. Execution-only work in the CG and VFX world early on. Creative leadership and strategy roles inside agencies and experiential shops. Time on the brand side, far more intimate with the business problem than the deliverable. This vantage point trained something in me that the traditional model never quite admits. The lines between brand, agency, and studio were never as clean in practice as they were on paper. We all agreed to pretend otherwise, because it made everyone's territory easier to defend. Brand owns the problem, agency owns strategy, studio owns execution. Tidy and increasingly disconnected from where good ideas actually come from.
Here's what I've noticed instead. The best work I've been part of never came from someone pacing obediently inside their assigned lane. It came from whoever was closest to the idea and most capable of pushing it forward, regardless of what their title said they were allowed to touch. Sometimes that's the studio getting pulled into strategy two weeks before anyone thought we'd be needed. The lane didn't matter. Proximity to the problem and the ability to actually solve it did. The boundaries were always a little fictional, built to manage territory rather than produce the best outcome, and territory management is exactly the kind of thing that falls apart once people actually trust each other. It's the antithesis of "good fences make good neighbors." I want block parties.
But here's the catch, and there is one. Blurring the lanes only works if everybody still understands their own value going in. This isn't a pitch for chaos, or for everyone doing everyone else's job badly. The model breaks down the second somebody crosses a lane because they're bored or wants a bigger piece of the credit, not because they're genuinely the right person to move the idea forward.
What makes this concept actually work is earned trust, not open borders. As it turns out, good neighbors make good neighbors. The agency trusts the studio to actually make the thing. The studio trusts the thinking upstream was real, so we're not relitigating the brief three weeks into production. The brand trusts both of us enough to not micromanage every decision. None of that shows up because the lanes got blurry. It gets built by everyone proving they're good for the role they've stepped into.
The studios and agencies holding tightest to the legacy model, the ones measuring success by how cleanly they defended their block of the neighborhood, will feel this shift first, and hardest. Not because blurred lanes are inherently better, but because work made by people who understood the assignment will always beat work made by people defending their lawn.
Here's the uncomfortable part. Most of the people still guarding their lane aren't guarding a philosophy. They're defending the fact that the lane was the only thing that made them feel necessary. Take it away, and the question isn't "what's my role" anymore. It's "am I actually good enough to matter without one?" That's the real reason the industry hasn't let go yet. Not tradition. Fear.
