Finding liminescence: Advertising’s ambiguous loss and the illumination within

There is a palpable feeling of loss among many advertising practitioners. What feels like pressure to keep up, pressure to do less with more, pressure to hold one’s job, is a type of grief. A grief which can not be reconciled, a grief with no closure. Ambiguous loss. To move forward, the advertising industry must recognise this loss, name it and not resolve it. By instead sitting within ambiguous loss, practitioners, agencies and brands can begin to discover liminescence, a term I am coining to capture a state of ambiguity where light emerges from liminality.

The goal is not to gain closure and move on. That’s not possible. The goal is for brands, agencies and institutions like the IPA, to step into new practices, a new energy and make visible what exists and makes possible a dance in the light of what can be.

Change in a Time of Grief

On 6 April 2025, I locked the doors to our 24/7 operated gym for the last time. Six years, three COVID lockdowns and a cost-of-living crisis. We had built something real, and it was gone. As I walked away, I felt grief. I also felt closure. I had a door to lock. A moment before. A moment during. A moment after.

That kind of grief is hard, but it has an arc. It lives in a frame storytellers can understand and offers a resolution with parables and growth.

The advertising industry is experiencing something else entirely. Physically it still operates. Agencies and practitioners still exist. Brands still run advertisements. Psychologically, the industry's purpose and meaning are in crisis, contributing to an abdication to tech companies, in-house teams and artificial intelligence to synthesise human connection once forged by commercial creatives. Industry consultant Tom Goodwin captures the accumulated weight of that erosion in The Drum: "An industry forged from brilliant minds, dedication, imagination, empathy, and ideas seems bereft of any resemblance to passion or craft in the digital domain" (Goodwin, 2025).

This loss of passion is what American psychologist Dr. Pauline Boss calls ambiguous loss, losses that are hard to name, that will never find closure, and that freeze people in their own state of anxiety. A person could be physically  gone but psychologically present, like a soldier lost on the battlefield. Or they can be physically present but psychologically gone, like a patient with Alzheimer's. These doors can never be locked. They hold people on a threshold, frozen in their capacity to make meaning.

The advertising industry knows something is wrong. The industry continues to try to retool, remodel, fix or replace what is broken, but when efficiency is driven by survival, we experience ambiguous loss. What if instead it chose to name its losses and work within the ambiguity?

I believe the advertising industry is experiencing an ambiguous loss it has not yet named and therefore the path forward is not to fix it, resolve it or wait for it to pass, but to stand within it, generate light from the inside out, and build the conditions for what comes next.

The first half of this paper explores the sum of ambiguous loss. The losses we know and the losses we feel. The second half explores what becomes possible when we stop reacting to the old model and begin living into ambiguity with greater resilience and hope.

The Four Losses We Know

UK advertising spend in 2025 hit a record high of £46.7 billion (Ponsford, 2026) and yet it feels like something has been lost. To name that loss, we must first see it clearly.

1. Identity

Two thirds of advertising spend flows to three publishers: Amazon, Meta and Google (Ponsford, 2026). Procurement expert Mike Lander argues in-housing is not a cycle but a correction. He cites ANA data that finds 82% of advertisers now operate in-house agencies compared with 42% in 2008 (2026). The question the industry has not yet answered is a simple one: what are agencies for?

2. Reach and the Architecture of Attention

Mass media offered a shared canvas. The one big idea could travel. Now, as Dr. Grace Kite argues, the future of brand building consists of "lots of littles”. While reach and attention are distributed across thousands of media fragments (2025), the minimum threshold to drive brand outcome is a mere 2.5%. (Havas Media Network, Lumen and Brand Metrics, 2024). The canvas did not disappear, it atomised. The conditions that once made a single idea travel across it have changed fundamentally.

3. Institutional Knowledge and Culture

JWT. Y&R. Wunderman Thompson. DDB. FCB. MullenLowe. These names carried distinctive cultures, deep institutional knowledge and specific ways of seeing the world. They were sunset, merged or absorbed. Following the completion of its $13 billion acquisition of IPG, Omnicom confirmed 4,000 further job cuts (Adweek, 2025). Across the industry, employment expectations remained negative throughout every quarter of 2025, with the IPA Bellwether recording a net balance of -11.0% at the start of the year (IPA and S&P Global, 2026). Each decision optimised business delivery, but people can only be optimised to a point. The industry has not fully named what went with them.

4. The Future Pipeline

Even if one argues these changes clear out legacy systems and legacy thinking, the pipeline that replenishes the industry is narrowing. The IPA Agency Census recorded a 19.2% fall in employees aged 25 and under, and fewer than half of responding agencies — 43.4%, down from 56% the previous year — still employed graduate trainees or apprentices (IPA, 2025). The digital, social-first Gen Z natives, who could bring much needed perspective, are not arriving. The room was not simply emptied. It is slower to refill.

Each of the four losses we know are structural, shaped by procurement pressure, platform economics, and the logic of consolidation.

There is something unfair, out of control, and dark about them. Those dark feelings can turn on the individual and an organisation, “Ambiguous loss makes us feel incompetent. It erodes our sense of mastery and destroys our belief in the world as a fair, orderly, and manageable place (Boss 2000).”

The One Loss We Feel

We have explored the structural losses we can count. Together they create an ambiguity, an instability in identity and meaning. Now let's look at the emotional value we struggle to measure.

I did a survey of 100 practitioners to understand the value added to relationships beyond measured output. Did practitioners believe value existed outside effectiveness measurement? Not a single practitioner believed the sum of value in our relationships is captured in effectiveness measures. Nor should it be. Effectiveness is an outcome measure. Value added speaks to the quality of our inputs, our influence, and mutual presence. 95% agreed our added value exists. Great work was overwhelmingly about trust with the client (83%), clarity and alignment (75%) and trust in the team (59%). 0% ranked the latest tools and technology within the top three conditions for great work (Vasavada Gill, 2026).

The best client relationships were described not in operational terms but in emotional ones. They built bravery, friendship, the freedom to challenge. One practitioner wrote: "Both sides challenged thinking. Transcended a transactional relationship and led to wider strategic involvement beyond marketing" (Vasavada Gill, 2026).

There is something powerful and beautiful in knowing a relationship feels transformational. The language that sits outside of mere transactions and implies true shared connection and a sense of achievement, fulfillment. This type of loss is harder to capture on a p&l sheet, but it doesn’t make it any less valuable. When the energy of work feels compressed, when the trust relationship breaks and clients move on, the grief is real. These losses feel ever more acute in today’s business climate. How do we truly measure the shared value in a transformation? Where do the feelings shared, the trust built go when everything comes to an end?

Drawing a Circle of Resilience Around Ambiguity

Feeling better cannot come with resolution because in ambiguous loss, there is no resolution. "I don't like to use the word acceptance," says Dr. Boss, "but I think we can try to be comfortable with what we cannot solve" (Boss, 2000).

Boss offers “both/and thinking” as the first tool within ambiguity. This language holds tension as two parallel ideas, rather than ideas in opposition. Creativity, not resolution, lights the way within. Rather than stating, “Either agency models will die or we must adapt to change”, we can offer a different perspective. “We must both accept the traditional model might die and use technology and human capability to navigate forward through profound change.”

The second of Boss’s tools is a circular framework of six resiliency factors: finding meaning, adjusting mastery, reconstructing identity, normalising ambivalence, revising attachment, discovering new hope. This “Circle of Resilience” is illustrated below. The goal is to move around it, forever circumnavigating the process of moving from meaning to hope. By accepting ambiguity and living into it, we will always have something to find, adjust, reconstruct and discover.

When we can shift intention and build inputs to measure and nurture resilience, the losses no longer sit in the darkness of what was. They start to take on the light of what else could be. Imagine the model we can build with our clients and carry into their brands and their customers..

Liminescence: Finding Light in Ambiguity

Liminescence is a word I have coined to describe the practice of holding both liminality and luminescence together deliberately. To be liminal is to stand on a threshold, between what was and what will be. To be luminescent is to generate light from within. Liminescence, therefore, is the state of still generating light inside ambiguity, refusing to wait for a resolution that will not come, staying generative within ambiguity rather than frozen by it.

This practice builds an actionable frame for brands, agencies and individual practitioners to move within the industry’s ambiguous loss. It is designed to halo the circular path of meaning, mastery, identity and hope for individuals, teams and institutions, regardless of functional level, operational structure, budget or time constraints. Like the path of resilience, Liminescence is both iterative and ongoing. The more it can be practiced across multiple sites, the brighter this industry can shine. However, it is important to recognise that even small changes can move grief into light. The spark is in the starting.

To frame this body of work, I have referred to three references: the Agency Reset 2026 maps structural and procurement pressures (Lander, 2026); What Clients Think 2025 captures what 680 clients actually value (Up to the Light, 2025); and the Sustainable Relationships Report surfaces the relational inputs that enable brave work (Perkin, 2024). Together they describe the same gap. The industry is being restructured around outputs at the exact moment clients say relationships matter most.

I also spoke with three practitioners, who embody liminescence from outside traditional agency structures. Matthew Knight founded Leapers to rebuild the threshold between agencies and freelancers. Rob Estreitinho built Salmon Crew, a community of 350 independent strategists after discovering that people outside the formal system are more generous and cooperative than expected. Lucy Verby founded UN//SCENE to platform voices the industry speaking circuit was leaving behind.

Creating Liminescence: An Individual, Company and Industry Practice

Liminescence as a practice works across three concentric rings of behaviour: speaking, doing and being. It asks practitioners to grow more intentionally first in language and self-talk, then in action and interactions and finally how rooms and spaces are held and embodied. As the diagram below illustrates, this model is as much about action as it is about presence. What do practitioners, as brand shapers and stewards, want to radiate? How do we want to show up and in which ways can we protect the creative, generative moments that make commercial creativity brilliant?

• Speaking: To yourself and to others using “both/and” language to resist binaries. The goal is to build coherence and psychological flexibility and to work across and connect through a range of individual partners, teams and media.
• Doing: Connect across boundaries, disciplines, companies, networks to find meaning, reconstruct identity and revise the ideas fixed in attachment. Replace expertise with curiosity. Seek out constructive discomfort. Close feedback loops.
• Being: Hold space with non-judgement. Normalise ambivalence, testing and learning and not being perfect. Discover new hope by choosing to look forward and noticing the abundant possibilities around us. Create conditions for open innovation and collaboration, where we platform emergent and out of industry voices. Where the only deliverable is to listen deeply and generously. To soak in what’s possible and give back where possible.

Let’s look at some ways we can build across the industry to action each halo of light.

Practitioners: The individual points of light

Liminescent practitioners know themselves and how they show up for others. This reflexive halo aspires to a model of self-regulation, where generosity of spirit trumps tyranny of ego

Speak with both/and language

The demand for bravery already exists, but it needs to be held. 45% of clients want agencies to be bolder (Up to the Light, 2025). The practitioner who can hold both the loss and the possibility can solve problems and think laterally to offer solutions to meet brand needs. 

Do connect across the whole system

77% of Marketing Directors believe it would be beneficial if their agencies talked to each other more, and 30% wish agencies would dig deeper into the problems they're solving (Up to the Light, 2025). How can we as individuals practice building cross-disciplinary ties both in and out of formal organisations?

Be in the space for partners to be people

"Your superpower for growth has always been your ability to invest in deep, trusted relationships as rigorously as you invest in creativity" (Vikki Mickel, CEO for Verity Relationship Intelligence, cited in Lander, 2026). Are you deep listening and asking questions to understand a client or agency’s perspective? Check, do we perform in spaces or do we hold presence in spaces? The quality in the room profoundly shapes what lights up beyond the room.

Brands and Agencies: Beams shone across a landscape

A liminescent company is a conduit between what exists in the collective organisation and what exists outside. Cast rays of light for the things we all need: shared institutional knowledge, career pipelines and the distribution of ideas. In liminescence, our once fixed walls become permeable to what’s possible.

Speak to the conditions that enable brave work

Staff turnover is the fourth biggest factor clients cite as damaging partnerships (Up to the Light, 2025). Knight observes: "As projects get faster and leaner, you lose any of that institutional learning. If you are working with purely fluid teams continually, how do you institutionally learn?" (2026). Make visible what is indispensable.

Do build permeability into policy

Estreitinho’s insight when building Salmon Labs was the cooperation outside of traditional agency structures. His observation is that at the holding company scale, competition is zero-sum. At the scale of independents, the market feels unbounded. “I sell potatoes, you sell seeds, maybe we can work something out" (2026). This fairer exchange incentivises members to share work and referrals. Cooperation is the modus of operation. For freelancers, an integral resource for agency work plans, Knight recommends a "do no harm baseline", which builds sustainable relationships and improves productivity: fair contracts and onboarding; community management for the full talent lifecycle; institutional memory structures across fluid teams.

Be the site of deeper mutual growth

Agencies will become either indispensable partners trusted for judgement, or replaceable suppliers priced on cost (Lander, 2026). Liminescence delivers generatively, not transactionally. In his IPA published paper, Neil Perkin outlines his SOUL framework, a best practice for mutual growth. The knowledge already exists. Perkin even built a flywheel model to compound trust over time (2024). Ask, what are the leading indicators companies need to understand, gain exposure and grow capacity? What questions need to be asked? What boundaries must be respected? How can time become an investment, not just a cost or input?

Industry: Reflectors of Practice, Refractors of Possibility

Industry bodies like the IPA hold a unique role in setting standards, practices and advocating for the advertising industry by building better ties with marketing organisations and with the government.

Speak the business and political case for the conditions of brave and creative work to have formal value

96% of clients believe great creativity can change brand fortunes (Up to the Light, 2025). However when ways of working compress, the work becomes transactional. In this economy, creative bravery can not be left to intuition, a survival of the fittest. Agencies, clients, and the government must offer incentives to build soft skills that catalyze team chemistry. Creative mastery takes time, a ‘test and learn’ mindset and a budget for failure. Building “both/and” conversations in service to commercial creativity make creative leaps viable, economic assets.

Do four things

First, treat freelancers as a distinct valued segment. Consider their representation in the industry census, Bellwether reports and as a “loose tie agency” with affordable access to relevant knowledge, tools and events. Second, extend the SOUL framework beyond the client-agency dyad to mutual growth relationships across the emergent external network. Third, participate in a conversation to reclassify generative thinking as R&D. If technology is the system, creative problem solving is the IP. It is an informal asset, not a cost. Fourth, advocate for platforms and awards submissions to feature out-of-agency voices. Says UN//SCENE founder Lucy Verby, “There are so many beautiful and brilliant ideas out there going unheard because they’re from people not backed by a pre-existing profile or big corporation…we may seem like a counter culture conference, but actually, I think we’re building our collective future” (Verby, 2026).

Be

The industry body that holds the whole ecosystem together. Do not just represent membership by how advertising is practiced and expressed within agency walls. Expand the definition where it grows and lives within the threshold of loss.

Leaning into Light

When I locked the gym for the last time, I did not know what grief would do. My own identity had fragmented, the future was ambiguous. I had a door to physically close, so I could start again. Many agencies do not have that luxury. They operate in a liminal state as they adapt their commercial models to a new distributed world. This comes with loss, an ambiguous loss where cultures, knowledge and practices are both lost within company walls, and also still remain beyond them.

The advertising industry must name its ambiguous loss and accept that closure and resolution will not come. A new hope arrives when we choose to stand within ambiguity and find our liminescence. This conscious practice casts light on the inputs of great work. The way agencies show up and inhabit rooms. It is about speaking to the world and ourselves using “both/and language”, doing more to collaborate outside of traditional walls, including embracing the sizable body of freelancers, who are integral to this system. It is about presence, a way of being that creates sites for practitioners to show up as people first, to be the psychological safety for new voices and clients to share what sparks their light and keeps them up at night.

The best of this commercially creative world is not gone. The collective identity born through craft, insight, partnerships and production has not disappeared. It has atomised across an ecosystem of equally passionate and talented voices. The dark gaps can be sites of illumination if we all become more permeable in practice, collective in spirit.

Liminescence is not a door to walk through. It is not an output to measure, an initiative to launch. It is a way of working, a way of standing on the threshold of change, ready to dance in the light of creation. Built deliberately and generously, both inside institutions and out. The collective mind is already out there. The work now is to bring it home.

Hemal Gill is an Independent Strategy Lead. This essay was submitted as part of the IPA Excellence Diploma in Brands.

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