Ten years in, one lesson keeps proving itself true and it has nothing to do with creativity.
Domenic Brasacchio, Founder and Managing Director, DPR&Co
Advertising is the only industry where rejection isn’t a risk. It’s the operating model.
Work gets killed in internal review. Campaigns that tested beautifully fall flat in market. Ideas you believed in deeply don’t survive contact with reality. And if you clear all of that, the public decides in seconds whether to scroll past everything you made.
Most industries tolerate failure as an occasional cost. Ours is structured around it. And yet the conversation about what that demands of people and organisations, and the impacts that compound over time, remains surprisingly thin.
Ten years of building DPR&Co has taught me more about this than I expected. Not because we’ve been exceptional at avoiding the losses, but because we’ve had enough of them, and enough time, to understand what they’re for.
The numbers that frame our industry are worth sitting with. The average CMO tenure sits at around four years, the shortest of any C-suite role. A new campaign idea is exposed to judgement in under 90 seconds of a client presentation yet may have taken months to develop. Most independent agencies don’t survive their first decade, and the ones that do rarely talk plainly about what the middle years looked like.
Getting to ten years in that environment isn’t primarily a talent story. It’s a design story about what you’ve built to absorb pressure, and what you do in the hours and days after things go wrong.
The person I think about most clearly in this context is Siimon Reynolds, who chairs DPR&Co.
Siimon created the much discussed ‘Grim Reaper’ AIDS campaign at the tender age of 21. It is one of the most effective pieces of public communication this country has ever produced. He went on to co-found Photon Group, building it from two people to more than 6,000 employees across 54 companies before its ASX listing. He has won Australian Agency of the Year twice, the Gold Lion at Cannes, and the Grand Prix in London.
Siimon has been observing the agencies that survive in this industry for close to four decades.
When I asked him recently what nearly forty years of watching this industry had taught him about who lasts, he didn’t hesitate. “One thing,” he said. “It’s all about bouncing back.”
“The winners aren’t the smartest. They’re the ones who can handle rejection and keep coming back stronger.” — Siimon Reynolds
What Siimon is describing isn’t a personality trait. It’s a design principle. The conventional framing is resilience, the ability to absorb setback without breaking. It’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. Absorption is passive. What Siimon is pointing at, and what ten years has confirmed for me, is something more active and more specific: the capacity to convert rejection into forward momentum, consistently, at organisational scale.
That capacity turns out to be inseparable from how far out you’re anchored. In 1970, Harvard researcher Edward Banfield identified long-term time perspective as the single strongest predictor of upward mobility across every demographic he studied. Not talent, not access, not effort. The length of your horizon. Siimon has watched the same pattern hold across nearly four decades of Australian and global advertising.
What makes the long view genuinely hard in 2026 is the pull toward immediate proof. The award, the case study, the announcement. That pull is constant, culturally reinforced and accelerating. The agencies most celebrated right now are often the newest and loudest. There is real value in that energy. But it is a different game entirely to the one that builds institutions.
The paradox that Siimon is most emphatic about is that the long view demands short-term urgency. Without urgency, perspective becomes drift. Without perspective, urgency becomes noise. Holding both simultaneously is where most organisations eventually fail, and where the ones that last learn to live.
The leadership question worth asking in 2026 isn’t “are we resilient?” That’s a credentials claim. The real question is “have we designed an organisation that learns faster than it loses momentum?” That question can’t be answered in a pitch or a manifesto. It can only be answered over time, by the pattern of what you do after things go wrong.
Ten years is not a long time. In the shape of the businesses Siimon has spent nearly four decades studying, it sits closer to the beginning than the middle. But it’s long enough to know that the agencies worth building aren’t the ones that avoid the long unglamorous middle. They’re the ones designed to move through it, with urgency, with perspective, and without losing enthusiasm for what’s on the other side.
We’re still in it. And after ten years, I’ve come to believe that’s exactly where we should be.