The Creative Industry Today

By Julie Belanger

As the social media and online writer for Applied Arts Magazine, I’ve been reflecting on a question that feels increasingly urgent: What is the true state of Canada’s creative industry today? The impetus isn’t abstract—it’s the accelerating collision of AI, corporate consolidation, and shrinking production realities that is fundamentally reshaping how creative work is made, valued, and commissioned.

This conversation is also personal.

Before joining Applied Arts, I worked as a stills and motion producer. Alongside my business partner Raff Melito, I co-founded Full Serve Productions. We lived inside the engine room of advertising—working with agencies, photographers, directors, and production teams to turn concepts into execution under constant pressure.

It was a world defined by agility: shifting creative teams, impossible timelines, and the familiar cycle of solving problems that only appear once everything is already in motion.

We had a strong run, worked on exceptional projects, and collaborated with outstanding talent. But before the pandemic, the pressure point became impossible to ignore. Social Media was changing the playing field, budgets were shrinking while expectations stayed the same—or increased. The math stopped working.

Like many production companies, we eventually stepped away—not for lack of opportunity, but because the structure itself had become unsustainable. And increasingly, work was moving elsewhere: in-house, streamlined, and absorbed into larger corporate ecosystems.

That shift wasn’t isolated. It was a signal.

So what is actually happening on the front lines?

The consistent answer: creative work is being compressed—financially, structurally, and temporally. Less budget. Less time. Same—or higher—expectations. And now, a new variable: AI accelerating production cycles even further while simultaneously raising questions about value, authorship, and craft.

At the same time, AI is also emerging as a powerful creative tool—one that enables exploration in ways previously out of reach. It allows creatives to push ideas further, test possibilities faster, and expand the boundaries of what can be visualized or conceptualized, often without the same financial or time constraints that once limited experimentation.

To understand this more deeply, we reached out to Applied Arts Award winners across advertising, design, photography, motion, animation, illustration, and education. We asked them to describe the terrain as they see it now—not in theory, but in practice.

“Today’s work is reactionary, driven by real-time responses and analytics. When I started, we relied on years-old AC Nielsen data. Since then, consolidation has reshaped the industry, with independents absorbed by multinationals and awards carrying less weight.”

Carson Ting, Partner and Creative Chairman Ting Industries Inc, when asked how he has seen the advertising and creative industries change over the course of his career.

 

Their responses were generous, honest, and at times sobering. So much so that we decided to let each voice stand on its own. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of individual features highlighting these perspectives.

But to begin, it felt important to step back and name the pattern.

Across disciplines, one truth emerged repeatedly: the “human touch” is still essential—but it is increasingly being asked to operate under constraints that border on contradictory. The expectation is not just to create, but to create faster, cheaper, and with fewer resources, while maintaining the same level of excellence.

Flux has always defined this industry—but what feels different now is the speed and scale of compression. There is less room to think, less room to test, and less room to fail forward.

AI sits at the centre of this tension. It is both an accelerant and an amplifier—capable of speeding up production while expanding creative possibilities.

Creatives are being asked to do more, in less time, for less money—while also adapting to tools that promise efficiency, but risk further devaluing the process that gives the work its meaning.

Despite this, there is no cynicism at scale. There is clarity. And there is adaptation.

The creative industry has always evolved through disruption—but what we are witnessing now is not just evolution. It is restructuring. Quiet in some places, abrupt in others, but unmistakably underway.

Stay tuned for the first instalment of The Creative Industry Today, where we begin sharing these perspectives in full. They deserve to be heard in their entirety.