Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, America, Attitude & Aptitude, Clients, Colenso, Colleagues, Consultants, Context, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Planners, Planning
A few weeks ago, I was writing the Colenso strat gang plan for 2026.
What we want to do.
What we want to change.
What we want to break.
What we want to create.
In doing that, I wanted to reference what we had experienced in 2025 against what mates at other agencies around the World had gone through. Not to compare necessarily, more to understand their perspective of what was happening.
Now, despite the fact I have a reputation for never being satisfied, I knew we’d had a pretty good year.
Not maybe by the measure others value, but by a lot of things I do.
Of course there’s things we can, should and need to improve – and we will – but overall, we’d built a foundation of interesting things that was good by any criteria.
Or so I thought …
You see, I spoke to a friend of mine in the US and when I told them some of the stuff we’d done, they kept saying …
“How did you make that much stuff?”
At first I thought they were either being kind or mistakenly believed that because NZ is so small, it’s impossible for the entire industry to produce more than one thing a year … but that wasn’t it at all.
Despite them working in America.
Despite them working in a big agency.
Despite them working on a massive client.
They’d produced nothing.
Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.
Actually, that’s not quite right … because they did tell me they had produced something.
In fact over 60 somethings …
Presentation decks.
For the same idea.
Which the client still didn’t buy.
Now you may assume with that many presentations, my friend is a fucking idiot. But you’d be wrong because she’s utterly brilliant. But – as I’ve written before – this is where we’re at these days. Endless presentations to endless people in endless departments just to get the smallest bit of work through.
But as mad as that is, it’s not as mad as this …
Despite no one making much work, they told me how everyone is as busy-as-fuck.
“Doing what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think they’re just creating, shuffling or editing papers”.
Now I’m not saying we’re immune from writing the odd needless presentation at Colenso …
Nor am I saying we’ve not beem asked to present the same deck to different ‘stakeholders’ within the same organisation a multitude of times over the years …
And if the reason for it is because the client spotted or questioned things in the agencies thinking that the agency hadn’t so they had to go back and keep updating it to re-present it … I get it.
But over 60 times?
For the same campaign?
That never moved forward?
If that’s the case, either the client is bad or the agency is.
Who is paying for this shit? Why are we letting this happen? It’s not just utterly inefficient, it’s utterly soul-destroying.
Worse, it also is completely destroying the value, reputation, purpose of our entire industry.
I get consultancies can operate this way – because ultimately, they get paid to offer advice rather than apply it – but we are an industry made for making, creating and doing.
That we are often positioned by business and procurement departments as ‘costly and unprofessional’ while they happily pay salaries to whole departments who never move anything forward or to consultancies who never take any responsibility blows my mind.
So while hearing the situation my friend found themselves could have made me look at the things we achieved in ’25 with a slightly more positive gaze, it served more as a cautionary tale. Because what we’re seeing is the marketing industry potentially turning more and more into the worst of the legal industry … where the goal isn’t to get the right result, but to keep the problem going.
Not because – as is the case with law – it keeps the money rolling in.
But because it keeps mediocrity feeling important and looking busy.
Hell, with this news, I may be nicer to my clients and colleagues from now on.
Emphasis on ‘may’. Hahaha.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Business, Clients, Colleagues, Leadership, Management, Professionalism, Relationships, Relevance, Reputation, Resonance, Respect, Technology
It’s March. Bloody March.
And it’s also Monday. How much change can one person deal with?!
Anyway, when I was young, I had 3 ways to be sociable.
1. Go outside and see who was there.
2. Go to a friends house and knock on their door.
3. Ring my friends house and see if they were in.
That. Was. It.
And you know what … I did the second one most of all.
Didn’t matter what day it was.
Didn’t matter what time it was [as long as it wasn’t at ‘dinner time’ and/or after 8pm]
Didn’t even matter where they lived. I did it … and so did every other kid I knew.
And it’s because of this, we were OK with whatever the outcome was … mainly because we went with hope rather than expectation. So even if they were in but weren’t allowed out, you’d of had some sort of physical interaction to work out where you stood.
I say this because someone recently sent me this …
… and I wondered if people even know how to do this anymore, let alone do it anymore?
Yes, I know you only have to like an update on Linkedin to get some fucker sending you an unsolicited message … but I’m not talking about those pricks, I’m talking about people who put themselves out there and engage someone in person, rather than hide behind emails, text messages or DM’s?
Maybe you think that because my generation are the last who HAD to do this, we’d still be OK with doing this … but truth be told, if someone so much as knocks on our door unannounced – be it friends or family – most of us would have to be physically restrained from calling the Police on their ass.
On one level, I get it … why put yourself in a position of awkwardness when you can find other ways to do it that are less confronting or confrontational. Except by outsourcing our interest to technology – or an intermediary – we lose something.
A way to show the other person matters.
A way to show you’ve really thought about what you want to say or do.
A way to show you’re willing to fail to say something you hope they’ll value.
I have a client who only deals in the face-to-face.
Sure, you can make an appointment to see him, but his attitude is if someone goes out of their way to come and see him, they’re worth more than those who only engage behind tech.
Even more so, if they only engage when they ‘want something’ – albeit wrapped up in the claims of ‘opportunity’.
Sure, it’s pretty old school, and he’s pretty old … though to be fair, the artists I work for also want their core team present for the big meetings rather than be on zoom etc – but that’s not why he does it [and I assume why they don’t either] because for him it’s all about trust and respect. By that I mean ‘earning it’ and ‘proving it’.
And maybe that’s the biggest difference between then and now.
Because back then, you knew you had to earn the right to have a chance of letting good happen. Now, too many expect it.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Management, Social Media
Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil
A few weeks ago, on one of the social media platforms, I wrote the word ‘idiot’ in a comment.
It was a statement about something I’d done but it triggered the platform to immediately put up a message – prior to them posting – that basically saying:
“Are you sure you want to do this? It could be read as offensive”.
On one hand I appreciate it the caution.
On the other, I find it amazing they are so focused on policing their users language but don’t hold themselves to the same standards.
Let’s be honest, most of them fall far below that behaviour on a daily basis …
From the ability to manipulate images in the most offensive and gratuitous way possible to the harassment of women – and that’s before we even get to the corporate behaviour of many of these companies – social media platforms seem to think they can divert our attention from their massive moments of self-interest, profit-motivated behaviours by executing some automated, minimum standard, ‘standards management’.
Nothing sums this up more than the ban of social media for kids up until the age of 16 in Australia.
While this was not instigated by the platforms, many jumped on it to demonstrate their support.
Was it because they mean it?
Errrrrm, almost definitely not … the driving force behind their ‘compassion’ was the fear of what may happen if they didn’t support it.
And they’d be right to think that, because the real question we should be asking is ‘why do we have to save our kids from social media when the real solution would be to hold social media companies to account to help protect our kids?
Of course parents have a responsibility in all this. A big one.
But if you think social media companies are exempt from any of the blame is insane and if you want to know why, listen to this.
Warning: It is extremely triggering, but very important.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Class System, Colleagues, Communication Strategy, Consultants, Contribution, Corporate Evil, Creativity, Culture, Effectiveness, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Meetings, Music
There’s a company I work with that has 14 employees.
Of that 14, 4 are specialists and the remaining 10 are very smart, informed, experienced, generalists.
And they make US$100 million dollars a year.
PER YEAR.
Part of the reason they make so much money is the speed in which they make decisions.
Sure, with only 14 people, it’s much easier to achieve that … but that’s not the whole story behind their success.
Because while all their competitors employ 5+ times the amount of people as them [even though their revenues are a fraction of theirs] the driving force behind their speed is down to 3 things.
1 They understand who they are, what they believe and what they do.
2 They only hire truly exceptional talent with experience proven over years.
3 They trust their team so they can make decisions with minimal consultation or debate.
Or put even more simply:
Opportunities don’t get delayed, diluted, dismantled or discarded by ‘heirarchy management’.
And the result of this trust, taste and experience?
They’re not only regarded as one of the most influential and highly regarded companies in their field across the entire World … they’re viewed as being the most successful company in the history of their category.
Hopefully it is obvious why I say this …
But if it’s not, this quote from Dave Trott – I think – sums it up.
I have to be honest, I can relate to this … and what makes this even worse is I’m one of the lucky fuckers, because I generally only work – and have only worked – with clients and colleagues who have the taste, experience and ambition to do what it takes to create good, interesting and original shit day after day after day.
Which begs the question, what the hell is it like for so many others?
I swear the problem is too many companies care more about building empires than producing excellence.
Where the prize is quantity not quality.
Size rather than craft.
KPI’s over creating real change.
Pride in conformity rathe than standards.
And so we end up in this situation where we have countless levels of middle management … where each one dilutes whatever is in front of them to ensure they don’t risk being negatively judged by the level above.
Empowered to only ever say no and never yes.
Resulting in opportunities being killed by either a thousand comments or delayed by a thousand meetings.
Which is why productivity has little to do with which operational model you embrace.
Nor does it matter if you operate with a flat-org structure or an agile approach …
If you want to be killer rather than filler, collapse the layers and elevate proper talent.
No wonder the brilliant Simon Pestridge once told me:
“Middle management want to be right …
… but [good] senior management want to know how to be better”
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Anniversary, Colenso, Comment, Family, Home, Jill, London, Love, New Zealand, Otis, Rosie
5 years ago today, we landed in Auckland.
FIVE BLOODY YEARS!
That’s the 3rd longest I’ve ever lived in a single place.
NZ was never on the plan, but Colenso was a place I’d always loved and so when they reached out post-R/GA redundancy [which came about by the then ‘shocking’ way I promoted my redundancy, which was covered by The Guardian Newspaper], it was suddenly a real option – made even more desirable after Jill told me [having mentioned they’d got back in touch] that “it would be nice to be closer to my Mum”.
Up until then, I thought we were going back to the US, but not only did I feel I needed to do something for the woman who I’d dragged all over the World after telling her we’d only have be away from Australia for a max of 2 years [Ahem!] both NZ and Colenso offered us things that were much more where we were and what we needed in our lives and work right then – from being cool with letting me continue doing my private projects through to giving us an escape path from Covid-ridden England … that is until it arrived in New Zealand and put us back in bloody lockdown, hahaha.
[That said, our immigration hotel – The Ibis – was in Hamilton, and as people from NZ will know, it was good prep, ha]
That said, it took a lot for us to get there.
First was getting approval to travel to NZ … then there was getting a spot in the quarantine hotel … that had to also align with the insanely limited flights to NZ … which was made harder by needing to find an airline that would also take our cat … plus the endless COVID tests we had to provide to different government departments, up to 24 hours before leaving …
And that’s before we talk about organizing the visas for me, the family and the bloody cat to enter the country … telling our bank that we were off to live on the other side of the planet on the very day we moved into the house we’d just bought in the UK … through to organizing a bloody coach to get us to Heathrow Airport, to ensure there was enough distance between us and the driver so there was no last minute COVID fuck-ups.
[The photo at the top of this post is from us getting on the plane and getting ready to take off]
And while moving across the world during a global pandemic is something I would never, ever recommend – and this is coming from someone who has moved countries into the double digits – we made it and were grateful for all NZ – and Colenso – has done [and does] for us.
That doesn’t mean NZ is perfect …
In many ways, it’s position as a ‘global utopia’ is worthy of a Grand Prix for PR given there’s a whole host of things that are fucked up that people outside of NZ rarely know about, let alone see … from deeply entrenched racism, a youth suicide rate that is proportionally – and continually – one of the highest in the world plus an overall lack of economic investment and youth opportunity to name but a few … however compared to many other places, it’s still a whole lot better in a whole lot of ways.
That said, we won’t be here forever.
Don’t know when that move will happen, but it will.
That we’ve been here 5 years is already incredible to us, given bar China, our usual tenure in a country is about 2-3.
But that’s how good the place is. And Colenso.
So why can I say we will leave at some point in the future?
Well, there’s a bunch of reasons why – of which one is the idea of living in one place till the end of my days fills me with dread – but the fact this place is already the 3rd longest place I’ve ever lived proves NZ is somewhere I regard as very special and why I’ll always see my time here as a chapter of true significance. It’s also why I hope when the day comes for us to leave, the people who matter feel I/we contributed at least as much as we were lucky and grateful to receive from them and the country as a whole.
And let me tell you, I haven’t felt that way about all the countries I’ve lived in, hahaha.
So to everyone in NZ – well, 98.46% of you – and everyone at Colenso …
Thank you.
For all you are and all you have done.
It’s been 5 pretty fucking awesome years. At least speaking for us, ha.