Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Apathy, Aspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Auckland, Community, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Emotion, Empathy, Environment, Experience, Humanity
I appreciate that in the first month of 2026, I have enjoyed 2 national holidays … which is on top of the almost ONE MONTH Festive Holiday than many in NZ get to enjoy.
Which leads to the title of this post.
The good [for you] is I don’t get any more national holidays for almost 6 whole, bloody months … so you can revel in my obvious pain and discomfort.
Which leads to the Bad News, again for you.
As I don’t get any more national holidays for almost 6 whole, bloody months, there’ll be no break from blog posts.
See, be careful what you wish for.
Talking of what you wish for, recently I stopped in a small town and and saw this:
I have to say, not only did it catch my attention, it made me feel quite emotional.
Given I had never been to this place in my life, that might sound a bit weird – it IS a bit weird – but it was also lovely to see a community looking out for its greater good.
For someone who feels he can only breathe – and find peace – in the chaos of big cities, I’ve increasingly come to appreciate the value, importance and warmth of community.
Maybe it is the relatively small size of NZ, but I’ve really come to understand it – and its role – here than anywhere else I’ve ever lived … including the very small village we moved to in England during COVID, a place so small that it consisted of 2 pubs and an [in]convenience shop – so named, as it never had any fixed opening times so it was always a lucky dip.
Don’t get me wrong, people looked out for each other, but you knew that their needs always came first.
Maybe that’s the same in NZ, but it doesn’t feel like it. Not with everyone, anyway.
And that’s why I liked this sign – or what this sign was trying to do.
To help the town evolve, innovate and be more useful to more people.
Both in terms of those who live in the town and those who could come visit.
At a time where it feels governments and business are increasingly seems out-of-touch with people’s reality – or worse, actively not giving a shit about it – it was just a nice reminder that ‘hope and optimism’ is born as much from feeling you’re not out on your own, as it is about seeing a path forward.
Maybe certain ‘marketing science experts’ would be better encouraging practitioners to see audiences and communities on their terms rather than as walking wallets who are waiting to hand over their money as soon as you have exposed them to the same efficient distribution of formulaic brand assets that they’ve told every brand to blindly bombard them with.
Just a thought, especially on Super Bowl day … where we will see tens of millions spent on sponsored [Dad] jokes and celebs-for-hire appearances.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Ambition, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand, Brand Suicide, Brands, Clients, Comment, Communication Strategy, Complicity, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Effectiveness, Honesty, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Planning, Point Of View, Politics, Relevance, Reputation, Resonance, Respect
We’re only a few weeks into 2026 and yet last week, a planner in London reached out to me to ask for some advice because they were already feeling burned out by work.
Obviously I’m not going to give details about who they are or where they work, but what I can tell you is their stress wasn’t because of workload, but because they were working with a client who could not clearly define the business problem they needed addressing, and then was blaming them for not giving them a solution they felt was appropriate.
In many ways, this is one of the most frustrating challenges in advertising today.
Where someone uses rounds and rounds of creative work to try and work out what’s the problem they need/want to solve.
Now there’s many reasons for this …
One is that too many companies have completely undermined, destroyed and devalued the role of marketing within their organizations – resulting in a lack of training, a lack of standards, a lack of C-Suite credibility and an unspoken rule that you are only empowered to say no to proposals and opportunities.
But frankly, the blame for this scenario is shared.
Because too many agencies have also completely undermined, destroyed and devalued the role of creativity within their organizations – resulting in a lack of training, a lack of standards, a lack of backbone and an unspoken rule that yo are only empowered to say ‘yes’ to a lack of clarity on problems and challenges.
What a shitshow.
Worse, what a waste of time.
So what ends up happening is both sides throw shade and blame at each other without realizing their own complicity in what’s going on, which results in ..
+ Everything taking 10 times longer than it needs to.
+ Everything getting more complex, confusing and opaque.
+ Everything being designed for – and decided by – committees.
+ Everything requiring more presentations and rounds of work.
+ Everything getting shaped by internal politics/managing up.
+ Everything being chipped away and diluted to beige.
Now of course, not every company, agency or brief is like this.
But a lot are – increasingly so – which is why it’s not exactly surprising the planner who reached out was feeling so burned out. And I’ve not even mentioned the role of procurement, the toxicity of the ‘sprint‘ or the outsourcing to AI to make things feel even worse.
And while this situation is no good for anyone – literally no one – what really bothered me was the fact this planner felt completely isolated by his boss, the team he worked into and the client he was working for.
Everyone appreciated the issue, but no one wanted to address it.
And there lies the fundamental issue that is killing the industry.
Because as I’ve said many times, the only way you get to make great things is if 3 things are present.
1. Clarity on what problem you are solving.
2. Shared responsibility in how that can be achieved.
3. Trust each other and be transparent with each other.
All three are needed all of the time.
And while that might seem like fantasy, I can tell you, it can – and does – happen, even though I appreciate it is seemingly becoming rarer and rarer.
But it can change, though it needs everyone to take responsibility for it – specifically senior people – because without that, the ‘stress reduction’ system shown at the top of this page will become the next global marketing tool found in every marketing department and ad agency around the World.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, AI, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Focus Groups, Research, Technology
One thing I’ve always hated is the arrogance some companies/agencies have towards their customers.
Blindly believing they are so important and clever, that society will do whatever they want them to do.
Maybe that’s why so many of the methodologies companies/agencies adopt to ‘understand audiences’ does not involve directly engaging with them … and even when it does, it’s done in such a false environment, that what they get out of it are viewpoints from a vacuum rather than real life. [More of that in tomorrow’s post]
It’s only getting worse with the advent of AI … where we’re already seeing research companies using bots to interview audiences. That’s right – under the guise of ‘scale’ – they ditching trained moderators and increasingly using tech to understand the needs, motivations, fears, routines of people.
Hello dystopia!
But this is not about that … this is about the rise of AI driven ads.
Now I have no issue with that, when AI is to liberate possibility rather than drive efficiency.
Colenso have 2 famous pieces of work that openly – and publicly – embraced AI:
Our Cannes Grand-Prix winning Adoptable work for Pedigree.
And our work for our Grand-Effie winning client, Skinny.
But what I’m talking about are the rise in AI generated ‘customer endorsement ads’.
I’m seeing soooooo many of these right now … especially in the health and fitness space … where a particularly healthy, attractive and fit individual talks directly to camera about the impact a particular food/routine/supplement has had on them, WHEN THEY OBVIOUSLY DON’T REALLY EXIST.
To be fair, there is always a super on screen that explains the people in the ad are ‘AI generated’ – not that you needed it, as you can tell from how they look, speak and move – but are they doing this because they think people will blindly believe the words of a ‘human’ who has code rather than DNA, or because they just want to do things on the cheap?
Maybe it’s both …
Maybe it will work – after all, there’s people out there that think Andrew Tate is a decent human.
But why would anyone believe a company who needs to use AI generate ‘humans’ to show how good their product is?
As I’ve written many times before, I think AI is incredible.
I use it, experiment with it and explore it all the time.
And while I am a novice compared to many – while acknowledging many of the people in our industry who claim to be AI experts on Linkedin, are the same people who claimed to be experts on the Metaverse when that was ‘a thing’ – I know it has potential and power to make powerful differences to society in a myriad of amazing ways.
I also acknowledge we’ve only just started to see what it can be and become, so what I am about to say is only going to get better – or worse, depending on your perspective.
However, there is increasingly going to be a backlash against any brand or company who are seen to be embracing it to exploit rather than enable … to drive efficiency, rather possibility … to gain profits rather than deliver benefits.
And while that may take some time … both to gather steam and for companies to notice/care … it will happen and that’s when they will finally realise ‘customers have always been smart, you’ve just not done stuff that made them care about you’.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Ambition, Aspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Audio Visual, Authenticity, Bands, Cannes, Comment, Communication Strategy, Community, Complicity, Content, Context, Corporate Evil, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Differentiation, Diversity, Effectiveness, Egovertising, Emotion, Empathy, Entertainment, Friendship, Influencers, Interviews, Management, Marketing, Music, Perspective, Planners, Planning, Point Of View, Relationships, Relevance, Resonance
Following on from Wednesday’s post …
One of the great pleasures that walking has given me is listening to podcasts.
To be honest, prior to walking I never really enjoyed them.
Sure, part of that was because the podcasts available in the early days were – generally – fucking terrible, but more than that … I just have always enjoyed the act of reading.
Still do.
But the beauty of a podcast is it lets me take my mind off the pain/boredom of walking and instead, let’s me lose myself in the joy of the story. And because I have an addictive personality, it means I rarely stop walking until I’ve heard the end of whatever the hell I’m listening too. Podcasts have literally ensured I’ve walked hundreds of kilometers further than I would otherwise have walked.
However for me to really love a podcast, it needs to be about true stories.
Don’t really care what – or who – the subject is about, it just has to be real.
Interestingly, the companies/individuals who do them best – or at least in terms of what I find ‘best’ – are the ones who have always told stories. Who know the craft of it. Who appreciate the importance of space and pace. Who see is as an expression of who they are, rather than simply the business they’re in.
Which is why I have recently been enjoying Rockonteurs with Gary Kemp and Guy Pearce.
Rockonteurs is a music podcast, hosted by ex-Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp and session bassist, Guy Pratt. Each episode hears them listening to different icons from the music industry. Not just in terms of artists and performers … but producers, promoters, songwriters and managers.
Now obviously I love music and a lot of the people they interview are individuals from my era … but that’s not why I like it or why you should listen to it.
The thing that stands out most of all is that regardless of decade, genre, country-of-origin, level of success … there is a camaraderie, respect and overall interest in what each person has done and how they approached it that is severely lacking in our industry today.
Right now, in our industry, it feels like everyone is desperate to be seen as ‘the ultimate one’.
The person with all the answers.
The person with all the knowledge.
The person who defines how everything should be done.
There’s not much humbleness in our industry these days – and what there is, comes across as contrived-as-fuck.
That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be proud of what they believe or what they’ve done … but it does mean they shouldn’t speak with a condescending tone or a desire to belittle or destroy anyone who thinks differently to them.
But it’s happening all the time.
Sure, some of that is amplified by the Linkedin algorithm – not to mention the conference industry – that rewards this sort of bullshit … but everywhere you look you see and hear people making some pretty outrageous, self-serving, blinkered claims.
What makes it worse is that in many cases, the things they feel OK with publicly judging/criticising/labelling are things they’ve never actually made/done themselves … though my personal fave is when you hear them repackage well established approaches/rules/campaigns and then try to claim they have ‘invented’ something new.
Even more bizarre is how this behavior is as prevalent with ‘senior leaders’ as it is with people just starting out … who you can at least understand are trying to stand out from a crowd of sameness.
Just last year, I listened to a very, very well-known and successful leader tell a global audience they had identified ‘the secret to success’ … without once acknowledging everything they said was [1] literally information that was decades old, [2] it is how good agencies have always operated.
Now I appreciate they have millions of dollars of reasons why they have to speak with the authoritative tone of God, but that doesn’t make them right – regardless how smart they may be – but what makes it sad is they have no willingness or openness to acknowledge there are other ways, even if they prefer/believe in theirs most.
And maybe that’s why I really enjoy the Rockonteurs podcast … because there’s none of that.
OK, I appreciate all the guests who appear have achieved a certain level of success, so there’s less to prove. I also accept many of the guests are looking back on their career – rather than ahead – so there is less of a commercial demand being placed on them to ‘win people over’. And finally, I completely understand all the guests have a direct connection to one – or both – of the hosts, so they’re talking to a friendly audience.
[Though I have to say the hosts aren’t great – sometimes bordering on annoying – as they often interrupt their guests in a desperate bid to either show public association with them or remind them that they too were once famous. It’s a bit yuck to be honest.]
But that aside, for an industry that still overflows with fragile egos … the one thing that came through once I’d listened to a few of the interviews – especially the first season – was how united they all were in terms of what they value/d … even though most of them all had radically different styles, views and interpretations of what that is and how to get there.
Underpinning this was that regardless on the level of success each guest achieved, they had been successful.
Maybe in terms of popularity.
Maybe in terms of a single song/album/concert.
Maybe in terms of their influence in a particular genre/fan of music.
Maybe in terms of simply having a career, despite never having a breakthrough hit.
But they had pulled something off against the odds and for that, there was something to hear, something to learn and something to respect.
That doesn’t mean they are not competitive.
That doesn’t mean they like everything each other does/did.
But it does mean they appreciate how hard it takes to make something you feel proud of – even if you don’t like it or understand it – and maybe, just maybe, if our industry adopted this stance a bit more, we’d not only be a nicer place to work, we might end up being a place that makes a lot more interesting work.
Because as I’ve said before [or should I say, what Ferdinand Porsche said before]: It’s better to mean everything to someone than be anything to everyone.
Check out Rockonteurs wherever you get your podcast.
I promise, whatever music you’re into.
Whatever era you’re from or adore.
There’ll be something you’ll like. And learn.
________________________________________________________________________
Please note:
There’s a public holiday here on Monday – I know, I know – so see you on Tuesday.
You lucky, lucky people – hahaha.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Ambition, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Corporate Evil, Corporate Gaslighting, Creative Brief, Creative Development, Creativity, Effectiveness, Planning, Process, Strategy
I come from a family of lawyers.
My Italian Uncle was a prosecutor against the Mafia and my Dad was a Human Right’s barrister who specialized in fighting corporations and governments who chose to label certain groups/people as ‘irrelevant’ or ‘unimportant’.
I – on the other hand – am not a lawyer. I neither had the brains or the patience … though I did get a distinction in law at college, albeit because my Dad helped me massively – hahahaha.
But the thing is, you can’t be around that level of legal brain without it having some influence over you and one of the things my Dad and Uncle really shaped for me was how ‘details matter’.
Now I appreciate law and advertising are VERY different, but one of the areas where they are very similar is the ability to make complexity, simple.
Unfortunately, a lot of our industry seems to have forgotten that … preferring to either celebrate complexity or make things embarrassingly simplistic, but when we do things right, we do things really right.
Of course it takes a lot of hard work to make things simple.
You have to read.
You have to explore.
You have to go down rabbit-holes.
You have to chat, challenge, and consider.
But not only does this approach mean you get to the core of issues, problems, understanding and opportunities … you are more likely to put something out that makes a real difference to people and the business. So I find it fascinating how more and more companies are giving less and less time for this hard work to be done.
Wanting the process to be at a ‘sprint’.
Wanting costs and people to be ‘trimmed’.
Wanting the agency to accept what ‘they say’.
But we don’t push back on this to be awkward, we push back on this because we give a shit about their wellbeing. We want to do things that add value to what they do, rather than open the door to challenges or questions. And while I appreciate there is a narrative that ‘the general public don’t really care about advertising’, the reality is a bit more nuanced than that.
1. They don’t care about SHIT advertising, but they do care about, what they care about.
2. They definitely care about not being fucked over by companies who try to fuck them over.
And if there’s one thing companies should know by now … social media often finds the stuff they want to hide. The stuff that challenges the narrative they like to project and profess. And while I appreciate that may have led to many companies making ads that basically say nothing – in the twisted belief that if they bore audiences to death, they’re protected – the reality is there will always be someone out there who delves into the details.
I’m not talking about conspiracy theorists.
I’m not talking about the populists and non-conformists.
I’m talking about individuals who want to make sure the companies who want them to give a shit, give a shit in return.
And you know what should scare companies even more?
AI allows everyone to do this quickly and easily. Suddenly the tool some companies have adopted as a way to ‘slash costs’, is the tool that allows society to work out if they should give them any time, let alone money.
And why am I talking about this?
Because in the last few weeks, there’s been a couple of posts that show the importance of ‘the details’.
A couple of posts that show a company that loves to claim they care about what you need, care more about what they need.
A couple of posts that are fucking breathtaking in their ‘findings’.
Who am I talking about? Uber.
Cars and Food delivery.
Now I appreciate what is detailed below may not be entirely accurate – different markets operate by different needs and requirements – however if you use Uber in any way, and I do, it’s something worth reading.
Because at the very least, if the information is not completely right, Uber can then tell us and show us how good they really are. And if the information is correct, then it will force Uber to change or face the consequences.
Details matter.