Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Business, Corporate Evil, Dad, Egovertising, Fake Attitude, Grifting
This is old … published when Trump was trying to win the Presidency for the 2nd time.
And while I am willing to accept he maybe meant it when it was posted, his recent behaviours has pretty much destroyed it.
But the lesson here, isn’t that changing circumstances can change your promises …
It’s that in the world of politics and business, convenience trumps all.
Especially when there’s money to be made.
Or from winning political favor.
Or boosting profits.
It’s why FIFA can give Trump their ‘peace prize’ all while they watch him attack countries and people without justifiable reason.
Funny how it’s only a few years ago we were supposedly living in a ‘brand purpose’ era …
A time where – supposedly – everything a company did, was in service of a higher purpose.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Mind you, I suppose that could be true if the brand purpose is ‘do whatever you need to do to get whatever you can want’.
It’s why strategy is becoming increasingly difficult to do well.
Because at its heart, to do it well requires truth and clarity to make things happen … but right now, too many organisations act in opaque ways. Behaving like a chameleon who can – and will – shape-shift to whatever suits their purposes at any given moment.
And I am OK with that if we were honest about that, but too often, we see too brands approach their positioning in the same way Trump approaches his promises … the result of which is short-term gain, long term pain and mistrust.
But hey … who cares when the people driving those choices can get out with a bunch of cash before society catches up – or catches on – with the rug that’s just been pulled on them.
It’s why my Dad’s words ring especially true to me right now:
“Pay attention, because someone out there is banking on you not”.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Brand, Brand Suicide, Comment, Consultants, Corporate Evil, Crap Campaigns In History, Creativity, Culture, Kickstarter
I know I work in marketing.
I know everyone likes to think their ‘thing’ is a ‘unique’ thing.
And I know people like to ‘big up’ whatever it is they do to sound even bigger than it is … like claiming a solid marketing 101 course is a ‘mini-MBA’, which is made even more amusing by the fact the person behind it has developed a caricature of being ‘no nonsense’ … but the problem with this ‘blinkers on, always look straight ahead’ attitude is that while you’re spouting your ridiculousness, we don’t see the people around us laughing and pointing.
Self-awareness is increasingly becoming one of the most important and valuable attributes in business – and yet, too often, anyone who points out a problem is met with distain, as if they are trying to destroy an organization when all they’re trying to do is protect them.
At this point, I could point to that utterly horrific Ritz Cracker Superbowl ad … or that Maxwell House/Apartment abomination … but no, I found something even more potentially insane.
This.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people have favourite notepads. It may be influenced by paper stock quality, design or number of pages … but selling a notebook on its ability to lay perfectly flat?
It’s a notebook for fucks sake, not a bloody Toblerone.
This is up there with the sort of bullshit hype you see on most Kickstarter pages … except on Kickstarter, they at least try and claim they’ve added some sort of innovation that marks it out from traditional approaches, whether true or not.
But a notebook that lies flat?
That’s where we’ve got folks.
That’s where the marketing industry is.
Where it is no longer good enough to simply be good at what you do, everything needs to have some sort of hype ingredient … even if it induces ridicule more than aspiration.
It’s not even fucking targeted to a particular audience who may – just may – value the aesthetic of multiple notebooks placed together more than what they put in the notebook.
If you take away the fact this ad is desperately and blatantly attempting to suggest it’s for a premium product with an innovative feature … this may actually be the most generic piece of generic communication ever created.
And before someone says, ‘but you noticed it and wrote about it’, I would remind people the opposite of good isn’t bad, it’s apathy and there’s more of that being triggered than ever before – driven by systems, processes and ego’s that care more about elevating the self-importance of the creator than addressing the realities, needs and contexts of the recipient.
What we do can be important.
Not life-changing important, but important all the same.
Let’s not forget we can emotionally move people, impact economies and categories and create different futures for millions in ways few other industries could ever dream of achieving.
But if we carry on with our blinkered, arrogant, tick-box, Emperor’s New Clothes attitude, we will eventually discover – as will the clients, pundits and peddlers who either buy into this approach, encourage it or flog it – that the only people who are listening, is themselves.
Of course, as an industry, we should always be open to the new and the next.
But that should never be at the expense of forgetting, ignoring or devaluing what we do and how great we can be at doing it.
Sadly, somewhere along the way, it appears we have … and are now our business model appears to be chasing whatever we think makes us look relevant to the procurement department in business rather than doing things that are valuable to the actual business.
Resulting in us having more tools but making less valuable stuff with it.
Or said another way, we’re increasingly becoming a division of Temu.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, AI, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Business, Colleagues, Conformity, Consultants, Creative Development, Creativity, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Fashion, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Marketing Science, Money, Relevance, Reputation, Research, Resonance, Respect
A few weeks ago, I found myself in Melbourne, Australia.
I had some time free so I went to the National Gallery where I saw seeing their excellent Westwood/Kawakubo fashion exhibition.
While walking around, it struck me how fashion designers talk about their point of view on society [and how they use their creativity to shape/change it] whereas modern advertising increasingly only talks about their systems and ‘proprietary’ models that drive efficiency and cost savings.
With that in mind, it’s both amusing and sad that for all the business rhetoric we spout on our stages, news pages, and LinkedIn feeds, fashion continues to have greater cultural influence, resonance, and economic impact.
And why is that?
Well, there are many reasons for it, but as someone VERY successful in fashion recently told me: “the top end of their industry is still led by people who love fashion, whereas too much of ours is run by people who crave the love of business”.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. Go back a little and most of our advertising leaders spoke like fashion designers. And while business will always be essential to our survival – and thank god for that and them – perhaps we’d be better served championing the power of what we create, rather than only focus on the process of how we create it.
Or better yet, let the work speak for us. But not this work.
And if you think I’m being an asshole, spare a thought for all the marketing professionals who attended their MBA course at Imperial College London, when they found I was their guest lecturer. Hahaha.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Agency Culture, AI, Ambition, Attitude & Aptitude, Billionaire, Brand, Brand Suicide, Business, Comment, Communication Strategy, Community, Complicity, Confidence, Conformity, Consultants, Creative Development, Creativity, Delusion, Details, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Experience, Innovation, Insight, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Mediocrity, Professionalism, Relationships, Relevance, Reputation, Resonance, Respect, Strategy, Success, Tactics, Technology
A few weeks ago, Jack Dorsey – ex-Twitter and now Block – laid off 40% of their staff.
They say this was not because they were doing badly, but because it allowed them – thanks to AI – to be even better positioned to take advantage of future opportunities.
He also said that he suspects most organisations will follow suit in the near future.
He’s not wrong … for many, reducing headcount is the ultimate commercial dream. Which got me thinking …
What will happen when every company is ‘AI’ led/driven/managed and there’s no more employees who can be ‘restructured’ to satisfy the C-Suite and/or share market?
How will companies exist when the people they once sold to, no longer have an income to keep buying their goods? How will companies compete when they all follow the same AI-led protocols, all learned from the same aggregated models and practices? How will companies build value when they’ve turned everything into a commodity? How will companies exist with ‘access per user’ business models, when AI removes the need for users? How will companies justify their price premium when they keep promoting their use of AI lets them do things for less? How will companies build trust and loyalty when everyone knows they’re being outsourced and managed by an algorithm?
One possibility is employees will suddenly be back in vogue … allowing companies to talk about how their products and/or services are now much more personal, hand crafted, and/or curated than their AI competitors. The other is – as many tech bros have suggested – we enter a world of ‘universal credit’ … except no one talks about where that money will come from and who will control the amount of money given to people.
Given there’ll be a lot less money available to be raised from taxes – as there won’t be enough people earning money from jobs – and the wealthy have an incredible ability to avoid governments taxing them appropriately, are we going to be reliant on the ‘generosity’ of the tech companies and should we feel good about that given they value power and control over a healthy society?
However none of this is AI’s fault. We’re now in a world where the obsession for short term results and/or PR headlines means everything is tactics, not much about strategy.
AI is incredible – as is its possibilities and potential – which is why when companies make a big song and dance about how they’re using it to ‘fast track’ growth and efficiencies [read: efficiencies] I can’t help but think it reveals far more about their narrow and limited thinking than the technologies.
What makes it even crazier is how the share market rewards companies for dismantling their operational structure and knowledge …
Oh I get it if you look at it in a vacuum, but not only is this behaviour often a short-term reaction – designed to boost share price at a time where bonuses or evaluations are due to take place … but why are these so called shit-hot analysts not questioning the leadership who put their company in the position of having so many alleged ‘excessive’ staff in the first place.
Because they don’t really care about anything other than the illusion of radical action.
Actions that allow them to say to themselves, ‘we were right’.
Remember Citibank back in 2008?
Forget condemning the leadership who encouraged their people to engage in a level of economic recklessness that contributed to the global financial crisis, and instead, congratulate them for firing 72,000 employees in the name of ‘efficiency management’.
As I said, I am not blaming AI for this, nor am I saying Jack Dorsey is the poster child for this attitude in management. At least in Jack’s case, he is in tech and recognises his own self interest in what he’s doing/publicising. That doesn’t make what he’s doing any better, but it at least explains his actions with more clarity than a lot of companies who have jumped into AI without seemingly realizing [or choosing to be deliberately ignorant] to the longer term implications they’re creating their own company, category and individual role.
Of course not all company leaders are like this – or doing this with AI – and I obviously appreciate it’s a competitive world out there … but to see them viewing efficiency and speed as the only levers that matter [and that is what AI is for] is pretty tragic. Add to that, many seem to have forgotten this technology is still in its relative infancy, so are basically buying into the ‘dream’ of what AI can do – as being heavily pushed by its creators/investors … which helps companies justify their heavy adoption of it, even though many of the C-Suite in those companies don’t have a clue what it is or how it works but just see the financial rewards of pretending they do … and we’re facing the very real prospect of organisations discounting or ignoring the ‘small stuff’, even though that’s what will determine if the ‘finish line’ is positive or destructive. [For more info on this, see my post about the ‘O Ring’]
As a friend of mine said, “it’s like buying a jet to do the school run”.
Mind you he also said, “beware of people selling promises they’ll never be accountable for, but will always benefit from”.
Unsurprisingly, he’s a lawyer.
In a technology firm. Haha.
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Yes, it’s Friday.
And yes, it’s the first of May.
But neither of those things are as incredible as this …
You see, on Sunday, it will be 20 years since I started this blog.
TWENTY BLOODY YEARS!
That’s before the iPhone.
And Android.
And Facebook.
And the Kindle.
And the financial crisis.
And before Pluto lost its planet creds.
AND BEFORE WI-FI WAS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE … so a very long time ago.
I still remember why I started it …
It wasn’t for any attempt for notoriety or popularity, it was more to do with survival.
You see I’d got a job that – frankly – I was woefully under-qualified for, and because it demanded so much of my time and energy to make sure I didn’t completely fuck it up, I needed an outlet for all the ideas and thoughts that were going around my head that I just didn’t feel were right for what I needed to do at that time.
Not because I was sure I was going to use them later … more because I needed to feel I was still connected to the stuff I loved while also believing that if I didn’t find a way to get them out of my head, they’d maybe be no more space left for anything new to enter my head.
And so this blog was born.
Reading through the first few posts not only reveals the times we were living in, but also the headspace I was in.
Trying to balance making sense of stuff happening around me while also needing an outlet for stuff I was feeling or thinking … which, in many ways, set the tone for how this blog has been for over 2 decades.
Which George recently described as, “the blog version of TK Maxx”.
He’s not wrong … and in some ways, I really like that.
Sure, among the almost 5000 posts I’ve written, there’s a lot of [to keep the TK Maxx analogy going] cheap and nasty shit in there … but there’s also a few ‘designer label’ gems hidden amongst it all.
At least for me.
Stuff that made me think, challenge or question stuff in ways that I had not imagined or considered before.
Stuff that ended up impacting how I did things and how I still do things.
Stuff that forced me to articulate what I believe, not just what I feel.
Maybe those posts meant nothing to anyone but me. Hell, maybe no one even read them. But while every post I’ve written reflects something about who I was – or am – those ‘self-defined gems’ have a special place in my heart because they represent a moment where I felt I was growing and learning.
It’s why I always enjoyed the comment section, because for all the overwhelming piss-taking I received, the vast majority always ‘encouraged’ me to look deeper, wider or longer at issues I’d written about. And I loved that. I loved how the people who commented always kept me on my toes … which is why one of the unexpected pleasures of writing this blog for so long has been seeing how my opinion on certain subjects has changed or evolved over the years. It’s served as a great reminder about the importance of always exposing yourself to others perspectives, opinions, experiences and standards, even if the goal of it is simply to be really sure about what you think or believe.
In many ways, that’s the biggest surprise of 20 years writing this blog.
I never expected anyone to comment on anything I wrote, because I started it just for me.
A private place to express my thoughts and idiocy.
But then Andy discovered it and he sent an email to everyone at Cynic and some of our clients announcing it and then the mayhem started.
At that point, blogging had become a big thing. A good thing. A community of people who wanted to help and contribute to what others were doing. A lot of this was down to the great Russell Davies and his iconic blog … a place that not only brought people from all over the world together, but inspired others to start writing their own as well.
It was a place that not only exposed me to a lot of brilliant people I’d never have known about without his blog – people like Gareth Kay, Paul Colman, Northern Planner, Rob Mortimer, Marcus, John Dodds, Lauren, Age to name but a few – it also brought people to my blog who helped add to the texture, lessons and perspectives I was writing about.
I will forever be grateful to Russell for that … especially as most of the people he inadvertently introduced me to, not only still exist in my life but I have met them all IN THE FLESH.
Alas the blogging community, like most things in life, has moved on with maybe only Martin and I still churning stuff out via that platform. [Well, he curates, I churn] And while technologies advances allows strategists to be even more connected in even more ways, the energy of the community is not the same as it was back in the early days of blogging.
Now it feels more aggressive.
More sharp elbows and self publicizing.
Wanting the spotlight on them rather than the work they do.
But then, the industry seems to value those who talk about the work more than those who actually make it … which kind-of highlights why the industry is in the state it finds itself in but refuses to acknowledge.
Emperor’s New Clothes anyone?!
Screenshot
That this blog is 20 years old blows my mind. I never thought it would last that long, mainly because I never gave much thought about how long I’d be writing the thing. It’s not always been fun – when I was receiving a lot of anonymous hate that resulted in me deciding to stop allowing comments was definitely a low point – but all in all, the whole experience has been pretty glorious.
In many ways, this is one of the longest committed relationships I’ve ever had.
And one of the most successful, hahaha.
The fact there are some people who have been reading it for almost as long as I have been writing it, is madness.
Have they no taste?
Have they got nothing better to do?
Or maybe they’re stuck in prison and this is part of their ‘sentence’.
The good news for them is there’s no way this will still be a ‘going concern’ in another 20 years … at least not in terms of how regular I’ve been writing posts for the past 2 decades. Not because I am running out of things to say [albeit Andy said I have only ever written 3 posts and just keep re-writing them in different ways] but because I’ll be – hopefully – doing other things with my life.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always be grateful to advertising … it has given me a life I never could have dared to imagine … but I am increasingly spending more and more of my time working and collaborating with artists and I feel that’s where my future may be. Not because I don’t love what I do, but because I find their definition and expression of creativity even more interesting, challenging, open, provocative and progressive than where our industry is choosing to head.
But that’s not going to happen yet. Hell, it may not happen at all – I could get fired by all the artists tomorrow for all I know – which is why for the time being, I’ll keep happily juggling my two ‘lives’ while churning out daily blog posts at the same time.
Sorry, hahaha.
That said, the point of continuing this blog is different to what you may think and why I originally started it.
Because while it has helped me grow, learn, make new friends and even help build my professional reputation [which is hilarious when you read some of the stuff I’ve churned out, like this!] … it delivers something that is even more important to me.
Connection to my family.
I know … I know … that sounds weird-as-fuck, but what I mean is this:
A few years ago, Jill said that while she rarely ever reads my blog, when she does – she can hear my voice because of the way I write.
Put simply, how I write is how I talk … so when she reads my posts, it feels like I’m with her.
And she liked that.
Add to this that I’ve shared deeply personal and important moments in my life – from getting engaged to getting married, to Mum dying, to becoming a Dad, to getting Rosie – and Bonnie – to saying a tearful goodbye to Rosie, to moving from Singapore to HK to China to America to London to New Zealand [so far] … which means moving from cynic/WPP to Sunshine to Wieden+Kennedy to Deutsch to R/GA to Colenso [not to mention all the other highs and lows that have impacted or been introduced to my life over this period, be it death, covid, friends, family, health, books, chaos, and/or multitudes of weird, wild, crazy shit] … and this blog is no longer just a place where I rant rubbish, it’s a place my family can have me close even when I’m no longer here.
That means a lot to me.
Not because I want them to need me, but because I like knowing they can access me should they ever need me.
Or if Otis ever wants to introduce me to whoever becomes important in his life.
It’s why I’m going to keep writing it and why I’m going to move it to a free domain again, to make sure it always stay up … because what originally was a place just for me, has become a place that offers connection to the most important people to me.
And with that, I want to say a big thank you to everyone who has ever visited or commented.
Whether you meant it or not, you’ve given me far more than I ever imagined or hoped for.
Thank you. Love you. Grateful for you.