Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Airports, America, Emotion, Empathy, Human Goodness, Humanity, Relationships, Relevance, Resonance
Despite being a sentimental bastard, I’ve always looked forwards.
I love the possibilities of what is ahead of us.
The new. The unknown. The what-if-we-could-do-this sort of stuff.
But when I was in NYC, I came face-to-face with a few things from the past that reminded me how their impact on me remains in the present.
I’ll be writing about a few of these over the next few weeks but the first was this …
Yep, a bank of payphone at JFK.
In a smartphone driven world, I have no idea why they’ve left so many of them there – but even accepting some people must choose to use a payphone over a mobile device, there was something lovely about seeing them all sat there.
A reminder of a time where the darkest corridors in the oldest airports were possibly where the most pure expressions of humanness could be experienced
People queuing up to talk to loved ones … friends … colleagues … or companies.
A rollercoaster of conversational emotions …
Happiness, Sadness. Curiosity. Despair. Hope. Calmness. Longing. Love.
Every payphone, a different story …
Each one interpreted by the voice, words and mannerisms of the person in front of you.
So even though airports send and bring millions of people to every corner of the globe each and every year, that row of payphones reminded me how rarely we now glimpse others lives in their raw and unfiltered state.
Social media certainly isn’t that.
In fact, I can’t think of many current situations where we witness masses of people all crammed into the same space, trying to live and deal with their individual lives in public.
Maybe that’s a good thing, but for all the convenience and freedom that tech gives us, this bank of payphones made me think that maybe the cost of this convenience is our ability to empathize and relate to the realities each of us lives in the shadows.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Business, Conformity, Corporate Evil, Corporate Gaslighting, Culture, Delusion, Humanity, Management, Perspective, Professionalism, Relationships, Relevance, Social Media, Technology, Toxic Positivity, Transformation
I’m back. I know, how terrible.
Which is why I have some good news for you, because I’m going to be away again in a few weeks. So you only have to endure the pain a little longer before you get ANOTHER reprieve. I know, I’m a Saint.
That said, I had a wonderful time, especially at State of Social in Perth.
Meg – the founder of the conference – has created a truly special event and like StratCon in Berlin, there’s a bunch of stuff other conference organizers could learn from them that would benefit audiences and the industry at large.
Anyway, I’ll be writing about that later, so shall we get the pain of me being back over as quickly as possible?
So as many of you know, I love tech.
Not just the practical stuff, but the ridiculous.
Robot dogs.
Robot rabbits.
Robot balls.
Robot guitars.
Hell, I even bought a, errrrrm, robot mother once.
My house is almost fully automated.
My car is filled with the sort of optional extras the engineers only come up with as a joke.
And don’t get me started on my history with smartphones.
And yet, despite my addiction to stupidity … I totally appreciate there are downsides to technology.
The scrolling,
The timewasting.
The interruption.
The distractions.
And that’s before we get to the blood-pressure inducing annoyance of hearing every fucking company try and claim they’re in the tech/AI space just because they use ChatGPT to write their Linkedin ‘thought leadership’ social landfill bollocks.
So, it’s no surprise we’ve started to see the backlash …
People fighting against companies outsourcing jobs to AI.
Society pushing back on the serving of AI slop.
Companies balking at the prices being charged for AI access.
Investment firms questioning the long-term viability of AI industries.
And then – at a much lower level – shoppers increasingly choosing dumb-tech over high-tech.
You know what I’m talking about …
Products that strip back their functionality to their bare essentials:
Cameras that only allow you to point and click.
Tablets that only allow you to read your books.
And phones that only allow you to make and receive calls and texts.
Will this result in bringing the tech giants down?
Probably not … but as I’ve written before, if the Tech Bros carry on their current path and hoodwink companies into outsourcing their entire operations to AI under the guise of increased profits and efficiency, who the hell will be around to buy the products they make or advertise?
But I’m going off on a tangent because when I was in NYC, I saw this …
Now, I don’t know about you, but a phone that gives you whatsapp, maps, uber ‘and more’ … is the opposite of a dumbphone.
Maybe it could be defined as the ‘night-out phone’.
Or – at a push – the ‘bare essentials’ phone.
But it sure-as-shit isn’t a dumb-phone …
That is unless the term ‘dumb’ is being used to describe the people they want to buy it and then maybe they’re onto something. Except, one look at their website and you realise they really believe what they’re peddling … which suggests whether it’s the tech bros or the idiots, we’re doomed either way.
Have a great day. Hahahaha.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Communication Strategy, Craft, Creative Development, Creativity, Marketing, Marketing Practice, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Planning, Process, Relationships, Relevance, Reputation, Research, Resonance, Rick Rubin, Rigor, RulesOfRubin, Standards, Strategy
When I spoke at the conference in Berlin, I talked about rigor.
The main reason for doing that was because while our discipline talks a lot about rigor, more often than not – it seems the emphasis is far more on the adoption of marketing science principals rather than putting in the time and effort to really get under the skin of our clients situation and the context and understanding of the audiences they need to embrace.
The obsession with ‘sprints’ is part of the problem …
Because it seems clients care more about having fast answers than they do right answers.
Oh, I know they claim to give us all the information we need to move forward, but – as Dan Lyons pointed out in his brilliant book, ‘Disrupted’ – too many companies don’t know ‘who they are, who they’re for and what they do’, so the result of that is we are encouraged to make work that appeals to who they wish they were, rather than who they are.
Hence the need for rigor.
To be given the time and space to understand what the hell is going on.
Now of course, I appreciate time is money … and what we do can cost a lot of it … but while you can definitely take too long to do things, you can also not take long enough, which is why briefs need to be more about what we need to change than what we want to say.
And while there’s more data out there than you could ever use, the reality is nothing – and I mean nothing – has the impact of spending time with the people who are deeply entrenched in the category/product/brand that you’ve talking about.
They’re the ones who know what’s going on.
They’re the ones who see the challenges and problems.
They’re the ones who evolve what and where things can go.
And while they may well be at the far edge of where the category is, more often than not – they’re also the people who bring the masses along with them.
Or said another way, they’re the ones who can help you listen and understand like a fan. An educated fan.
Because the more you do that, the more you are exposed to the textures and nuances that reveal the truth, power and possibilities of what you are dealing with. Truth, power and possibilities that – in the obsession with speed – often get overlooked or devalued in favor of quick wins and convenient answers.
It’s basically how Rick Rubin has always approaches his job …
Understanding the artist’s truth and pushing/elevating it, rather than simply having a singular format that he adopts regardless of who he is working with or the situation they are currently in.
And before you dismiss this, there’s 2 important things to remember:
1. What he is doing is basically strategy.
2. What he has achieved – by any criteria you want to measure him by – is beyond almost anything any strategist in our industry has.
Now it is important I point out that I don’t have a problem with marketing science …
It has a place in the strategic process and has lessons/considerations that are valuable and important.
My problem with it is far more about how it is presented, specifically by the people who have a vested interest in promoting their ‘methodology’ … because they suggest it is the only way to liberate a brand’s potential when that is not the case and – generally – it is designed to not go wrong, rather than to elevate how far you can go.
Which is why we need to stop confusing ‘marketing science’ as strategic rigor when it’s more strategic 101. Valuable, but foundational.
It’s also why, I have a sign in the Colenso ‘strat’ department that reminds everyone that true strategic rigor requires us to be …
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Ambition, Brands, Business, Creative Development, Creativity, Planning, Relationships, Strategy
So a few weeks ago, I spoke at StratCon in Berlin.
I had known about the event because I knew one of the organisers – Fran, from Jung von Matt – but it was my first time ever going.
I knew it was going to be good because the brilliant Paula Bloodworth told me how much fun she’d had when she spoke there previously – delivering a presentation that went down so well that I discovered it was still being talked about TWO YEARS LATER – but even then, I wasn’t prepared for how much I was going to enjoy it.
Part of this was because of the variety of ‘strategy speakers’ they had talking …
Rather than having people from the same discipline all through the day, they had strategists that covered a broad spectrum of the discipline.
Advertising,
Branding.
Research.
Consultancies.
Media.
It meant the audience not only heard a broad spectrum of thinking, it meant they understood the different issues, approaches and contexts that go into those specific areas of strategy … something that is sadly missing from many of the other conferences out there.
Another thing I loved was there were almost zero ‘agency/product pitches’ from the presenters …
We’ve all been to those talks that feel more like a ‘timeshare sales meeting’ than a place where you hear interesting opinions and perspectives … but there was none of that here. In fact, for a conference that had a very focused topic for the day, it was amazing how many different viewpoints we heard, aided by the fact there were a variety of strategists, from a variety of different disciplines of strategy in attendance.
And that range of speakers went one further …
Because not only were they different to the usual suspects at these sorts of events – bar me, obvs – they represented different lengths of time in the industry. In fact for Vinzenz – a young planner from Mother Berlin – it was their first ever industry talk and so not only did we have the privilege of learning what they felt was interesting and important for the development of his strategic career, he got to experience and grow from the experience.
More conferences should do this.
And finally, the thing I loved about StratCon was the audience.
Unlike in other markets where there will be some strategists who slag off every speaker because they think they’re better, smarter and more experienced than them [plot twist: they’re not] this felt like a real gathering of a community.
People coming together to share, learn, connect and hopefully be better.
It felt tangibly different to other conferences I’ve attended … and while that may be because it’s organized by the community rather than outsourced to a company who seek to monetize every element they can from every person and company in attendance or because German strategy is – as more than one attendee told me – ‘starved of inspiration’ so everyone went in with open minds and attitudes, the result was that StratCon was a lovely place to be.
Our discipline is in a weird place right now and as I said in my talk, for it to get better requires more than another fucking framework, an optimistic mindset or a sense of intellectual superiority. Which is why I liked StratCon so much, because it was where honesty – rather than sales pitches – prevailed … and if anything is going to help us get out of this small box we’ve walked ourselves into, it’s dealing with the issues that are holding us back rather than hiding from them with the deluded belief ‘the framework will set us free’.
A huge thank you to everyone who attended and the organizers of the event …
Not just for inviting me – which was amazing – but allowing me to spend time in a city that was hugely important to my Dad.
Walking around that first day let me feel I was close to him again and for that alone, I can never thank you enough.
I can honestly say while I was only in Berlin for a short time, I leave with memories, moments, people, stories and an amazing pre-event dinner, that will last a fucking long time. And given how many incredible things I did and saw on that trip, there’s no higher compliment I can give than to say you were one of the true highlights.
An extra hug of appreciation to Fran, Heleen, Vinzenz, Achim and ‘Hamster’.
Auf wiedersehen …
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Aspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Clients, Colenso, Collaboration, Colleagues, Comment, Communication Strategy, Corporate Evil, Creativity, Culture, Delusion, Emotion, Empathy, Equality, Harmony, Honesty, Hope, Inclusion, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Relationships, Reputation, Resonance, Respect, Trust, Truth
Let’s be honest, when we want something we often show an ‘unnaturally good side’ of ourselves in an attempt to win someone over.
Doesn’t matter if it’s dating, business, or even getting someone to take out the bins … we are all capable of turning on our manipulation skills when it suits.
Nothing embodies this more than the agency pitch …
Where they bring out the most senior of senior leadership to the meetings …
Where they promise access to ‘the best of the best across the whole network’ …
Where they talk about developing specialised processes, systems and tools …
Where they discuss building a dedicated agency arm just for their service …
Where they say they’re open to new financial remuneration models and approaches …
And while I am in no way suggesting they’re lying about this, it rarely turns out like this.
There’s many reasons for that, of which one of them is prospective clients are also playing the same game …
Talking about the groundbreaking work they want …
Promising to provide good budgets, access and timelines …
Reinforcing how much they want a long-term partnership …
Championing the importance of debate and discussion …
Suggesting openness to new ways of working …
Again, not lying … but also not being entirely honest either.
If I’m being generous, a lot of this is because life and business is constantly changing and evolving so promised need to keep changing … however at the end of the day, the real problem isn’t that things change, it’s that we’re frightened of being transparent.
The irony of which is the greatest demonstration of respect – and arguably, the greatest way to build real trust – is being transparent.
By that I mean telling those around you, what is happening, when it’s happening.
Sure, I get there can be implications in doing that, but there’s far more if you delay speaking up …
It’s why I love Angela – Colenso’s CEO – attitude that ‘honesty trumps harmony’.
She’s right …
And while I appreciate it may not always be a comfortable conversation at the beginning … if you do it in a timely and transparent way, it always ends up being better than the alternative. That being people discovering the reality of the situation because of the disaster of the situation.
And yet so many still think that is a better way to deal with things … believing they can either overcome the situation or can hide the situation.
So why am I saying all this?
To be honest, I just wanted a way to justify posting these 2 photos because while the sum up the point of this post, the reality is they just made me piss myself laughing …
Because they’re true.
Oh so true.
The pitch …
The reality …