Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Pitch, Reputation, Respect, Teamwork, Trust
I love pitching.
I love the feeling of possibilities and potential.
I love being around people where we’re all focused on how a problem can be tackled in an interesting way.
I love the debate and the pushing of working out what’s the real problem we need to focus on.
I love watching the journey from everything to something …
Possibilities to a defined point of view.
It’s the thing that still gives me the most excitement … that triggers my insatiable desire to win better.
But – and it’s an important bit – that only works if we’re all are leaning in, because one thing I absolutely fucking detest is the backseat driver.
The people who are never short of opinion but always short of getting their hands dirty with the rest of us.
Who ask for meetings but then ask someone else to send the invite.
Who sit in reviews but do everything except what they’re supposed to do.
Who watch everyone working their ass off but never offer to help beyond a half-hearted enquiry as they are about to go home.
Who make their comments the morning after because they didn’t stay with everyone the night before to discuss the decisions.
Who sit around distracting everyone but not doing much for anyone.
Look, I get these things can happen occasionally and I also appreciate pitches often impact your life in ways that they shouldn’t – or you hope wouldn’t – but the people I’m talking about can be described by the very simple trait that they expect everyone to serve them rather than ‘muck in’. They convey an air of superiority regardless of their experience or level. And yet – should you succeed – you can be sure-as-hell they’ll be one of the first to insert themselves into any celebrations, acclaim or award, even though no one can actually define what exactly they did.
It’s why I love what someone told me they called them when I lived in Singapore.
Tai Chi Experts.
Not because of their calming influence.
Nor because of their clarity and control.
Because they are masters at one thing and one thing only.
Deflection. Deflection. Deflection.
Which is why for all the systems and processes the industry likes to claim it operates by, the reality is it’s driven by what I call ‘co-ordinated and synchronized sweat’ … which is why the people who ‘perform’ may still experience the kindness and care of their colleagues, but not the trust. And if that happens, then you’re probably fucked.
Which is why the best advice is to never be known as the Tai Chi Expert.
That doesn’t mean you have to destroy yourself to prove yourself, but it does mean you have to add to the process rather than just commentate on it.
Filed under: 2026, A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Apathy, Attitude & Aptitude, Business, Colenso, Colleagues, Comment, Complicity, Conformity, Content, Context, Craft, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Curiosity, Delusion, Differentiation, Distinction, Diversity, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Emotion, Empathy, Focus Groups, Inclusion, Insight, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Marketing Science, Planners, Planning, Point Of View, Process, Professionalism, Relationships, Relevance, Reputation, Research, Resonance, Respect, Standards
Recently I had to interview a relatively well known singer songerwriter.
While their major successes were in the 90’s, they’d always had a place in popular culture – albeit British culture.
I went into the call only knowing what I had read up about them and what I had thought about them when they were making hits … so while I was intrigued to chat, I wasn’t exactly sure how it was going to go.
Fortunately for me, I had a secret weapon and that was a Mum who had instilled in me to ‘always be interested in what others are interested in’.
What this means is your job is simple: listen to them and follow where they take you.
That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions.
Nor does it mean you can’t challenge them when you feel their answers contradict each other.
However, rather than go into it looking for faults or specific answers, your focus is simply to understand how they think and see the world.
And I am so grateful for that because the conversation was amazing.
Not just in terms of what was discussed, but how much I understood and – even related – to many of the choices and decisions they made on their journey.
A reminder that whoever you are … whatever plans you have … or wherever you’re from … we’re all bumbling along trying to make sense of the stuff we experience and are exposed to, while trying to keep on some sort of path we feel we can manage or hope to navigate.
I came out of our chat with a totally different perspective of this indivudual – both as a musician and as a human.
More than that, it allowed me to look back on my perceptions and realise how much I had let prejudices, associations and media [mis]shape my point of view. Or said another way, how I had chosen to ‘tune out’ their reality and ‘tune in’ to the noise surrounding them.
Noise created by people who often didn’t know them and certainly didn’t know what they were going through.
We all have experienced a version of that in our life. Now imagine it on a national and international scale?
Which is why that chat not only helped me see their choices and career through an entirely different lens … it made me feel deeply ashamed of myself.
Of my prejudice.
Of my judgement.
Of my wasted energy.
And I told them and they were incredibly kind and gracious about it. Far more than I deserved, let alone expected … but I can honestly say, I now look at who they are and what they have done – and do – with deep respect rather than judgement or ridicule.
That doesn’t mean I suddenly love their music – I don’t – but I do now completley understand where it came from and what it represented. Especially to them. And that – ironically – has allowed me to connect to them as an artist and a human far more than I ever imagined was possible … amplified by their openness, warmth and willingness to be vulnerable about moments in their life that were most definitely not easy.
I say all this because I think where I started prior to the interview represents what our industry is doing day after day.
Relying on cherry-picked data points, shortcuts and convenient answers, rather than going out their way to truly understand the textured lives, perspectives and challenges of the audiences they want and need to connect and engage to.
What’s making this even worse is how many research companies are now outsourcing ‘data gathering’ to AI driven bots … reinforcing that business increasingly values speed, convenience and efficiency over depth of underrstanding.
And the result of all this?
False perceptions.
Self-interest driven solutions.
Increased category convention advertising.
Or, to sum it up even more devastatingly … Maxwell House idiocy thinking.
It’s why I’ve always seen strategy as an outdoor job more than a desk job.
It’s why I’ve put-out books about what society is thinking over what marketing is claiming.
It’s why I’ve always favoured working with people like On Road and Ruby Pseudo over the conglomerate research companies.
And finally, it’s why – when told by planners they don’t have time to go out and talk to people – I’ve said that even if they talk to 3 people in the streets, that’s likely 3 more than anyone else. Because as much as it is always the right thing to make time for more understanding, the point isn’t about scale of opinion, it’s about scale of the nuances you will discover … because when you’re open to that, you’ll not only learn how much you never knew, but see how much your creativity can now impact and achieve.
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, 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”