NORTHERN PLANNER

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  • Be tough. Go home.

    The light in the window

    It is nine o’clock on a Thursday and the agency is lit up like a Christas tree. You can see it from the street. The blue glow of laptops. A pizza box open on the boardroom table. Someone standing with one hand on the back of a chair, nodding at a screen as if it might nod back.

    Nobody asked them to stay. Nobody needed to. It just is, subtle but there.  Fed by deadlines, demanding clients and managers who quietly show that leaving at six is a kind of confession. The sacrifices get worn like medals. The missed bedtime. The wedding left early. The holiday spent on hotel wifi.

    But here’s the awkward part. The work done at nine o’clock on a Thursday is, on the whole, not very good.

    The arithmetic

    The best evidence on long hours comes from an unlikely place: the munitions factories of the First World War. The workers were paid by the piece, so every shell was counted, and their hours swung wildly with the needs of the front. A century later the Stanford economist John Pencavel went back through the records.

    What he found has the shape of a hill that suddenly flattens. Up to around fifty hours a week, output climbed in step with time. Past that it climbed more slowly, and at the far end it barely moved at all. A seventy-hour week produced little more than a week of fifty-five. Fifteen hours, handed over for nothing.

    Shells are not ideas. But a tired mind makes a familiar idea, and familiar is the most expensive kind of failure. It looks finished. It survives the meetings. Then it vanishes on air.

    The gun

    Then there is the other kind of pressure, the kind that never shows up on a timesheet.

    Teresa Amabile at Harvard spent years reading the daily diaries of people paid to be creative. On the days of greatest time pressure, they were 45 per cent less likely to come up with a new idea or crack a hard problem. And the damage lingered, a sort of pressure hangover, with creativity staying low for two days or more after the deadline had gone.

    The cruellest detail is this. On those same days, people believed they were being more creative. Pressure feels like inspiration. Same racing pulse, same dry mouth. It just doesn’t make the same thing.

    Now walk into the creative or strategy department (because strategy is ideas too) where the pressure isn’t only the clock. It is the expectation that you, personally, will be brilliant, today, in front of the client, the ECD the CSO and whoever decides your next pay rise. We hire people for their imagination, then build them a room where imagination must perform on cue, like a seal balancing a ball at feeding time.

    Amabile did find one exception. Creativity could survive pressure when people felt they were on a genuine mission and were shielded from interruptions. Not a deadline invented to keep everyone keen. A real reason, and a closed door.

    The old toughness

    So why do we keep doing it? Because somewhere along the way we confused suffering with seriousness.

    Steve Magness, a running coach who has worked with Olympians, wrote a whole book about that confusion, Do Hard Things. His argument is that the toughness most of us were raised on, the clenched-jaw, no-pain-no-gain, never-show-weakness kind, has failed us. It looks hard. It works badly. It runs mostly on fear, and fear is a fuel that burns hot and leaves a great deal of soot.

    Every agency has its own version. The creative director who sends work back at eleven at night, partly to see who is still online. The Strategy Director who makes you Powerpoint overnight. The pitch week run like an initiation. The quiet pride of the person who hasn’t taken a proper holiday in three years. And the rule nobody writes down but everybody knows: the first one to leave cares the least.

    None of this is toughness. It is endurance theatre. It is the runner who refuses to ease off on the hill because someone is watching, and then walks the last three miles.

    Real toughness

    Magness offers something better. Real toughness, as he describes it, means feeling the discomfort, leaning towards it rather than away, paying attention to what it is telling you, and leaving yourself enough room to choose what happens next. It begins, of all places, with embracing reality. Then it asks you to listen to your body, and to respond rather than react.

    One of his stories is about Alex Honnold, the climber famous for going up El Capitan without a rope. Honnold once turned back from a climb simply because he didn’t feel right that day. No drama. He walked away, and he came back when he did feel right. The man who climbs a granite wall with nothing between him and the valley floor is not short of nerve. He just listens to it.

    Translate that into agency life and toughness starts to look very different. It is the creative who says the idea isn’t there yet and asks for Monday. It is the planner who tells the client, kindly, that the brief is wrong. It is the ECD who looks at a room full of grey faces on a Wednesday afternoon and sends everyone home, because tomorrow’s ideas will be better than tonight’s.

    Real toughness that starts with how you actually are, not how you’d like to look.

    The rest day

    Every cyclist learns this eventually, usually the hard way. You don’t get stronger on the bike. You get stronger afterwards. The ride is only the damage. The legs rebuild themselves on the sofa, in the bath, in bed, and they come back a little better than they left. Magness and his co-author Brad Stulberg once boiled it down to a sum in their earlier book, Peak Performance: stress plus rest equals growth. Leave out the rest and the sum goes negative.

    Ideas obey the same law, and our own trade worked this out long ago. In 1940, James Webb Young, an adman at J. Walter Thompson, published a slim book called A Technique for Producing Ideas. Gather your material, he said, chew it over properly, and then let go of it completely. Go to the theatre. Listen to some music. Let the back of your mind do the digesting. The idea will turn up when you aren’t looking for it, in the bath, or while shaving, or in that fuzzy minute before you’re properly awake.

    Henri Poincaré had one of the great insights of his mathematical life as he stepped onto a bus. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever had one in the fourth hour of a video call.

    A tougher agency

    So what would a properly tough agency look like? Not a softer one. A tougher one, in Magness’s sense of the word.

    It would measure ideas, not hours, and notice when the two start pulling in opposite directions. It would treat the nine o’clock light in the window as a warning rather than a trophy. It would save real urgency for real missions, the ones where everyone understands why the clock matters, and it would guard those teams fiercely against the drip of interruptions that Amabile found so corrosive. It would let the people who make things wander round a gallery on a Tuesday afternoon without filling in a form to justify it.

    And its leaders would go home at six, visibly, with their coats on, saying goodnight. Culture is not what the handbook says. It is what the boss’s coat does.

    The descent

    There is a moment at the top of every climb when you stop pedalling. The road tips over, the wind arrives, and the bike starts doing the work. The descent is not a reward for the climb. It is part of the ride. Without it, you would never get home.

    Ours is a trade that sells ideas. We should be the last people on earth to confuse being busy with being brilliant. The best agency of the next ten years will not be the one with the brightest windows at nine o’clock at night. It will be the one whose people arrive on Monday with their legs back, carrying something they thought of in the bath.

    Be tough. Go home.

  • Be More Dentist: strategy that starts with how the world is

    The dentist

    In the 1930s, with the world sliding into depression, John Maynard Keynes thought it would be splendid if if economists could one day be thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists.

    Nearly a century later, Isabella Weber has picked up that daydream and given it teeth. Her new book, Anti-Fascist Economics, argues economists have profession have spent too long polishing models and too little time looking in people’s mouths. There’s too much economics stressing about ideology and prescribing the same treatment whatever the symptoms.

    A dentist can’t do that. Nobody with an abscess wants a lecture on the theory of enamel.

    If you’re a strategy person you might think she isn’t only talking about economists.

    The onion

    Most brands have one, or pyramids, temples, wheels. Each addressed to the person we wish we were selling to. People who think about butter on the bus. People who want to join a movement. People who never run out of money halfway through the month.

    Beautiful characters who don’t exist

    People assembled in a meeting room, or made up by ChatGPT. Weber’s stakes are far higher than ours. Her patient is democracy; ours is yoghurt or jam. But the illness is the same one. Start from the world you would like, and the real world will ignore you. Or begin to rebel.

    The toothache

    When you begin with the pain instead of the theory different things happen. Weber begins with the price of the things nobody can do without. Rent. Food. Heating. The bus fare. She says the far right isn’t winning because its specially convincing. It is winning while leaders and decision makers quoted statistics and talked about ‘growth people kept checking their bank balances and felt less and less in control of their own lives.

    Just like the tracking  saying awareness is up two points, consideration is steady, and the brand is in rude health. Meanwhile, in an aisle in Wakefield, somebody picks up the product, turns it over, looks at the price and puts it back. The tracker measures what we decided to measure. The toothache measures itself.

    And yet strategy (account planning) was born as an act of dentistry. In 1968, Stanley Pollitt at BMP and Stephen King at JWT came, separately, to the same conclusion: agencies needed someone whose whole job was to bring the actual person into the room. Not the target audience. The person. The job was (and should still be) a refusal to make things up.

    The spanner

    Weber deeply distrusts the economist’s romance with the silver bullet, the one grand model that explains everything. She would rather get into the nitty-gritty, because food doesn’t behave like energy, and energy doesn’t behave like housing. People never behave like an economist wants them to.

    Strategy has silver bullets too, and tools masquerading as answers.  Purpose is a tool. Price is a tool. So is distribution, a cheaper pack size, a sonic trigger (it’s a bloody jingle).  We spent our time arguing brand against performance, long against short, purpose against product. Differentiation V Distinctiveness has become a min-cold war.

    A cyclist halfway up climb doesn’t believe in any particular gear. He uses the one the gradient asks for, and changes it the moment the road does.

    How Brands Grown was a breath of fresh air, but a then it became a religion. In fact it became a torch. Strap it to your forehead and it only ever lights the thing you were already looking for

    The admission

    Weber’s also the only people willing to stand up and admit that something is broken are the extremists. The mainstream offers paralysis. The fringe offers a door. People, unsurprisingly, walk towards the door.

    Categories work the same way. They are not life changing (the most important bit) but each one has something everyone thinks doesn’t work but no one will admit.  The fees nobody understands. The pack that’s half air. The service without a phone number.  Whoever can say it first, plainly and without flinching, gets to own the fix.

    All Marmite has done for years is admit that for many people, it tastes horrible. For Keep Walking, Johnnie Walker had to admit that for most people the idea of being financially successful had gone. I’m convinced a coffee brand could own the fact that for most, coffee is a way to get through the day without wanting to hit someone.

    The attic

    Most of Weber’s ideas are not new. Her answer to wild grain prices, in a market where four trading houses handle somewhere between 70 and 90 per cent of the world’s grain, is a public buffer stock that buys when grain is cheap and sells when it is dear. Keynes made the same case a hundred years ago. Her model for affordable food is Mexico’s canasta básica, where retailers agree to cap the price of a basket of around two dozen staples in return for tax breaks, and the government praises or shames them by name at a weekly press conference. When she wants proof that public ownership need not be a museum piece, she points at Switzerland, which never sold off its utilities and saw inflation peak at 2.8 per cent in 2022 while the OECD average hit 9.5.

    None of was damascene revelation. It came from noticing what already works, somewhere, for someone, and asking why it couldn’t work here.

    Our attics are full of the same stuff. The regional ad from 1987 that outsold the national one. The thing customers do with the product that the product team finds faintly embarrassing. The best strategic ideas are rarely invented. They are found, dusted off and carried downstairs.

    I worked for a hair straightener brand that, in real life, helped millions of women feel in control of their lives, because they felt in control of their hair. It saw beyond the false dichotomy between a woman wanting to feel beautiful and wanting to feel capable. It forgot this and began to believe its customers were all models.

    I also worked on a shower gel that was so intense you had to be careful washing your genitals with it. Fans loved the intense hit. Others hated it. But they were convinced they were the brand for mountain bikers and early sustainability adopters.

    The mirror

    In 1960, Volkswagen ran with Lemon. They never pretended the Beetle was glamorous. It was small and odd.

    Fifty years later, shoppers liked Aldi’s prices, but they loved brands….and Aldi didn’t stock the ones they wanted. So they just put the brands on the table, right next to Aldi’s own, and let real people decide. You might remember Jean, who compared a box of PG Tips with Aldi’s tea and then announced she’d rather have a gin.

    Aldi has now overtaken a couple of established UK Grocers. These brands would argue about trading updates, difficult conditions and so on. Both are supposed to be on the side of real people, it says so in their values. Aldi’s marketing director puts their success down to a refusal  to gloss over real life.

    Monday morning

    So what does dentistry look like on a wet Monday, when a brief drops into the inbox and the coffee hasn’t kicked in?

    It starts before the brief is read properly, with a question about pain. What is actually hurting the people this brand is for, this month, at this price? Not what they say in groups, but what the till receipt says, and the half-empty basket, and the forum thread at two in the morning. Then comes a harder question, the one that stings a little: what do we believe about these people that we have never once checked? Somewhere in the answer is the thing everyone in the category knows and nobody says. Write it down in words your Mum would understand. Only then do you go looking for a tool, and you take whichever one relieves the ache, even if it isn’t the one you’re famous for.

    The writers of the Oulipo in Paris, who spent decades composing novels under absurd rules, liked to describe themselves as rats building the maze they planned to escape from. They understood something planners forget: a constraint is not the enemy of an idea. It is where the idea lives. Reality is the finest constraint we have. It costs nothing, it is everywhere, and the competition keeps ignoring it.

    The climb

    Anyone who has ridden up really steep hill every map tells a small lie. The contour lines say one thing. Your legs say another, and your legs are right. Ideology is the map you drew at your desk. Reality is the gradient under the wheel, and it has never once read a powepoint deck.

    The good rider doesn’t argue with the hill. She drops a gear, settles her shoulders, and climbs the hill that is actually there, not the one she was promised. It is slower than the daydream and a great deal less glamorous. It also gets you to the top.

    Weber wrote her book because she believes democracy depends on economists learning this. Our stakes are smaller, and we should be honest about that. But the method travels from her world to ours without losing much on the way. Be humble. Be competent. Look in the right mouth.

    Be more dentist.

  • It’s Special to Be Normal

    It’s OK to be different.

    Of course it is.

    More than OK, actually. Difference matters. Different experiences, different brains, different ways of looking at the world all matter if you want great ideas that land. 

    But here’s the bit we seem to have forgotten.

    It’s OK to be normal too.

    Great don’t arrive like lightning bolts in the minds of a genius, even if seems that way. That 10,000 house of practice Gladwell was on about is just the lap lap after 10 million hours of collective input. That came before.  

    Take evolution.

    We love the ideas of Darwin’s flash of insight the Galagapos Islands. Except Alfred Russell Wallace had the same insight too.  

    That doesn’t diminish Darwin. It makes the story more interesting.

    They were both working at the end of an massive chain of ideas. Geologists, naturalists, breeders, explorers, philosophers and countless others had moved the ball steadily up the pitch.

    Darwin put it in the back of the net. But a lot of other people got the ball somewhere near the box.

    That’s how ideas tend to work.

    What looks like genius from a distance is usually a huge number of tiny advances compressed into one neat story.

    And the more different people you allow into that process, the richer the possibilities become.

    Which should be a sobering thought for an industry that really enjoys genius.

    We love the rockstar creative (or even rockstar strategist). 

    We seem to let a couple of people dominate the industry conversation. You know who.

    Now some folks are really, talented. Genius is special.

    Just perhaps not quite as special as genius likes to think it is.

    Which brings me to creative agencies.

    For an industry supposedly obsessed with difference, we can be remarkably similar.

    I don’t just mean diversity in terms of gender, race, class, education or background. There is a huge conversation still to be had about cognitive diversity too — about who gets heard, which personalities thrive and how many potentially brilliant people never make it through the door because they don’t perform brilliance in quite the right way.

    I mean something even more everyday than that.

    Spend enough time in agencies and you notice the uniforms.

    They change with the decades, but they are there.

    The right trainers.

    The right glasses.

    The right restaurants.

    The right references.

    A particular way of talking.

    A particular way of presenting.

    A particular kind of confidence.

    Even a particular way of appearing unconventional.

    We spend so much time celebrating people who don’t fit in that we’ve somehow created a very specific way you’re supposed to not fit in.

    And underneath all of it sits one of advertising’s deepest beliefs:

    You must be interesting.

    Normal is not enough.

    Average is practically an insult.

    Ordinary is something to escape.

    Agencies worship at the altar of special.

    Yet the people whose behaviour we are trying to influence mostly spend their lives doing astonishingly normal things.

    Taking the kids to school.

    Working.

    Arguing about what to have for tea.

    Watching television.

    Checking their bank balance.

    Walking the dog.

    Wondering whether they remembered to put the washing on.

    Trying to get through Wednesday.

    There is drama in that.

    There is humour in it.

    There is tension, love, embarrassment, anxiety, joy and meaning.

    Real life is absolutely full of creative material.

    Yet we’re often so desperate to transcend the ordinary that we stop looking at it properly.

    We want brands to change culture.

    Start movements.

    Create conversations.

    Have a purpose.

    Disrupt categories.

    Become icons.

    Meanwhile, most people would barely notice if most brands disappeared tomorrow.

    Perhaps one reason is that we’re trying so hard to make brands extraordinary that we forget to make them recognisable.

    There is enormous creative power in someone seeing a piece of work and thinking:

    That’s me.

    Not the person I want people on Instagram to think I am.

    Not the person a brand strategist has decided I aspire to become.

    Me.

    The boring, contradictory, slightly ridiculous person who exists when nobody is watching.

    Great creative people understand this.

    They don’t look down on normal life.

    They hoover it up.

    They notice what people say.

    What they don’t say.

    What they keep in the kitchen drawer.

    What they argue about in the car.

    What makes them laugh.

    What embarrasses them.

    What they secretly care about.

    They know that observation is often more valuable than imagination.

    Perhaps agencies should apply some of that curiosity to themselves.

    Because our obsession with being special creates another problem.

    Think about the talent we must miss.

    The person with an extraordinary mind who doesn’t wear the right trainers.

    The brilliant strategist who has a stammer.

    The deeply original thinker who doesn’t enjoy standing in front of twenty people performing an inspiring little monologue.

    The person who isn’t cool.

    The person who isn’t loud.

    The person who doesn’t know how to look creative.

    How many genuinely different thinkers have agencies rejected because they didn’t look sufficiently like our idea of someone who thinks differently?

    There’s another cost too.

    Trying to be special all the time is exhausting.

    Constantly constructing a version of yourself that matches the person you think you’re supposed to be takes energy.

    Eventually you can spend so much time performing yourself that you forget to actually be yourself.

    And that can get in the way of work.

    Friendships.

    Relationships.

    Life.

    So yes, this is absolutely a rallying cry for being different.

    For bringing outsiders in.

    For making room for different brains, personalities, experiences and perspectives.

    For taking ideas away from the handful of people who have traditionally been allowed to own them.

    But it’s also a rallying cry for something that might feel considerably less fashionable.

    Being ordinary.

    Being uncool.

    Being average at some things.

    Enjoying things everyone else enjoys.

    Not having a personal brand.

    Not always having something clever to say.

    Not needing every opinion, outfit, holiday, restaurant, cultural reference or piece of work to prove you’re interesting.

    Because you don’t actually need to try that hard to be different.

    There has never been another person with precisely your combination of experiences, memories, relationships, mistakes, tastes, anxieties, abilities and ridiculous little habits.

    And there never will be.

    You’re already different.

    Which means you can probably stop trying so hard.

    It’s OK to be different.

    It’s OK to be normal.

    Just be yourself.

    You are enough.

  • Devious Strategy

    There is possibly nothing less disruptive than saying you want to disrupt something.

    Every category wants to disrupt. Every start-up is a challenger. Every leader wants to behave like a start-up.

    Everyone wants to break the rules. Which means breaking the rules has somehow become one of the rules.

    It reminds me of non-uniform days at secondary school. Nobody wore the uniform. Yet somehow everyone turned up looking remarkably similar.

    So maybe strategy needs to be a little more devious. Not dishonest. A decent human being should generally try to play fair. Brands should too. But playing fair doesn’t mean playing exactly the game everyone expects you to play.

    Sometimes the cleverest thing you can do is bend the rules a little.

    This is where I struggle with disruption.

    It’s one of the most overused words in marketing, and it doesn’t get people, real people.

    Human beings quite like novelty. But we hate change..

    We like discovering a new restaurant. But it pisses us off when they move the milk aisle.

    Brands are part of this.

    Let’s get real, most of lives are built around autopilot: habits, shortcuts and familiar things that mean we don’t have to think very hard.

    Human nature doesn’t like disruption. Yet every brief tends to start with it.

    People don’t want disrupting. They have stuff on.

    So maybe when every brand is trying to disrupt everything, the genuinely unconventional strategy might be to fit in.

    Make something easier. Feel familiar. Turn up at exactly the right moment. Remove a decision rather than create one.

    That’s devious strategy. Taking the route people aren’t expecting. Even thought they should.

    It could mean not looking like advertising at all. People have become really good at avoiding it.

    If something looks like an ad, there is a reasonable chance a thumb will have moved past it before the logo appears.

    So perhaps don’t make something that looks like an ad.

    Make something useful.

    Entertaining.

    Interesting.

    Something people might actually want to spend time with.

    That’s level one deviousness.

    Level two is behavioural science.

    All the Richard Shotton you probably read but never use.

    It was all anyone talked about for a bit, but no one used it much.

    And now it’s out of fashion, it’s time to strike.

    There may be something more cunning still. Stop obsessing about finding the product truth.

    Or the brand truth. Or the cultural truth.

    Few products are really different. Let’s be honest, not enough brands are.

    So teams spend weeks looking for differentiation, distinctiveness or meaningful difference that isn’t really there.

    Some of the greatest advertising never bothered.

    It just executed the shit out of the obvious.

    Or tapped into something everyone knows but doesn’t bother to use.

    In human behaviour.

    Stella costs more, so it must be good. .

    Reassuringly Expensive.

    Whisky is about success, but young people can’t afford a house, well done for hanging in there.

    Keep Walking.

    Sport makes us feel better about out very average lives.

    Just Do It.

    Even more devious stuff from Toyota.

    A fast car?

    You could get there too early.

    A nice car?

    A car to be proud of.

    Bloody obvious, but it’s the idea, not the truth. Not quite made up, but not ownable or cultural.

    I know there is more behind these, but the devious planner doesn’t let the truth get in the way of a good argument.

    No brand onion required.

    And then we come to authenticity. And Purpose.

    People don’t require culture to be literally true (brand comms is part of this).

    It doesn’t need to be real. It needs to feel true.

    Relatability is not reality. No soap opera is real.

    Advertising has always worked somewhere in that gap.

    It exaggerates. Dramatises.

    Reframes.

    So instead of:

    How do we disrupt the category?

    Ask:

    What’s the cunning way through this?

    What rule is everyone following that we don’t actually need to?

    What apparent weakness could become a strength?

    What are people already doing that we could make easier?

    What are competitors desperately trying to say that we could avoid saying altogether?

    What obvious truth is sitting in front of everyone that nobody has thought to make interesting?

    What if, rather than forcing people to change direction, we simply moved with them?

    None of this is particularly grand.

    That’s probably why I like it.

    Strategy takes itself very seriously.

    As do most brands.

    Frameworks.

    Transformation.

    Disruption.

    Category redefinition.

    Occasionally even a North Star.

    Devious strategy feels more human.

    Notice what everyone else is doing.

    Notice what people actually do.

    Then find the little gap between the two.

    And sneak through it.

    Because when everyone else is trying to overturn the table, sometimes the smartest move is simply to reach underneath it.

  • The Tyranny of Polish

    When I started in agencies, most creative reviews involved a layout pad and a Sharpie.

    There would usually be a handful of ideas.

    Not twenty-seven routes.

    Not twelve territories.

    Not seventeen executions of roughly the same thought.

    A handful.

    And nothing got into the room unless the creative director thought it was worth discussing.

    This could obviously be brutal.

    Sometimes unnecessarily so.

    But it did have one useful consequence.

    By the time you were talking about the work, somebody had already done quite a lot of the editing.

    And because the work was usually just marker pen on paper, the idea had nowhere to hide.

    No beautiful typography.

    No motion.

    No atmospheric soundtrack.

    No AI-generated world in which the product appeared to have been photographed by Annie Leibovitz on Mars.

    Just the thought.

    If it worked in black marker on white paper, there was probably something there.

    If it didn’t, polishing it wasn’t going to help.

    That feels increasingly rare.

    Today, ideas often arrive looking suspiciously finished.

    They appear in decks.

    They have art direction.

    They have mock-ups.

    Sometimes they move.

    Increasingly, AI means an idea conceived at 10.17 can look like a finished campaign by 10.23.

    This sounds like progress.

    I’m not completely sure it is.

    Because finished-looking work is strangely difficult to review.

    Psychologically, it feels harder to question.

    Someone has clearly spent time on it.

    Choices appear to have been made.

    It no longer feels like the beginning of an idea.

    It feels like the decision.

    So instead of asking the most important question—

    Is there actually an idea here?

    —we start discussing typefaces.

    Or crops.

    Or whether the product should be slightly bigger.

    Polish changes the conversation.

    Worse, it can disguise the absence of an idea completely.

    Art direction can be seductive.

    So can tone of voice.

    So can motion.

    So can a beautifully crafted case-film treatment explaining something that, when you strip everything away, isn’t really a thought at all.

    Sometimes you don’t notice until quite late.

    By which point a lot of people have become emotionally and financially invested in the thing.

    The Mac created another problem.

    It made producing stuff incredibly easy.

    Which means we now produce an extraordinary amount of it.

    Creative reviews that once contained six ideas can contain fifty slides of variations.

    A line changes.

    An image changes.

    The line moves to the image.

    The image becomes a carousel.

    The carousel becomes social.

    Someone adds a TikTok execution.

    Suddenly everybody is staring at an ocean of work trying to work out whether an idea is swimming around in it somewhere.

    More output has somehow created less clarity.

    And I sometimes wonder what this does to creatives.

    If the standard becomes not the quality of the thought but how finished it looks, then of course people learn to optimise for finish.

    A rough but brilliant idea can feel weaker in the room than a mediocre idea rendered beautifully.

    Which is backwards.

    I’ve seen the same thing happen in pitches.

    I once worked with a client after a pitch where the CMO went to some lengths to explain that he had wanted to appoint the other agency.

    Why?

    Their deck was prettier.

    To be fair, this is a visual business.

    Clients should expect agencies to communicate well.

    Presentation matters.

    Craft matters.

    How something feels matters.

    But there is surely something wrong when an agency spends more time making the deck impressive than making the thinking good.

    I’ve seen strategy presentations that were extraordinary pieces of theatre.

    Beautiful design.

    Perfect prose.

    Great storytelling.

    Clients loved them.

    Everyone left the room excited.

    Then came the work.

    And gradually everything fell apart.

    Because beneath the story there wasn’t actually much of an idea.

    Polish had created confidence that the thinking couldn’t support.

    I should probably declare an interest here.

    I am slightly dishevelled.

    More than a little shy.

    My design skills are middling.

    My presentation “presence” is unlikely to trouble the TED conference.

    So perhaps I would say all this.

    But the easier polish becomes, the more important it becomes to resist being seduced by it.

    AI will make almost anything look good.

    Which means looking good will tell us less and less.

    The scarce thing will not be execution.

    It will be judgement.

    Editing.

    Discernment.

    The ability to recognise a strong thought before it has been dressed up to look like one.

    Perhaps we need more reviews with Sharpies again.

    Not because the old days were better.

    They weren’t.

    But because sometimes removing the polish is the easiest way to see what is actually there.

    A good idea survives being ugly.

    A bad one often depends on being beautiful.

  • Researchers v Spongers

    Strategy used to be called planning.

    Which is probably all the evidence you need that strategy people should never be allowed anywhere near naming.

    Still, there was something beautifully simple about account planning. The job was, more or less, to help make the right plan rather than the wrong one.

    And part of the reason planning came into being was to protect creativity from research.

    Clients started to ask the people their advertising was aimed at what they thought about it. Researchers were duly commissioned. Groups were convened. People sat behind one-way mirrors. Biscuits were provided.

    The difficulty was that the people conducting the research often knew relatively little about how advertising actually worked.

    Although, to be fair, neither did anybody else. They still don’t including the people who make it.

    Planners were supposed to sit somewhere in the middle. Close enough to research to understand real people, but close enough to creativity to understand that asking someone whether they “like” an advert is not necessarily the same thing as understanding whether it will work.

    It was a useful skill.

    Then somewhere along the way, planners stopped doing very much research.

    Perhaps this is why we needed the grander title of strategist.

    It sounds considerably more impressive and conveniently disguises the fact that many practitioners have become professional opinion holders.

    We read things.

    We develop points of view.

    We post confidently on LinkedIn.

    Sometimes we even put a pyramid in a presentation.

    There is nothing inherently wrong with having an opinion. Having a good one is an important part of the job.

    The problem comes when we forget what it is.

    An opinion.

    Because the slightly uncomfortable truth is that nobody really knows exactly how advertising works.

    There are obviously people who know an enormous amount about it. There are decades of evidence. There are useful models, principles and patterns.

    But there is no equation into which you can enter a brand, audience and budget and receive a guaranteed answer.

    Mark Ritson and Byron Sharp can disagree about fairly fundamental things. Practitioners have been arguing about how advertising works for as long as advertising has existed.

    Paul Feldwick wrote one of the best books on the subject and, massively oversimplified, much of its conclusion is essentially:

    It depends.

    Which is both reassuring and deeply annoying.

    If some of the most experienced people in the industry cannot predict with certainty whether something will work, there is perhaps something slightly odd about asking a group of eight people in a room in Slough to do it for us.

    Although possibly they are less confused than the experts.

    That particular problem is mostly about creative research.

    Research has a much bigger job than deciding whether somebody prefers Script A or Script B.

    Its more valuable role is helping us understand the world the work has to live in.

    And this is where another problem appears.

    People don’t generally spend their days thinking about brands.

    They don’t sit around contemplating the emotional role jam plays in their lives.

    They don’t discuss the semiotics of household cleaning.

    They don’t wonder what their bank “means to them”.

    We do.

    Which makes asking ordinary people direct questions about these things slightly dangerous.

    Ask somebody a question and, especially if you have given them £60 and a sandwich to answer it, they will try their best to give you an answer.

    The answer may even sound convincing.

    It just might not be true.

    Not because people are liars.

    Because we are remarkably good at constructing explanations for things we have never previously considered.

    Asking somebody how a brand fits into their life can therefore be a bit like asking a fish to explain swimming.

    The fish swims perfectly well.

    It just doesn’t have a PowerPoint about it.

    Which is why some of the best research doesn’t really feel like research at all.

    Instead of asking people about brands, ask them about their lives.

    Better still, sometimes don’t ask very much.

    Listen.

    Watch.

    Hang around.

    Go somewhere real.

    Have a conversation rather than an interview.

    People reveal extraordinary things when they stop being asked research questions.

    You could describe good research as professional voyeurism.

    Or perhaps professional nosiness.

    Both sound slightly sinister.

    But the principle matters.

    You are trying to understand life as it is lived rather than life as it is reported in response to Question 17b.

    And it is tempting at this point to conclude that research is rubbish.

    That would be equally stupid.

    The alternative is strategy and creativity completely untethered from reality.

    A room full of agency people confidently discussing what “people” think while none of them has actually spoken to one recently.

    Research isn’t the problem.

    The problem is what we ask it to do.

    Research should rarely be asked to provide the answer.

    It provides evidence.

    Stimulus.

    Contradictions.

    Possibilities.

    Sometimes it destroys an idea.

    Sometimes it turns a mediocre idea into a better one.

    Occasionally it provides the tiny observation from which an extraordinary idea grows.

    In the right hands it is invaluable.

    In the wrong hands it is creative kryptonite.

    And perhaps the biggest mistake is thinking research is something researchers do.

    Creatives should research.

    Strategists should research.

    Account people should research.

    Everyone making something for other human beings should spend as much time as possible around other human beings.

    Not necessarily with a discussion guide.

    Just paying attention.

    I sometimes learn more listening to people talking while they queue to sign in at the swimming pool than I do reading the latest marketing effectiveness report.

    Not because reports aren’t useful.

    Because the queue is life happening.

    People complaining.

    Joking.

    Negotiating with their children.

    Talking about money.

    Work.

    Dinner.

    Parking.

    Their aching knee.

    The thing their husband has done again.

    Tiny fragments of the world our work is supposed to exist within.

    The more of that you absorb, the more of it somehow finds its way back into the work.

    Research, then, isn’t really a stage in a process.

    It is a habit.

    Curiosity with its sleeves rolled up.

    A willingness to notice.

    To ask another question.

    Or sometimes to stop asking questions altogether and simply listen.

    Perhaps we need another name for people who do this.

    Spongers would be quite accurate.

    Unfortunately that already means something else.

    So research will have to do.

    Just don’t mistake it for the answer.

    It is something much more useful than that.

    It is input into a decision.

    And the quality of that decision depends not simply on what you discovered, but on what you do with it.

  • When two become one

    It’s a dreadful Spice Girls track but also a great approach to strategy, because usually you’ll find that not only do people have two stories that need resolving, so do brands.

    John Yorke’s Into The Woods is worth a read if you work in marketing and/or brand communications. It’s a brilliant book on storytelling, but not the usual Pixar structure or any other model that everyone else uses.

    If it was that easy, not only would every movie you’ve seen, or book you’ve read, be sublime, so would every pitch you’ve given or received.

    I’d wager they were not.

    Even Pixar, with a model that get’s trotted out in every second workshop are not immune to duds.

    The first problem with everyone developing stories the same way as everyone else, is it all looks the same.

    The second problem is that all YOUR stuff ends up looking exactly the same. Consistency is a must, but spend a sec looking at real popular culture and it’s complex, messy, with multiple threads and plot lines. That’s what you’re up against. Simplify can be a false god.

    The biggest problem is, no process or structure automatically produces great work, it depends on people, imagination and persistence.

    That said, Yorke’s book has a simple truth to why some stories strike a chord in culture and some don’t, and it can help

    At the heart of truly great stories are actually two narratives. The one a central figure tells themselves, and the one the world tells that the central figure hasn’t seen. A simple tension between how the figure sees the world and how the world is, or could be. The driving force of the story is the journey the character goes on to realize the world’s story instead of theirs.

    It’s Scrooge’s epiphany that life is for sharing not taking. It’s Neo realizing he’s the one. It’s even Wile E Coyote trapped into the belief he will capture road runner when of course the world knows this isn’t possible.

    I used to think the gold in this was finding a so called insight, Instead of leaning into the usual audience tensions, it’s more provocative and uncovers more original work to expose a motivating gap between the audience thinks they are and where they could be. I’ve often found it useful to admire your target audience, it’s a different disciple to be their cheerleader.

    Like Ikea’s Wonderful Everyday helping us see it’s actually the small everyday things that make us happy, not the big stuff we usually repeat and remember.

    Like Cadbury reminds us that while it’s easy to see people as mean spirited and divisive if you just look at the new and social media, everyday kindness if everywhere if you just look.

    I’d go further, we all feel we have little agency, but Cadbury tells us the smallest act of kindness can make a massive difference. We can all matter.

    However, Cadbury shows something I think there is something even more potent.

    They were believing the rubbish about the brand being about joy, when they has just struck lucky with a drumming Gorilla. They had forgotten their own philanthropic history – generous brand at every level.

    (warning, this case study, like most, will be post rationalized, it will have been much messier)

    So yes, look at the the way a business (or brand) sees itself and the way the world sees it. Or the way a brand sees its potential and the real potential it could grasp. Find the gap and pour magic in.

    Because today, most planners and strategist have lost the habit of really seeing both a business and the people they serve.

    So have many clients.

    Where they should see life, they see a category.

    Where they could see a community or person, they see a datapoint.

    Or just get Claude to look.

    They forget that white synthetic research can get you an answer, the art is looking yourself to realize you were asking the wrong question.

    Most people do not really care about the brand or even the category. This can be really dispiriting until you realize both are usually part of something bigger, or attached to something more interesting, or could fit with something in a way no one could see before.

    But the first act has to be to look in a different way, not find evidence that supports your worldview, your first hunch or how you think you can disrupt the category.

    I often thought that while Just Do It was brilliant, it was just a true picture of how people relate to sport that no one else had the courage to look for, or simply work with. The uncomfortable truth that sport is a way for normal people to escape real life for a while.

    But everyone talks about Nike when they don’t really know. So….

    One the best pieces of work I was involved in was for IRN BRU sponsoring the Commonwealth Games. Few brands would have been willing to lean into the simple truth that Scottish fans are heroic supporters despite the fact they very rarely win at anything.

    So yes, if you’re a strategist looking to retain value against AI or something, start looking for the gap between how a brand sees itself and how the world sees it. Find the magic in that gap.

    If you’re brand, lay off the Kool Aid, find the truth in how you’re really used, when you use and why. Find your place, then turn that into something irresistible.

    Make two stories become one.

  • The hardest thing isn’t being tough

    A gentler kind of strength

    I grew up in agencies where it often felt like survival of the fittest. Creative directors could rule by terror. The loudest voices ruled the room. Passion for the work was treated as a licence for almost anything, and working through the night was worn like a medal of honour.

    At the time, much of this passed for ambition. We were making creative work, after all. It was supposed to matter. Pressure was part of the job, and if you couldn’t take it, perhaps you weren’t cut out for it.

    I’ve come to think we got toughness badly wrong. Gentleness isn’t a compromise. Being hard doesn’t always mean being effective.

    In the agencies I grew up in, toughness was everywhere. Strength through adversity. Push through. Don’t show weakness. The person who could take the most punishment—or dish it out most convincingly—was often mistaken for the strongest person in the room.

    But what if the harder thing is admitting you’re struggling? Saying you don’t know? Changing your mind? Being kind when you have the power not to be?

    Steve Magness makes a version of this argument in Do Hard Things. Toughness doesn’t mean suppressing emotion and forcing yourself onward, whatever the cost. Real toughness requires us to pay attention to discomfort and deal honestly with what is happening. That takes more strength than just pretending everything is fine.

    Passion can make us care enough to do extraordinary work. It can also become obsessive, consuming the rest of our lives and binding our sense of worth to the next result.

    Honesty? Agencies often confuse going all in with having no limits.

    Of course we cared about the work. Some nights ran late because an idea was close and nobody wanted to let it go. I’m not pretending that creative ambition can be reduced to a tidy working day, or that brilliant work comes without effort.

    But there’s a difference between choosing to give something your all and being expected to prove your commitment through exhaustion. Once overnights become a badge of honour, people stop asking why they were necessary. Was the brief clear? Was the decision made too late? Were we improving the idea—or just demonstrating how much we could endure?

    I think we also need to be honest about what intimidation does to the work. If speaking up might invite humiliation, you learn to keep doubts to yourself. You learn which ideas will please the person in charge. You learn to present certainty, even when you can see a problem. In that kind of room, a good challenge can die before anyone hears it.

    The loudest voice then wins by default. Not because it has the best answer, but because quieter people have learned the cost of offering theirs.

    The loudest voice then wins by default. Not because it has the best answer, but because quieter people have learned the cost of offering theirs.

    It was harmful to a generation of people who worked in those agencies. It was also a poor way to make creative work. You need honesty to find the weakness in an idea. You need enough trust for someone to suggest a direction that isn’t fully formed. And you need people with different ways of thinking to contribute before the room settles on the answer it already knows how to approve.

    The culture that claimed to be fiercely committed to creativity often made creativity harder.

    I don’t say that from a position of innocence. I grew up in it. I absorbed some of its rules, and I’m sure I’ve carried some of them into rooms of my own. It takes time to notice the difference between a high standard and a needlessly hard experience. It takes longer to change the habits that once helped you survive.

    And this isn’t only an agency problem. Much of that old idea of toughness is bound up with what men have been taught to be: self-sufficient, competitive, unshakeable. We know masculinity has a problem. We talk about the unhappiness it causes men and, of course, the people around them. Yet we still reward some of the behaviours that help create it. We admire the man who never admits doubt. We call cruelty candour. We treat kindness as softness and vulnerability as a loss of authority.

    It’s time to ask what actually works.

    Could a leader be demanding without being frightening? Could a creative director care passionately without making everyone else pay for that passion? Could we make work we’re proud of without asking people to damage themselves in the process?

    I believe we can. Gentleness doesn’t mean avoiding difficult conversations or lowering the bar. It may mean having those conversations sooner, more directly and with enough care that the other person can actually hear you. Kindness doesn’t prevent ambition. It gives more people a chance to bring their best thinking to it.

    There is courage in that. The courage to admit that a way of working you once admired caused harm. The courage to hear a perspective you might have dismissed. The courage to say, “I don’t know,” when everyone expects you to know. And, perhaps hardest of all, the courage to change when the old way has served you well.

    We can’t undo what happened in those rooms. But we can stop confusing the ability to endure a bad culture with evidence that the culture produced great work. For the industry’s sake, and for all of ours, we should be asking for something better.

  • Just because it feels good, it doesn’t make it right.

    I had a mini epiphany after some sessions with a physio. Two actually.

    To begin at the beginning, I’ve had a sore shoulder for months, it started when I was swimming and, if I was a rational human being, I would have stopped and got it looked at, but oh no, I raged at my middle aged body letting me down and tried to push through it.

    Idiot.

    Obviously I made it a lot worse than it needed to be, and weeks of trying to rehab it seemed to be getting nowhere, until I met said physio who asked me different questions, not just about swimming about, well everything.

    And she found the problem isn’t swimming, it’s sleeping. Years and years ago, I discovered that when I’m fast asleep, I put turn on my back and put my arms right behind my head. There is no rational explanation for it, it just ‘is’.

    And it was trapping my rotator cuff, and it was rebelling.

    The treatment isn’t adjusting my swim position, or just rehab and strength and exercises, it’s sleeping different, so my rotator cuff doesn’t get ‘pinched’.

    As in most things, treating the wrong problem will get you knowhere and it often takes an outside perspective to figure out what it really holding you back – and better questions.

    No doubt you’ll have seen this in strategy and brand stuff, solving a problem can only begin with knowing you have one.

    I feels good to know you’re doing something, but feeling good isn’t the goal, solving things is.

    Oh, and she also told me stretching isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, it feels good, like it’s doing something important but it doesn’t really do that much (if fact it can be counter productive) and showed me all sorts on mobility and pressure point release.

    In other words, just because it feels good, it doesn’t mean it’s doing any good. Like a brand refresh that looks amazing but it’s linked to any reality about the business role in the real world, or what it could be. Or a well written observation that is peddled as an insight.

    Just because it feels good, it doesn’t make it right.

  • Think Less, Sell More (or learn from the 1950s)

    The problem with paying people to think about brands is all they do it think about brands.

    It’s why I’ve always been nervous about brand consultants, they’ve been asked to look at every nook and cranny of something few people in the real world understand or care about.

    If you’ve ever had to execute a 100 page tone of voice guide you’ll know what I mean.

    It’s not just these practitioners though, marketing departments are paid to think about their brand day in, day out. They know every part of the business is the most minute detail and often fall into the trap of thinking normal folks would care as much as they do.

    And then we have agencies. Many of whom, focus on a clear message and take-out, more of whom ache over the smallest detail and actually believe they are making something that will compete in a busy culture with Eastenders, Tik-Tok creators or whatever.

    And then we have those who like to think that EVERYTHING has changed since such things as brands became a vehicle for business growth. It’s certainly fair to say that attention is more fragmented and there is even more choice, too much choice. We’re simply making too much of everything. Yet, brands were invented to help people not to think. The name comes from the brands that helped cowboys know which cow was which.

    For people choosing products. it used to be way of knowing which product was best without having to think about. Of course, today, it’s hard to buy something truly awful and there are too many options.

    Brands are simply a way to cut though the landfill of too much stuff to choose, even more than decades ago, they are a way of helping not to think.

    And even then, the brands they choose they don’t think very hard about, that’s the point. Most people who buy from any given company can’t really tell you why it’s different. When it’s search time or buy time, they dredge up a mess of fuzzy associations and memories, so they know what they will be getting without having to think about it….and if they think about much it’s actually the usage experience, more like how it felt than how it actually worked (we remember how we feel a lot longer).

    So what you ask?

    A reality check, no more no less. Stop asking dangerous questions of your brand. Stop asking dangerous questions of agency partners and, especially, stop asking dangerous questions of real people in research. Stop asking them what this brand means and why it’s different, sweating over the smallest detail. They’ll try and answer but it won’t be true or useful, because it’s not how things work in the real world.

    In the real world, it’s really building the right collection of fuzzy associations and memories to help people to (hopefully) buy you without thinking too hard. In many ways, like a soap opera with some sort of editorial theme and feel, key plot lines and recognisable characters, places and, sometimes moments.

    Soap Operas started in the 1950s, coincidentally sponsored by brands to build long lasting associations with potential buyers. Content strategy, branded content, whatever you want to call it, like a better way to think about brands these days. It was all done well decades ago. Funny that.

    So yes, think less, sell more.