I’m an agency partner and head of strategy who got a bachelor of arts degree in English Lit. I have worked for or with people who studied art, theatre, marketing, psychology, history, or nothing at all. I am very much convinced this is the primary reason this is such a great industry to work in, both culturally and creatively.

When you remove a credential as a barrier, you get closer to the (admittedly mythical) idea of a meritocracy, where actual contributions play a bigger part in how a person is valued than the letters after their name, or the logo on their degree. I don’t pretend to believe meritocracy is a real thing, but it’s an ideal worth trying to aim for. Judgement by credential, especially in any role where the mechanics shift massively from category to category and from company to company, is usually a mistake.

Letting people join in from any background or education is one of the ways we attract a different category of brilliance than most other business types. It’s unlikely we’re going to be able to throw as much money around as tech companies, any time soon. But there’s a reason people in that sector tend to list former employers in their bio; it’s another form of credentialism, despite being layered on top of coding tests and other forms of quasi-meritocratic evaluation.

The thing about not being a credentialed industry is that it comes with the burden of needing to train yourself. No one is going to do it for you, in most cases.

Early in my career this was basically my hobby. I would read everything anyone reputable published about advertising and I would try to understand every emerging trend, platform and tool before it became common knowledge. I dove into every theory and tactic. I still do, I just do it later at night or sometimes during the workday, because I have a partner and a child that don’t love being ignored for my laptop. This is where agencies have failed, in my estimation. I have a lot of conversations these days where I make a comment about a seminal piece of advertising theory, or a brilliant piece of historical work, and hear crickets. We have a ton of talent, but not nearly enough curiosity about why this job exists, how it actually works, and what value it delivers, and it’s because agencies are afraid to put anything in calendars that isn’t a billable hour.

We can’t reap the considerable benefits of a more open, inclusive and creative recruiting/hiring mindset, unless we pair it with deeply integrated training.

This can be as simple as an ever expanding library of publications about the industry, as formalized as paying to send people to IPA or APG or CMA or whoever training programs, or as idiosyncratic as running a lunch and learn program to introduce your coworkers to the mechanics of how this stuff all theoretically works. In Canada, University and College are different things. The former is theoretical and academic, the latter is applied and actionable. Advertising training needs to be both: you need to ensure everyone in the building understands the theory behind *how advertising works*, as well as the various crafts necessary to *make advertising that works*.

Sure, training people is essential if you want to deliver great results, but it’s also the only way we protect ourselves from being pulled into the credential trap. No one can make an MBA or a Harvard Continuing Education certificate an actual barrier to employment, as long as great work is being done by people who don’t have either. When I read about the crisis of training in advertising, I get worried not because the work will be bad, but because the day we lose that argument is the day advertising turns into yet another job where genuine creativity is more the risk than it is the point.

We owe it to ourselves to make sure we train people well enough when they get here, that we don’t start asking them to be trained when they show up. That way lies even more sameness, even more “ad factories”, and even less joy both in the agencies, and in the audiences.

There are many things that you probably think of as innate traits or gifts, that are learnable skills. We have a tendency to take any forms of capability that are delivered with ease, and assume they are limited to a chosen few, blessed with their unique ability. Unless the thing we’re talking about is a physical reality (you cannot learn to be 6’8”) you can probably get closer to it.

The biggest example, for me, is being “likeable”.

In an industry and role where many people celebrate being difficult, I know a good 50-75% of you cringed when you read that word. But I don’t mean “be a people pleaser” or “be a doormat”. I mean being a person people will actively choose to be around and to work with. I think nearly anyone can do this, even if they struggle socially. I fully understand that some people have intrinsic challenges that make elements of this harder, and I respect that. I still think of this concept, being nice to be around, as learnable. It’s also a professional skill.

As a strategist, if being around you sucks, your life gets harder. You will struggle to connect with creatives, you will find clients remote and distant, and you will miss out on opportunities. This doesn’t mean you need to be cool, because thankfully this isn’t high school. But you do need to be likeable.

The core skills of likeability are putting people at ease, treating people like people, and expressing yourself relatably. They are things you can start doing immediately after you finish reading this.

Putting People at Ease.

This is primarily about considering the impact your words, actions, or presence have on others. If you’re stressed, lash out, and act unpredictably, you will make others stressed, anxious, or on edge. Some of this is manageable through self control, but a lot of it is shaped by practicing transparency and vulnerability. When you’re willing to admit what you’re bad at or worried about or what nerdy thing you love, you are expressing your own humanity. When you are forthright about lack of sleep or a scary meeting coming up, your transparency provides context.

This isn’t a formal ritual or specific pattern to follow; it’s finding natural points in conversation to share useful information. It’s me admitting I was 4’10” in the 9th grade, or that I did model parliament for years growing up, because being able to admit I was a tiny nerd is vulnerability, which is just honesty without obvious gain. If you can do this without it becoming trauma dumping or seeking reassurance, you will generally put people at ease, by establishing your humanity and establishing context for your behaviour.

Treating People Like People.

This has two key elements. Remembering that anyone you interact with is worthy of respect and care, but also remembering that you are not more of a person than anyone you’re talking to. Smart people, nerdy people, people with specific talents, can easily fall into the idea that they are having a truly unique experience of being alive based on how wildly talented they are. This makes someone unpleasant to engage with. It gives them implicit permission to make other people feel small.

If you can enter every interaction with the mindset that 1) this other person is worthy of my respect, and 2) you are not uniquely superior to them, you will probably get along okay. Largely because this mindset is incompatible with treating people like crap. People respond well to being treated with genuine respect, especially when it’s paired with being treated like an equal. This doesn’t mean deference. It means not treating others with contempt, even subtly. Doing this at an introduction is easy. Doing it when you disagree, when the meeting went bad, when it’s 3am and the thing is due at 9… that’s harder. That’s also when it matters.

Expressing Yourself Relatably.

This is the most alien part, because it requires reframing the purpose of writing, speaking or presenting. I think around 90% of people talk to express their ideas. Maybe 10% talk to be understood. Your job would probably go better if you prioritized being understood instead of being heard. You need to express yourself in a relatable way.

In practice this means choosing metaphors that your market will understand. You might default to car or war metaphors but not every person will have that mental architecture. It means being able to explain yourself four or five ways without getting annoyed. It means being able to shift between whatever model of thinking your audience uses, and linking them together where needed. It means having ideas that you’re willing to shift into language your audience speaks. To be relatable means understanding the people you want to relate to. It means listening and noticing the cues that someone might relate to a framing rooted in a hobby or a sport or a life stage. It means knowing if someone is a Byron Sharp marketer or a Jack Trout marketer or a Simon Sinek marketer.

This is powerful precisely because it’s rare. Most people don’t think about making their words or ideas relatable to another person. They act like everyone should need to conform to them. Especially smart people, talented people. The idea that your great idea is better when understood, is somehow seen as a compromise, which is objectively absurd.

If you couldn’t tell, I was not great at people, growing up. I was a smart kid, a giant nerd, and a youngest child. I was not naturally charming. I was objectively weird. But I paid attention and I learned how to balance being able to connect with people, with how to ensure I was true to myself. If you can be yourself, while learning to put people at ease, treat people like people, and express yourself relatably, people will like being around you.

There are some very successful people who reject some or all of these skills. If you want to be lonely and have enemies, go for it.

There are obviously more areas you can work on (physical presentation, sense of humour, picking up cues) but in general anyone who is having trouble connecting with others will benefit from starting here.

And you’ll be functionally better than about half the strategists you work with, by default.

Advertising’s addiction to bullshit is not just annoying, it’s the biggest reason the industry is somehow under attack and contracting despite the making and selling of advertising being a central (sometimes only) economic pillar of businesses ranging from Google, to Meta, to Amazon. The bullshit runs across the academic and evidence driven world of marketing science, to the vibes and hype driven world of buzzwords that brought you questions like “what’s our metaverse strategy?”

At least once a week I see an obviously smart person fall prey to the need to make advertising (or themselves) sound like something more impressive, innovative or revolutionary than it is, by invoking a form of bullshit. While they get a short term boost in attention and can potentially capture the zeitgeist (and related money), these instances each make a withdrawal from the banked credibility that actual results build for advertising and marketing as business functions.

The most common types of bullshit I see in this industry:

A battle between two interchangeable words for the same concept.
Advertising people, especially those in the academic sector, love to have debates about differentiation versus distinctiveness, or awareness versus salience. And while these are fundamentally disagreements about the definition of words, in practice they lead to massive distraction, every time. The vast majority of marketers I’ve worked with have either understood or outright said, “brand can be a differentiator”. Which basically means having distinctive brand assets, can be a form of differentiation. Similarly, a differentiated product attribute (ingredient story, package size, country of origin) can become a distinctive ownable brand asset. Marketing people have been literally fighting about this for more than a decade, it’s on the setlist of the Ritson v Sharp version of the last Rolling Stones tour, and the amount of overlap is enough to make it a basically meaningless debate, in practice. But rather than describe what counts as “meaningful differentiation”, we try to throw out one concept to replace it with another one that is a near-synonym. There are so, so many bullshit arguments in advertising that involve taking sides on the head of a pin, and rather than say “there’s some nuance” and getting on with it, the bullshit continues (likely because it sells subscriptions, courses, textbooks and very occasionally, marketing).

A strong stance against something no one has ever actually said.
If I have to read, hear, or watch one more person ‘boldly’ state that the marketing/sales funnel doesn’t accurately represent consumer buying journeys, I am going to scream into the void for so long I may need to sign up for a twitter account again. This has been a “bold” argument for a decade, and is a fundamental misrepresentation of what the funnel is for: a simple heuristic for four states, acknowledging what size each of them generally is - the universe of people who are aware that your brand exists is probably larger than the group of people who would consider you, which is probably larger than the group who are going to buy your product. Much like Maslow’s ‘hierarchy’, there are a lot of people who are assigning an order or progression to something that isn’t actually inherent to the concept. We all now impulse purchases exist. We all know that some categories are functional and purchased solely based on need or recommendation. You aren’t enlightening anyone or challenging orthodoxy. You are inventing a bullshit dragon to slay, so you can present yourself as a hero. It’s tired and more than slightly embarrassing.

Presenting efficiency as effectiveness, or as a form of success.
This specific flavour of bullshit is very popular in dashboards from tech platforms, but in general: great ROI has a pretty loose correlation with effectiveness. Great media results that don’t translate to business results, are more likely to be about efficiency than effectiveness. Finding a way to do something that is super effective, in a more efficient fashion, is a breakthrough. Figuring out how to do something mostly ineffective at a near zero cost is what the kids today are referring to as “slop”. Presenting slop as a game-changing advertising strategy is fundamentally bullshit. It’s also arguably about half of the history of digital marketing, but that’s a much larger knot to untangle.

A very old idea in new clothes.
A “story world” of “brand lore” is not fundamentally different from an “immersive 360 brand narrative”. Both are basically the same as an “omnichannel storytelling strategy”, which we used to call “a big idea” or a “brand platform”. The vast majority of the time someone is dressing up a foundational, near-universal idea in cutting-edge buzzwords, they are selling you bullshit. This is for a simple reason: it’s a lot easier to seem innovative, than it is to seem good at something. That said, it’s harder to actually BE innovative than it is to actually seem that way, which is why any new language should be interrogated to see if it’s actually referring to anything nearly as fancy or novel as it sounds.

The artist dodge.
My favourite type of ad bullshit is what I call “the artist dodge”. It’s when you hide behind the concept of art, to avoid accountability, rationale, or a need for evidence. This was common in the peak “story” era of advertising, when people liked to pretend they worked at Pixar instead of in marketing. There are definitely situations where “this is the right decision from a craft perspective” is 100% valid. Those situations are not generally strategic or even conceptual in nature. When it gets to the execution, don’t get in the way of the craft. But when it comes to the strategy, the idea? It’s at least a little bullshit to avoid explaining yourself by pretending to be an artist.

I understand the temptation to make your ideas sound bigger, more groundbreaking, and more exciting than they are. This is, fundamentally, a trap. And it’s one that only seems like a good idea if you deeply believe you are smarter than everyone who reads the industry press, scrolls LinkedIn, or goes to conferences. Not taking your peers seriously, looks a hell of a lot like not taking your industry, your work, or your clients seriously.

My take here is simple: please, be anything you want to be… except full of shit.

This isn’t really about productivity, but it’s about the FEELING of it. When you switch to a new app or start using a new note taking strategy, you have to think about it, all the time. You need to reshape a thousand tiny behaviours. And as a result of that thinking and that effort, you tend to overestimate the impact it’s having on what you do, both in terms of quality of output, and in time saved.

This has been a subset of my experience with AI, and I think it’s going to be a telling part of how corporate AI adoption plays out.

I’m going to include the now-standard disclaimer: I am not anti-AI. I use AI tools regularly. But mostly to augment or simplify my work, not to do my work for me. This feels like an important distinction. I’m also not the world’s most advanced AI user, and I don’t code - I have invested very little time in learning how to make things with code since I finished high school, for reasons good and bad.

That said, I have gone deep in integrating AI to how I work, largely because I see huge potential opportunity. First, it was in terms improving my research approach, where it’s still paying dividends. Then in terms of changing some internal workflows, taking advantage of the way retrieval augmented generation can lead to a great research and validation partner for initial thinking, and can be customized to your company workflows and processes. This has also paid off nicely.

At that point I thought “I need to go further” and went all in on trying to develop skills and multi-agent processes that would automate some of the parts of my job that seemed more, well, automatable. Things like category landscapes, competitive analysis, etc. Time consuming, somewhat standardized outputs, some predictable steps.

This was electric and intoxicating, and ended up eating a lot of evenings and weekends.

I can’t code in the least, but with Claude Code I could work through the process and start building skills that would do things like a category, brand or audience audit. And I spent many, many evenings sitting on my laptop late into the right trying to refine, tweak, and improve these processes. I would look at the output, be impressed, then dig deeper, see significant issues, and try to refine it again.

This was not a one day process. This was a couple months of 4-6 hours a night after my wife and kid went to sleep, sometimes longer. Watching tutorials and reading documentation and trying again and again. And it was so, so interesting. The way my effort and process input was multiplied, led to some great-proof-of-concept level output. But almost none of it was ready to actually put in front of anyone (other than the small group I got to gut check it, specifically framed as WIP).

And when I tried to use it as part of actual work, I realized quickly that an imperfect skill or tool based on a technology that is prone to misrepresentation, misinterpretation, and misunderstanding (tbh, all of these more than the hallucinations that take up much more of the public discussion) meant that I was spending a fair amount of time fact checking, revising or clarifying any output I wanted to actually use. Often it was mostly right, but wrong in significant ways. And there were some things that just aren’t available in the training data, or website scrapes, or in the reddit threads AI inevitably uses to contextualize findings.

The problem, of course, is that using AI feels like magic.

If anything, vibe-coding a few ill-fated projects made me more sympathetic with the comp sci mindset that has shaped this millennium so far. I’m doing it on easy mode, but it makes it easier to imagine someone who truly understands this feeling like 1) anything is possible through code, and 2) the correct solution to anything is code-able. No wonder Meta wants to replace human friendship, or Google wants to replace the film industry - if code is the solution to everything, then the solution to everything is code; and now the code is getting tantalizingly close to writing itself. When I contrast this lens with my own experience, I can easily imagine an enterprise dedicating a team of 6 for 6 months to create something that can automate a task I’d give a junior employee a week to do. And I’m certain they’d be able to do it. I’m just not certain it would improve the actual work, that it would be read and considered deeply, that it wouldn’t require an amount of validation and re-work that didn't erase any productivity gains.

After a lot of time spent in this headspace, I reflected on the impact I’d actually had on my work, aka the reason I started these project in the first case. And I realized that while these side projects had felt deeply, transformatively productive, they had had nearly zero impact on my actual work product. And I don’t mean “the efficiency gains were below expectations”. I mean “almost none of this work resulted in any impact on my actual work product, despite being intentionally designed for that use case”.

I had been engaged in productivity theatre. Claude Code was my bullet journal equivalent for a quarter, promising massive gains in efficiency, intelligence, impact and capacity, but in actuality delivering an engaging little ritual that honoured the concept of productivity, without delivering any.

Some of this, I think, is just a consequence of my specific job. Strategy work is rarely a repeatable process, and the approaches, sources, and processes that make research and analysis meaningful for one project, would be worse than useless for another. I’ve said before that strategy is a different job every day, and this is an example of how that creates wicked problems when it comes to automation or even outsourcing.

I work with a couple of very smart people who have taken what used to be a Microsoft Office document, and used AI to turn it into a live dashboard that is better suited to our work, and better represents what the document was trying to accomplish. That is a REAL AI use case, but also not always the kind of thing that people get excited about. (In my estimation the chatter about the AI SAASpocalypse is a lot more reasonable than the same discussion about office work.)

This isn’t a moralistic stance, I still use AI on a regular basis; I’ve just found a well structured prompt in a markdown file, and a curated set of resources to pull from, delivers more value, faster, with no “setup tax”, than building custom skills and tools, possibly just because the juice is worth the squeeze. For the nuts and bolts output of my job, the models are the magic, and my attempts to build ever-more-intricate scaffolding on top of them was a solution searching for a problem, rather than vice versa. I’ve learned that (so far) anything requiring visual, multi-format or emotional analysis is often better done by a person, rather than done by AI and validated (or redone) by a human later, at nearly the same time commitment. This has been my issue when building my own AI tools and toys, and when I’ve test driven those made by focused companies.

I’ve found again and again, that AI works incredibly well as a tool and an input to a process, but when I try to use AI to create human-quality outputs, I end up spending more time getting it from “borderline acceptable” to “good” than I would by just doing it myself.

AI is fundamentally a seductive technology. It feels very different than what it actually is, which is why the Turing Test was abandoned so unceremoniously as a metric of intelligence, and why you occasionally see someone convinced that AI is indeed “alive” despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe it’s pareidolia on steroids, maybe it’s just close enough to a sci-fi dream come true that we can’t resist the idea.

It’s worth noting that “AI is sentient and talking to me” and “I am personally solving the frontier of science thanks to AI” and “AI is making me superhumanly productive, and will eliminate human work” might be three points on a spectrum, rather than two flavours of delusion and the future of the economy. Because the thing I’ve noticed most as AI has improved and become more mainstream, is how many people on the internet I’ve seen go from concise, incisive, unique voices, to longwinded, over-confident, high volume, wallpaper.

That’s not how the world works anymore, and it’s why you feel so isolated.

The broader backlash against social media, against “the algorithm” is largely just this. We, for a very long time, had a shared mass culture within our cities or countries almost by default. But the algorithm is really just a tiny part of a greater story of fragmentation, targeting and, well, capitalism (sorry). That’s the thing that’s happening here.

For all the rage against social media, big tech, etc, the problem is a lot broader - beyond algorithms you’ve got to worry about the amount of content being made, who it is specifically being made for, the paywalls and other forms of gatekeeping, and how those factors shape the reality of you (as a person, not a strategist) can connect with.

The types of entertainment have exploded as well; which means, very few of us are watching (or reading, or listening to) the same things, at the same times. The decline of linear TV, an increase in streaming an on-demand platforms, and alternate content sources (even just for video, the rise of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc, is eating into consumption time on any given platform.

When the last episode of MASH aired, 125 million people watched it. A beloved TV show finale, but those numbers are only matched now (in a much larger world) by things like World Cup games. Today, there is more stuff to watch than ever before, by an order of magnitude. The biggest hit of the streaming era was season 1 of Squid Game, with Netflix reporting 265 million people starting it over a three month period. Globally. This is a huge success, but it’s also the exception that proves the rule; because what else has been that broadly shared of an experience in recent memory?

TV and film used to be a near-universal form of social lubricant, as did music, magazines, movies. Even into the 00s it was rare to find someone who didn’t watch any of the top shows, and when you did, it was usually an intentional statement about rejecting mass culture (and embracing pretension as an identity).

This explosion of content has consequentially led to tighter targeting. Less stuff is made for everybody, because that seems like a worse bet than making stuff for specific audiences. And that’s great, especially in situations where certain audiences (regional groups, identity groups, ethnocultural groups) are underserved. But it also leads to the brutal rationale that the system can support about 20 Taylor Sheridan shows about ranchers, and a comparatively small handful of shows aimed at queer audiences. Creators do this too; they ruthlessly pick a niche and try to get an anchor there, because the audience isn’t rabidly loyal, and there’s no time slot or broader cultural reinforcement to create a ritual. The end result is identity being a bigger driver of what you consume than anything else - a reinforcement loop.

This is also why so much of the biggest IP in the world is 20+ years old - mass culture hasn’t been destroyed retroactively, we’ve just stopped creating it. So of course we keep mining the mass cultural objects of the previous era; we actually still share an understanding of them.

The other layer is the separation into different services. I’d argue right now the majority of high end content is only accessible if you subscribe to a specific service, at rising price points. In my (relatively affluent) social circles, you see some separation between the Spotify people and the Apple Music people, based solely on uneven gaps in the catalogue of each platform. When it comes to film and TV, and sports, the question of “did you see X” is often answered by “oh, I don’t have that streaming sub”. Platform exclusivity is a logical business strategy, but it also undermines social cohesion over content. If I’m really into Apple TV+ shows, and none of my friends want to subscribe, the conversations they spark stay in my living room, or drive me to virtual connection as a way of engaging with a fandom; still social, but less personal - this is maybe the biggest source of online community, the situations where your interests and passions do not connect with the people around you, so you find people who do. This was once rare enough that Cory Doctorow (currently best known as the enshittification guy) wrote one of his early novels about it. Now it’s the universal condition.

When the content you consume is a series of monthly subscription decisions, rather than one big bundle (or two), it shapes your intellectual, social and conversational reality. This seems silly, but I think a lot about the role the Simpson’s played for millennial humour; we all made the references because we had nearly all watched it. There is not a current version of this, as far as I can tell.

Finally we have the specific form of gatekeeping that frames itself as a reaction to online culture. The in-person only, no phones, intentionally offline cultural connection that has decided the issue is solely the digital connection we’ve started using as methadone for a lack of real social connection. Treating the symptoms without treating the cause is generally questionable medical practise, but it’s also what you do when problems seem too big to solve. I’m not going to blame Phoebe Bridgers for running a small, local, intimate tour series to launch an album. But the idea of romanticizing in-person connection to the point where it becomes a status symbol or luxury good, seems counter to the idea that what we need is more social connection, not less.

Which is why, if you’re trying to connect people, you should start with something that connects people. Lots of them, not just a niche audience that will be at its most aligned at the moment the show they’ve been obsessed with gets cancelled after season 2, due to lack of viewership.

Culture is like advertising. We either win together, or we lose as individuals.

The human insight behind smoking essentially comes down to smoking feeling good and looking cool in the moment, versus the very well-documented consequences of smoking arriving decades in the future. We’ve tried to overcome this cognitive gap by making smoking less cool and desirable, but it’d probably be most effective to just change the math.

If cigarettes gave you cancer in two weeks instead of 30 years, you could probably cut the number of people smoking by 95% inside of the first year. Partially because there would be fewer smokers left alive, but mostly because the consequence architecture would be completely reshaped. Strategically, and especially from an effectiveness lens, this would work.

Of course, we can’t possibly do that. It’s horrendous. You can’t intentionally make something addictive more lethal, you should make rational arguments, ban it, accept personal choice, whatever. But that doesn’t make the underlying analysis wrong - if smoking killed fast, fewer people would smoke. It’s so simple it’s almost alluring, except for the evil.

This sounds like an absurd hypothetical, but it’s the reality of strategy in business and advertising, all the time. Purdue Pharma went to market for years, directly telling doctors that their highly addictive product, was less addictive than alternatives, because they KNEW that was what doctors needed to hear to prescribe Oxycontin in mass amounts. Meta arguably has built an entire business on powerful human insights and strategies you wouldn’t want to show up in discovery during a lawsuit, whether it’s harming mental health in teens, or reinforcing political polarization in adults, to boost engagement.

Even if it generates billions, unbounded focus on effectiveness isn’t great for companies. There’s the legal risk element, where carefully argued rationale for defending decisions looks a lot like intentional harm, but there’s also the brand risk of everyone eventually hating you, of becoming a scarlet letter that people do not want to be associated with.

A pure focus on effectiveness is where strategists and supervillains can overlap. Figuring out how, to paraphrase a more pious version of Google, a company can win without being ‘evil’, is a pretty key part of the job.

The other challenge we run into, is that as an industry, advertising types tend to treat building beloved icons, and being effective, as two different jobs. There’s an attractiveness to treating this as a spectrum, with ruthless performance on one side, empty but lovable brand advertising on the other side, and a mushy safe middle where no one is happy, but no one is mad. That framing is just permission to either be evil, half-ass it, or abdicate responsibility. In reality, these are separate axes.

On one hand you have (business) effectiveness. The work, whether it be brand or business strategy, either works, kinda works or doesn’t work. On the other, you have (brand) affinity. What you do doesn’t have to make people love you, but you also don’t want to be seen as an awful thing to be associated with. Business needs to get the monetary results to sustain, grow, and navigate change. Brand needs to build affinity, whether through trust, affection, aspiration, or familiarity. These two needs are often in tension with one another.

Top left, we have The Purdue Zone - where you’ve fully leaned in to a world of modest strategic proposals that seem like sharp marketing thinking if you don’t consider that, when people eventually find out that you’re creating false affinity by lying to them, it’ll all fall apart. In a situation like Purdue’s, anyone could have eventually foreseen that selling an addictive product as non-addictive was not a bulletproof long term plan. And yet, not dissimilar to critiques of Meta, anything can be on-strategy, if the graph goes up and to the right. Everyone stops smoking, and if you don’t count the bodies, it looks like a win.

Bottom right, we have The Cannes Quadrant - the land of high affinity / low effectiveness. So named because the ad industry falls into this trap so often you’d swear we WANT to be there, drinking rosé. This can be something beautiful and meaningful with no actual tie to the business or objectives, more art project than advertising, or it can just be work that actually says or accomplishes something for a cause, but without delivering any tangible business value at the same time.

Top right you have The Bullseye - strategies that generate meaningful return for a business, but also generate meaningful affinity in an audience. This is where legendary work lives, but it’s not an impossible goal. It just requires alignment that how you make money, and how you sell yourself, aren’t in conflict.

Bottom left, you have Non-Strategies. Things that delivered no love and no results. Here lies the metaverse, etc.

The challenge here is that both the results and the emotions need to last. Cheaply bought affinity (through lying, or even cynical short term borrowing) can fade and turn into a reason to, well, hate you. Temporary results similarly condemn a business to a collapse. The challenge isn’t so much solving a puzzle, as it is refusing to abandon the truth that there is a real tension to be reconciled. You can’t just pick one or the other.

The ad industry has a terrible reputation right now, largely because people consider the Cannes Quadrant work to be intentional camouflage for an industry that makes its money in, and is betting its future on, the Purdue Zone. The affinity we’re building through the beautiful things we can make, is being eroded by the pursuit of easily measurable effectiveness that doesn’t care what we have to do to the customer, or the world, to hit the right numbers. This isn’t getting any less scary as the biggest players in global advertising double and triple down on data and performance, and show less and less interest in creativity and humanity.

No one cares how efficiently or effectively you do something, if what you do makes the business (or the world) a worse place.

The prophetic case is basically about the always-almost-here vision of affordable and accessible super-human intelligence. The machine is smarter than you, you should delegate as many tasks as possible to the machine, you should reshape your workflows, documents and output to be better aligned to the machine, and likely we’re entering a grim meathook future where there will be a permanent underclass (aka those who do not submit to the machine fast enough).

I’m not going to engage with the prophetic stance today, because I don’t actually believe it.

The practical case for AI, is that it’s an incredible tool for taking care of the category of things I usually call “grunt work”, in a cognitive sense. Grunt work is things that are hard, unglamourous, but important. Physically this is stuff like taking boxes off a truck, or moving items off a pallet onto a shelf. It’s not “unskilled labour” (it is possible to become skilled at anything, as anyone who has done a grunt work task for the first time will know intimately) but it’s also rarely creative nor strategic. It’s a repetitive task that one can become very good at, but if a machine could do it (with no economic pain to you) you would happily hand it off. Getting this stuff off people’s plates, done fast and cheaply by an AI, would mean efficiency gains and labour savings, is the pitch.

There’s a longstanding meme about wanting AI to do the dishes, so we can make art, rather than make art so we can do the dishes. This is fundamentally a comment about grunt work - things we know we need to do, but that we don’t take pride in mastering or doing well. Dishes or laundry are often an example, but grunt work can be fiddling with the margins of a document to ensure it looks good, or organizing files on your laptop, too.

The entire category of grunt work is being redefined, and what we put in that bucket is going to reveal a lot about what we believe, at an individual level, a business level, and a cultural level.

The example of coding is instructive, because some of the people I have talked to are reckoning with the reality that they used to spend 90% of their time doing something that is now grunt work; that is, writing the actual code that will make the idea, architecture and approach they’ve already come up with and outlined, real and workable. Code is a great place for AI to come to life, because the cultural attitude around the code itself has seemed like “if it works, that is success”. I’m not a developer, but I’ve been hearing jokes about janky, baffling, poorly commented code for forever. Whether or not it worked was the point, and if it was a little bit of a mess under the hood, that was fine. It should not be surprising this is the first discipline that is being wholly reshaped by AI. The separation between “knowing what you want to make” and “making it work” was distinct, but also, everyone was culturally inoculated against messy solutions as long as they were working solutions - no one has a meltdown about the equivalents of em-dash usage. Perfect AI grunt work scenario.

We’re seeing the same behaviour play out in other disciplines, as you’d expect. But what’s interesting is how many people who until recently would not have called core tasks of their job grunt work, are now treating it that way. In advertising, I’ve seen a lot of different groups quickly identify their own low hanging fruit. The grunt work of taking meeting notes and drafting a contact report (account service) or conducting a high level research audit on a new industry (strategy) or seeing if someone else had used this exact language / concept before (creative) or timesheets (everyone) seem like a perfectly reasonable role for AI.

This gets more interesting as you explore more capable agentic solutions. Is all research grunt work now? Is all process work? Ideation? Synthesis? Competitive analysis? At what part of the process does expert direction at a step by step level become essential? Does it ever? Every person, company, use case needs to figure out where the line is for themselves, but I have noticed (first hand) how easy it is to make stuff with AI and consider that an accomplishment, rather than aggressively critique the usefulness of that stuff.

This is the reveal; when you show the world exactly what you think is worth doing, and what you don’t.

When you outsource things like writing, communication, relationship building, advice, editing, or design to AI, you are 100% gaining an efficiency advantage. You are also declaring those things to be grunt work. And if you are declaring the specific things that differentiate you, your business, or your product, to be grunt work, you are making the case that you, your business, or your product, are a commodity. Because fundamentally that’s what AI generated work is; unless you’re running a custom foundational model.

If you do not have a compelling argument for why people should pay you to pay for tokens to pay OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or X (or Mistral or Cohere or…) to generate the output, you are basically making a compelling argument for your role, business or product to not exist except as a thing someone asks AI to do directly, cutting out the middle man.

Grunt work is a commodity. Meaning unless you add something of value to it, it is ruthlessly competitive and easily replaced. Paying anything above the bare minimum for it is effectively a hedge against needing to train someone to do it again, and the exact same framing applies to AI. Which is why, in most cases, people and businesses have well thought out, clear arguments for why the things they do, are not just grunt work.

This is not an argument against using AI. It’s here, it’s pretty incredible in terms of what it can do, and you can use it to do things you wouldn’t have considered plausible due to affordability or timing concerns even a year ago. But it’s definitely an argument to consider what is actually grunt work and what isn’t, even if you can generate a passable facsimile of what a great and considered version would look like.

I don’t want the grunt work version of medical advice, or the grunt work version of a professional relationship, or the grunt work version of creativity. I’m already seeing some of the least engaging advertising of my life out in the world because someone who doesn’t know better thinks it looks “good enough”. Good enough is fine for some things, the same way it was when I was stocking and facing shelves in a grocery store at 15. But the only thing good enough has ever made someone feel is sated, or indifferent.

That’s probably fine for grunt work. It’s a little unsatisfying for everything else.

Put (too) simply, Hurman’s contention is that advertising works in two ways: we either capture existing demand, or create future demand. The entire digital advertising era has been very, very focused on capturing existing demand, and the industry (primarily via ad platforms and mostly-advertising tech companies like Google and Meta) has been very successful at that.

Whether or not they’ve been successful at building brands and delivering lasting business results is much more debatable.

But this has led to a crossroads. The biggest players in what is usually thought of as the ad industry are holding companies, and they are leaning very hard into trying to be more like the tech companies that have reshaped the industry around capturing existing demand. Right down to the restructuring, rebranding, and mass layoffs, the WPPs, Omnicoms and Publicises of the world have gone all in on “we’re a tech company now”, with AI investment abounding and a promise that the future is technology driven efficient advantage. The creative agencies they have not yet shuttered seem destined for the same status as the in-house agencies at Meta and Google, that is, loss-leaders for media sales. (Ironically this is very 1960s advertising thinking, just for a world without monopoly laws). Orbiting around this are many performance and efficiency focused agencies that are consciously engaging in a race to the bottom, with the intention to win. This is the Church of Existing Demand, and the orthodoxy is positively stifling.

On the other end of the spectrum are the independent creative agencies. I am very biased, because this is my world and my competitive set. But almost all of these companies are looking for the quality advantages that new technologies can crank out, while keeping the focus on making work that people remember, like, think about. Earning attention and affection, rather than just buying and optimizing for it. This is a doctrine of effectiveness that is fundamentally about creating future demand (and future customers). Capturing existing demand isn’t ignored, but it’s a secondary priority, largely because this has already been optimized to within an inch of it’s life by the massive advertising-supported tech companies that both own the platforms, and are building much of the tech that underpins the AI optimized future of performance marketing.

The obvious truth is that you need both. You need to efficiently capture existing demand, but also create demand for the future so you can survive past the next quarter. The issue is, this isn’t only an argument about what the most effective way to build an industry and deliver results is.

This is actually about what the word “advertising” means.

When I was a kid (I know, I am ancient) advertising meant 15 and 30 second TV spots, billboards, print ads (magazine and newspaper), and radio, primarily. The internet has opened up a ton of new options for what advertising can be, and people LOVE some of them: well done influencer marketing, UCG collabs, streaming sponsorships, in-game experiences, DTC merch drops, and custom content can be well-liked. But if you ask a random person in 2026 how they feel about advertising, what they’re thinking about isn’t any positive experiences. (I ask people this regularly, and it’s not fun.)

“Advertising” has started to mean stalking, punishment and public shaming.

With the current uproar about surveillance capitalism and surveillance pricing, the stalking point is hitting a new level. People are angry that advertisers are developing deep “anonymous” profiles of them and targeting them in ways that are uncomfortable to explain. In general, I think if you dropped an average person into a presentation from a modern media platform (especially one with a retail / loyalty layer) they would be horrified.

If the value exchange of “we give you points so we can figure out exactly when your kids move out, so we can start pushing you ads for discount boxes of wine right as the loneliness hits” was fully legible, most people would be deeply uncomfortable. But this even extends to the feelings people have about endless targeted email offering you predatory services and terms, spam that can never be filtered away, and retargeted ads that keep checking if you want a product that is forever sold out in your size.

The line between scams, spam, and advertising is effectively invisible, today. That is an industry defining problem on a much larger scale than, say, AI.

When the number of unskippable ads increases dramatically over time, or when pausing results in another ad break, or when it’s a solid 120 seconds to get to the next part of a 10 minute video, it feels like advertising is a way of the platform in question bullying you into either giving them more money, or finding a technology solution to work around it. If the ‘ad burden’ is high enough for adblocking to become even semi-popular, it’s not sustainable.

And finally there’s the fact that in 20 years we went from Jeff Bezos arguing advertising was a tax on a lack of innovation, to Scott Galloway arguing advertising is a tax on the poor. The shift to advertising being only for the “low end” versions of products, primarily digital ones, is stigmatizing both working in the industry, and consuming its output.

All of this comes down to one thing: we need to stop letting the Existing Demand-Only people define what advertising means.

Advertising based on Future Demand tries to entertain people. Inspire them. Build positive associations and additive experiences. Ideally build cultural moments. And those things are still happening. But they aren’t being associated with the word “advertising”. Popularly, the word is more defined by banner ads than by anything that gets acknowledged at Cannes.

I only really see two choices here: either we stand up for the stuff that has value beyond efficiency, and champion that it should be the standard bearer for this industry, taking priority over the other stuff, OR, we abandon the label of “advertising” and pick a new word for the parts of this trillion dollar industry that don’t immediately make people angry, dismissive, or disgusted.

I’m not ready to give up yet.

Not directly related to the above, but in a similar vein of believing in advertising: I’m both proud and excited to be part of the team working on Rebrief, a new Canadian Journal of Advertising. You can learn more on the website, substack or instagram, but the short version is: this is a group of people who love the Canadian ad industry enough to want it to be better. The first print issue (coming this summer) will include personal essays, fiction, analysis, and a wide range of perspectives on the question “what is Canadian advertising?”

If this sounds interesting, sign up, learn more, and potentially even sponsor the issue to get in front of the influential audience of people shaping the present and future of one of the industries most influential markets.

My immediate thought hit like a brick - the problem is that strategy done well, is almost never done the same way, twice. And instead of celebrating that as an important part of the job and the role, we have a tendency to obfuscate, formalize, and otherwise productize the work of strategy to make it easier to explain. In doing so, I’m pretty sure we make it harder to actually understand.

In the simplest terms, a lot of strategy is about turning business problems into human problems, and then turning human problems into communications problems. The “why” of all of that problem transformation is, as I’ve said in the past, is to narrow the aperture so that ideas can hit the right target.

But the reality is that you can’t use the same strategic approach or toolkit for every problem. An awareness problem is different than a meaning problem. Both are different than functional problems. And all three of those are different depending on what the competitive set looks like, how engaging a product category is, or how established the brand identity, tone and distinctive assets are.

Not every strategic problem needs the same kind of research, or audit. Not all of them require a segmentation or a brand framework or a benefit ladder or a maxdiff survey. But if you don’t know how to do/use all of those things, and many many more, well, you’re going to run into walls as a strategist, headfirst. Sometimes the strategist a problem needs is all vibes, and sometimes they’re all stats, and sometimes they’re just a very experienced thing-that-matters-finder.

Even that ignores the role strategists play in terms of interpersonal and inter-organizational relationships. The strategist I need to be cracking the brief, the one I need to be facilitating a client workshop, and the one I need to be briefing a creative team, have really, really different skill sets. And that’s ignoring that every agency I’ve ever worked at, even ones I’ve been a leader at, have very different beliefs about how the work should be done, what the objective is, and what tools or processes are the core parts of the shared way of working.

The point I’m trying to make is that the reason most strategists are either bad at, or very reductionist when it comes, to, describing what strategy is, is that it’s different every day. Sometimes it’s different multiple times during a single day. When I talk to creatives or account service people in agencies, the tasks might change, and the people might change, but the way they organize and manage a project or relationship (at a fundamental level), or the way they come up with and refine ideas (rather than specific executions) seems to be relatively stable day to day. The details definitely change (client personalities, team dynamics, categories, budgets, etc) but the job seems consistent. This is likely why both groups can do a great job explaining the value they bring to the table.

Strategy doesn’t fit this pattern. You are very often spending a meaningful chunk of your time, figuring out how to spend the rest of your time, to address the problems in front of you. A lot of conversations involve saying “I don’t know yet, give us a minute / hour / day”.

What’s more absurd is, agencies (big and small) do not acknowledge this. They *train* strategists as though every problem has one of a few predictable shapes, follows the same steps, and requires the same tools. This approach has created a subset of people who don’t actually know how to do strategy work, unless it falls into the very specific patterns they were trained to follow. It leads to being reliant on one brief template, one set of paid subscriptions, one handful of frameworks.

If you only know how to do strategy in one circumstance, or even at one agency, I’d argue you don’t actually know how to do strategy in a way that is meaningful or useful for your team or your clients. Until very recently, I’d expressed this as an argument against excessive specialization in strategy roles.

But, the problem isn’t even career paths or titles being too narrow. It’s that if all you have is a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail.

Advertising is the way it is, and to some extent strategy exists, because of the high costs of failure. Unlike many other businesses, where you can fail quietly and semi-anonymously, until the point when you don’t, advertising can’t truly be tested until it is out in the world1. And the smallest-sample-location-based tests can spread, because advertising is fundamentally spreadable; nothing we put into the world ever fully goes away or stays put, anymore.

A brand mis-step, even as a small regional test, can completely shift the relationship a company has with its consumer base, and it will take years to fix. This is hard for some people to understand until it happens to them, but the short version is; in many cases way safer to ship broken product than broken marketing. Largely because product (assuming it doesn’t harm someone or immediately make you a laughing stock) can be repaired, recalled, or exchanged. Marketing that screws up too much isn’t forgotten, if anything it’s more memorable than the good work you do on purpose BECAUSE it’s a mistake.

A high cost of failure has led to some behaviours that are features, but get perceived as bugs.

Agencies overthink things. We have a lot of rounds of approval and redundancies in our processes. We over-consider best practices at times. This is in conflict with speed sometimes, and there has been a massive amount of effort invested over the decades to make the process faster, but just as reliable, because the stakes of a screw up have gotten higher in an age of social sharing, influencer marketing, and (deep sigh) “cancel culture”.

So we tend to operate in a strict mode of Ready, Aim, Fire.

Ready as in “let’s figure out what we’re doing here”, Aim as in “let’s align on the approach, solution and idea” and Fire as in “let’s make the thing and get it out into the world”. We make sure we’ve got a good understanding of the expectations and constraints, we develop a detailed plan for what we’re going to do and how we’re going to approach it, and then we execute to the best of our abilities. This is logical, consistent, and useful. Managed risk, minimal wasted effort.

It’s also the exact opposite of the way AI makes me want to work.

My experiments in AI have gone from the regular chatbot interface, to building plugins, skills and agents in Claude Code that take tasks that used to be too time consuming to do, and makes them always-on background work.

Step one, for me, was figuring out how to get better, more detailed more informative stuff out of LLMs, paired with my existing processes. Basically, making it possible to take a Ready, Aim, Fire approach with more depth, detail, and exploration than was possible before. This has, tbh, been a huge success. It’s changed the way our team works, and made it easier to deepen our engagement with a problem before delivering a strategy, before digging into a comms plan, or before briefing a team. We’re spending less time on finding the right things to think about, and more time on the thinking.

But when I started building more automated processes into my workflow, I realized the best way to work with AI tools is the opposite. I needed to start thinking Ready, Fire, Aim2.

The “Fire” stage shifted from “make the things and get them into the world” to “make a lot of things and see what of it actually makes sense, and use THAT to evaluate what the right choice is”.

The pace of prototyping possible when it comes to building tools or outputs with AI breaks the math, a bit. When you’re building something internally that means endless iterations as you whittle your initial stick into a spoon. But it works for purely mental labour, too. I’m not pushing anything half baked into the public sphere, but I am iterating at a more detailed and faster level, and sharing a different type of work in progress. For someone who’s career has likely been more shaped by animated discussions about strategy documents than any other thing, the ability to throw together 20 or 30 versions of a strategic territory, rapidly figure out what doesn’t work, and then take that knowledge to craft something I’m actually ready to stand behind, is kinda great.

I am still midway through this rewiring. It’s only possible because of the ability to make inefficient, but less uniquely humanly creative, parts of the process happen very quickly. In one recent example, I needed to consider potential definitions of a set of words. Ready-Aim-Fire Jon would have spent an afternoon with a thesaurus, and built a map of all the possible definitions and how they interconnected. Ready-Fire-Aim Jon, however, used an LLM to crank out hundreds of combinations, with proposed definitions attached. By reading that pile of options, I both 1) encountered some unexpected possibilities, 2) realized that a lot of stuff might have worked if done differently, and 3) realized that a lot of stuff was definitely never going to work, and discarded it.

I didn’t spend the time independently thinking my way to a correct and defensible answer, and then validating the answers I liked the most (and that’s what the timeline available would have suggested, even a year ago). I spent it challenging and questioning AI attempts at a small defined problem, to develop and refine a set of heuristics I could use to make the problem clear, tangible and solvable.

The cost of failure in advertising hasn’t gotten a single iota lower. But the job has always been to fail internally as part of the process, so that you don’t fail when it comes to what goes to market. We’re in a time where the we have the ability to do that at higher definition and at greater scale, than before. We can see what success and failure are shaped like, before we commit to an outcome, more often than we used to.

Ready, Fire, Aim.

People have problems. When you have problems you’re looking for solutions, but sometimes also just an outlet for the anger that comes from those problems. Politically this is a (maybe the?) dominant trope of our modern age - one person will blame immigrants, another youth, or boomers, or the poor, or billionaires. The value of someone to blame is that you can suggest the solution somehow lies with them, but also, they personify the problem. This can lead to very dark places (check your newspaper) but it’s worth considering how it shows up in (a non-bigoted) context. Brands are often looking for someone to blame, intentionally or otherwise, with their marketing.

Brands Blaming Themselves

Blaming yourself for the problem only works if you’ve already taken action. Maybe the best example of this is Domino’s actively admitting that their pizza was bad, and promising to change it. This breaks through to an absurd degree, assuming you take action, and assuming that people believe you when you tell them what that action is.

This is a reboot, if done well. You change or fix or pivot and you do so with calculated transparency, to get empathy, attention, and maybe a second chance. It’s always looked at with a bit of skepticism, because no one trusts brands or marketing anymore, but it’s a powerful brake to pull. You can only do this very rarely, if done seriously. However, lately everyone has been doing it in jest. We recently saw a massive number of brands jump on the “apology” trend with “official” admissions that they had screwed up by being too good, too effective, too desirable. Similar to a generation of influencers who moved from controversy to absolution with the classic notes app apology post.

Brands Blaming the Competition

This is somewhat rare, at least in direct terms. But when you have complex categories, you can get to a really interesting place. Blaming the competition is often a matter of differentiation and positioning. When a natural deodorant tries to generate fear, uncertainty and doubt about the impact of aluminum ingredients, they’re not only blaming the competition for something scary, they’re also reminding you how safe they are. When an electric car company highlights the emissions cost of owning an internal combustion car, same deal.

Samsung has been leaning hard into blaming Apple specifically for perceived cultural stagnation, and Anthropic is not-so-subtly positioning its competitors as the probable cause of an AI brain-rot future. Blaming a competitor is also a great way to distract from your own failings. A year or two of panic about TikTok manipulating politics did wonders for Meta shifting the conversation away from the many, many, many examples of their own platforms being used to manipulate the political situation in their own country.

This approach is mostly about getting your audience to align with you, in opposition with someone else. There are studies that suggest if you and someone else hate the same person, you’re going to develop a faster connection with them. Which explains most of high school and office politics in one fell swoop, but also why brands want you to think your problems have more to do with they competitors, than with you.

Brand Blaming the Customer

It’s almost never framed this way, but a huge amount of marketing is essentially blaming the potential customer for their own problems, and positioning a brand as the solution. Whether it’s someone trying to tell you a new gym will create discipline, suggesting the right outfit will address your self esteem issues, or nudging you gently that a special person in your life requires fancier things from you, a lot of companies have been using the strategy of “you are the problem, but we can fix you” to great success.

This is what most people are talking about when they complain about advertising and consumerism. Whether it’s about criticizing your natural bodily processes, shifting norms of self care, aligning class hierarchy to clothing and accessory purchases, or just old fashioned weaponized insecurity, we often don’t even know that we’re doing this. Which makes it an incredibly powerful question to ask when you’re looking at a positioning, a brand strategy, or an execution: “are we just blaming the customer, here?” is probably a better way to ensure that oft-invoked empathy is actually influencing the work you’re doing.

Brand Blaming Society

This has long been popular, and has gotten only more so over time. It’s also wildly risky. At a fundamental level, this was the strategy behind the legendarily bad Kendall Jenner Pepsi ad, but also Apple’s 1984 spot. When you’re going to root your work in questioning the whole world, and positioning yourself as a solution, you need to be credible in that assertion. Most companies are not.

This was an epidemic at the height of the brand purpose era. Society was not living up to its potential, but [insert brand] was going to change that. With this framing, the most impressive thing about this era of marketing is that it didn’t collapse on itself sooner.

The challenge with blaming society, is that most of us aren’t actually rebels. The successful examples of this as part of a strategy are usually either tapping into an existing populist anger, tapping into a widely acknowledged but not yet addressed societal wrong, or presenting a widely accepted POV as an unpopular opinion.

The challenge we have with blame as a strategy is that it’s simple, seductive, and toxic. Blaming your customer might work, but it will eventually earn you resentment. Blaming your competition looks petty and reinforces that they’re the default. Blaming society often sounds a lot like giving up.

Blame is a tool, sure. But as a strategy it’s lacking. Which is shocking when you consider how common it is.

Lately, I’m realizing that people who want to break in should instead be focused on the windows.

Let’s backtrack. The “traditional” way of breaking into strategy, in my experience, was about getting into an ad agency, first and foremost. You’d take a job in social, or in account service, and you’d use that entry point to learn how agencies work. Ideally you’d build connections in strategy (at your agency or otherwise) and you’d find ways to demonstrate strategic aptitude; either explaining a thing no one else was explaining, or writing the tactical briefs that a snooty planning director thought were beneath them, or offering to write upfront slides. If you were good and lucky, someone would notice, and boom; strategist path unlocked.

There was a brief period of time where most big agencies were hiring junior strategists, or strategy analysts, which were all clearly positioned as “your pathway to a career as a strategist”. This is a harder sell now, because the business model is changing, and frankly because the amount of value delivered by a junior strategist or analyst probably isn’t as easy to justify paying for, as it used to be.

Which brings us to the AI factor. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I spent a weekend playing with prompts, and basically ended up with the world’s fastest strategy intern. As the quality of models develops, and as I keep refining my prompts and approach, I’m relatively confident that these tools (that our whole strategy team has access to) are probably as good as a junior strategist, at the work we often ask a junior strategist to do. This doesn’t mean the work is perfect, by any means. But it’s often comparable quality raw material, delivered in 10 minutes instead of 10 days, and iterated on endlessly, usually with more meticulous sourcing so you can fact check the output.

All this leads me to one thing - it’s going to get harder to come through the door. You’re going to need to think about coming in through the window.

The OG method still works. If you can get hired into an agency (often in accounts or social), and impress or intrigue the right strategist, there’s an opportunity. This is the most competitive path because it’s the least creative one. And, to be honest, it comes with risks - if you don’t make the transition to strategy before you’re, more often than not, a Director, you’re never going to. Not because you don’t have talent, but because 1) you won’t be interested in taking a demotion in title to reflect your probable skill level as a strategist, and 2) you’re even less likely to be interested in taking a pay cut for the same reason.

The sweet spot is kinda narrow. I have known several (very good) account people who took the job with the intention of transitioning to strategy, but, that wasn’t what was behind door number one.

But windows, you can jimmy open. Maybe it’s through a side project that demonstrates deep strategic thinking. Maybe it’s starting in an adjacent field (research, marketing science, media, academia) and bringing genuinely valuable non-strategy experience. Maybe it’s tech or entrepreneurship as the evidence that you’re a lateral thinker who sees things that other people do not.

Sometimes it’s just about picking a better crow bar. I have heard dozens of stories of people breaking in to agencies with an absurd stunt, whether it be micro-targeting ads to get their name in front of a creative director, or showing up at an agency in costume to show dedication or attention, or even showing up at Cannes with fake t-shirts to sneak into a company party to network.

Every time I have heard that kind of story, it’s been about a creative. Creatives are more comfortable with the windows, generally. It’s something to learn from them.

The biggest change I’ve noticed in the last 5 years is that young people who want to break in to strategy, or even agencies in general, are less ambitious about and dedicated to the goal than in the past. They’re still smart, but if there’s not a clear or direct path, they’re not super interested in trying to create one1. They’ll move on to something else.

This is a problem, because the test for getting into the agency world, is getting into the agency world. There’s no admissions process, no real credential that is a guarantee (and I say that with respect to the multiple certificate and degree programs I know students and instructors from). As the biggest players in advertising are shifting to cost cutting and managed decline, as the number of entry level positions are being reduced, and as the definition of what we do on a daily basis is changing, the most ‘non-traditional’ parts of the industry seem like they’re pre-requisites for survival, rather than just success. Learning the craft is essential, but only so that you can figure out how to break the rules effectively, at a time when the constraints shift several times a year.

I’m not one of those people holding a “The End Is Near” sign and telling you that a career in advertising, or in strategy, is ill-advised or doomed. I think this is maybe the career path with the best balance of accessibility, creative & intellectual satisfaction, and compensation potential, if you’re suited to it. But it’s never been for everyone, and people expecting to just walk in through the front door, are likely to be disappointed.

People are feeling caught, between the wave of financialization that is turning everything about their life into an investment, and the wave of pathologization that is turning everything about their self into a diagnosis.

You’ve heard about financialization at this point, but to recap: when everything can have monetary value, everything will. Not only your education, career path, and life choices, but sports becoming primarily about gambling, prediction markets turning the rest of your life into a betting opportunity, and single-stock retail investing turning every waking moment into a respectable casino. This has seeped into our broader optimization culture, as well. You obsessively track your diet and exercise, buy three separate devices to quantify yourself, and then validate your investment by changing how you work out, how you eat, and how you rest. You worry about doing it “wrong” despite knowing movement is good for you in and of itself. You judge your progress by a graph, not a feeling. You benchmark yourself against others and start looking for more and more hacks, to increase the comparative return on your investments. The spectrum starts with an Oura ring and a supplement Huberman mentions, and ends with injecting grey-market unapproved peptides from a foreign factory. And that’s not even talking about the people evaluating the cost benefits of GLP-1s versus groceries.

The broader social implications of this mindset is showing up in interesting places. Materialists builds an entire narrative on whether or not it’s possible or wise to love someone who isn’t a good ‘investment’. Social media content openly discussing the arbitrage of attractiveness as a mate, for a life of easy privilege. When people are feeling economically at risk, and the world order is crumbling, money becomes the only form of purpose available.

When everything is finance, and finance is everything, meaning is harder to come by.

The second pressure is one I’m seeing a lot less conversation about, but I think it’s as important. When I talk about pathologization, what I’m referring to is the way personality traits and social dynamics seem to have been displaced in broader culture with diagnoses and disfunction. Some of this is a side effect of the rise in therapy-speak in day to day life, where very specific concepts are taken out of context and wielded as a bludgeon; a common one is ‘emotional labour’ but another greatest hit are accusing other people of being narcissistic or sociopathic because you don’t get along with them. This trend went into overdrive during the pandemic, when a huge cohort of people started to self-diagnose with ADHD, autism, and anxiety disorders, often with little more evidence than relating to a TikTok video and the content of a subsequent google search. Obviously, each of these things are real. Obviously, many people will need actual (ideally professional) help learning how to manage or live with these types of neurodiversity. But there’s value in people being allowed to be shy, or nervous, without treating it as a condition, too.

One of the most visible examples of this ongoing trend of pathologization is in dating. People are identifying themselves on platforms by their self-diagnosed mental health conditions, which is fine. But the discussion has also shifted to one of attachment styles, broad pronouncements of abusive behaviour, and even medicalizing concepts like infatuation as “limerence”. We are slowly turning more and more average social interactions into problems to be solved or avoided, turning more or less neutral traits into flaws.

When you internalize this mindset and language, you don’t really get to have a personality, anymore. You become a collection of conditions and traumas, defined entirely by things outside of your control. Who you are beyond diagnoses becomes limited to what you own and what you like rather than how you behave or what you feel. For all the accusations about capitalism robbing us of individuality, capitalism never told you to feel bad for having a crush on someone you’re dating.

This is the vise. On one side you have a creeping financialization that makes everything about you a quest to optimize your worth, financially and quasi-financially. On the other side you have the least zen deconstruction of the self possible, where you are reduced only to a collection of diagnoses, trends, and accumulations.

Money replacing meaning. Diagnosis replacing identity.

This is maybe the best explanation for what I’ve seen described as nihilism in today’s youth. If your entire value is judged on your monetary worth, which is hugely influenced by the circumstances of your birth, and your identity is shaped primarily by diagnoses which are ALSO thought to be heavily influenced by who your parents are… we’re entering an oddly fatalist version of an individualistic society, where we openly suggest that you have limited control over who you are and what you achieve… but we’re going to judge you for it anyway.

There is a huge opportunity to credibly step outside these pressures, the two sides of this vise, without trivializing the importance of money, or the validity of mental health and neurodiversity. But in order to step outside something, you need to be able to see it first.

Read. All the time.

Early on in my career I had a boss who asked how I knew about… the weird things I knew about. I said “I read a lot”, and that rapidly turned into me doing some rough math. My estimate at the time was about a thousand pages (or equivalents) a week, between books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and social media. He used to tell people this in meetings, which was both flattering and mildly embarrassing.

Every good idea I’ve had has come in some part from that kind of mass consumption. Warren Ellis once described where his ideas come from as different elements of things he’d seen, smashing into each other in his brain. That was maybe the first time I had read someone explaining my own mind to me. It stuck.

I fell in love with the internet because it was, in the late 90s and early 00s, basically an endless magazine. And even though AngelFire pages were supplanted by Tumblr and BoingBoing was replaced by The Verge, there was always a new smart person with something to say. Something to read. A river of thinking, of various quality and degrees, but massively complex so much signal (and noise) on a daily basis.

Social platforms made this messier. Google Reader died and RSS feeds slowed to a crawl, and suddenly blogs, this incredible buffet of writing, just withered.

Soon all I was finding to read online was paywalled websites and social media. The algorithms got smarter. But they didn’t prioritize quality. They just knew how to draw attention.

I don’t think I read any less, over the years. But in 2025, I only read about a dozen books. More of my time and attention was spent on posts (mid), on newsletters (good), on tv and videos (mixed bag), and a more than healthy dose of comic books.

Regardless of the volume of input, my output started to narrow, a bit. Something was in the way. My information diet was the equivalent of a mall food court.

In late 2025 I decided maybe I needed to refine my inputs. In a fairly small shift that felt tectonic, I decided to take the social media apps off my phone. Anything with an endless scroll is gone, except for the substack app. And the change is somewhat staggering.

I’m not spending that much less time on my phone. But I am reading a lot more actual books and news and magazines, things with editors and standards and maybe the good kind of gatekeeping. And it’s almost unsettling how long you can go, outside of books and magazines, without encountering actual complexity.

This is what I slowly realized I was missing. The internet used to be a place full of complexity, and that was why I spent so much of my time there. It’ll probably become a great place to hang out again, and there’s undeniable creativity and genius online… but that creativity is designed and selected for effortless consumption above all else. One sentence hot takes. Minimum viable meaning. And it occurs to me that there’s no such thing as a cheap shot, when all the shots are free.

There’s no complexity on an endless scroll. Only sufficient volumes of noise to make you think another minute, hour, or day will help you find signal.

There’s no “eureka” moment here. This is a personal shift and realization, and the sad and funny part is that it’s very easy, despite feeling daunting. The worst thing that can happen is… your phone feels a little boring.

If that feels overwhelming, it says as much (if not more) about you than it does about your information diet.

This isn’t intended to be a rant on how people should live, or to be an attack on specific forms of entertainment. It’s a commentary on a key ingredient for strategic thinking, maybe for thinking in general, that most people aren’t cooking with anymore.

Boredom is the only waking moment, when you actually get to use your mind for something other than interpretation, analysis, and absorption.

When you’re reading, listening, watching or talking, you’re only doing a specific type of responsive thinking. Responsive thinking is great, it endows you with mental agility and can elevate a spark into a fire, but it’s not enough unto itself.

The other kind of thinking, the kind that I believe meaningful strategic ideas comes from, is more about generating novel ideas, unexpected comparisons. Not bridging two existing concepts, but deep synthesis, pulling meaning from so many places that it seems like it’s coming from nowhere. The best place for that is a blank page, either digitally, physically, or mentally.

The blank page hasn’t been readily available, lately.

It’s not only that this is the most entertained the human race has ever been, with AI research telling me the average person is spending about 1000 hours a year watching video, about 900 hours a year on social media, around 500 hours a year on music, and about 400 hours a year gaming.

We’re also layering that entertainment; we’re on social media posting the concert we’re attending, listening to music while doing basically anything, and playing Balatro on our phones while our partner watches a reality show filled with well-dressed plastic surgery enthusiasts.

There’s no boredom allowed, anymore. We filled those spaces with a selection of glowing rectangles.

People used to get bored as a matter of course. Waiting in line, sitting on the toilet, etc. The reason 72% of us (according to a 2014 study) get our best creative ideas in the shower, is that it’s basically the only time you aren’t multiply occupying your brain.

We used to get our boredom for free. Now we need to fight for it.

There’s a cottage industry of apps and tools to help you get your attention back from your phone, but most of them push really hard for disconnection as the goal. Other trends, like “raw dogging boredom” by giving yourself timed blocks of digital abstinence, seeming peaked this year. But the key, to me, is recognizing that giving yourself space to think, to be bored, is a key part of actually sitting with the information or ideas you have.

Thinking time should be boring, until the moment when it’s very, very exciting and you have a new idea. Our current dominant model of inspiration is an infinite supply of stimulus, hoping that in the act of consumption, two ideas slam into each other like electrons, and something big happens.

A potentially more reliable model is to fill your mind with as much of the key information as it can hold… and then stop giving it things to do other than figure it out.

You can engineer boredom relatively easily. Every device that matters to you has airplane mode. Most apps can be easily deleted. You can buy earplugs at a reasonable price. Paper notebooks and physical pens are a great way to eliminate everything but you and your thoughts. But we tend to think of boredom as a punishment or a sign we’re not optimizing properly.

Instead I need you to think of boredom as a piece of equipment. You need it like you need data, like you need context, like you need a solid understanding of statistics, actual conversations with people, and a solid narrative.

Boredom is where great ideas start. Everything else is just riffing on something you just saw, which is *fine* and valuable in its own right. It’s just not the good stuff.

To get the obvious out of the way: In 2026, the ad industry is at an inflection point. Holding companies are merging, some of them are imploding, all of them are fundamentally shifting their business model (or adopting an approach of managed decline). Are you becoming a tech company, becoming an AI enabled efficiency machine, or becoming a SAAS platform? No one is sure what the right move is, but I’ll caution people to remember two things. 1) the ad industry is fine, advertising is supporting many of the most influential companies on earth, and 2) there’s a world outside of holding companies… they’ve only existed for 64 years. People have been advertising since ancient Egypt, at least. From a Lindy’s Law perspective, I’m not worried about advertising having a future, and you shouldn’t be either. Worry about how you’re going to navigate the chaos that’s happening while we all figure out what that future looks like.

Traditional media is evolving at gunpoint.

People don’t read anymore. That’s not a criticism, it’s an observation. People rarely seem to watch TV with their full attention, movie theatres have as many cobwebs as patrons, and radio is becoming less relevant as podcasts, streaming audio and in-car technology continue to improve. At the same time, big tentpole content like sports, awards shows, late night, and news, is moving to other channels and formats, or is under siege economically. The consensus is that Stephen Colbert is probably going to be a podcaster relatively soon, and will make bank doing it. I’ll probably watch him more, to be honest. Either Netflix is going to own Warner Bros, HBO, and a world class IP library, or Paramount (with Oracle money) will. None of the old media is going to fully disappear, but right now we’re getting a front row seat for the world figuring out that traditional media has hit the point of managed decline. Radio did this already, going from the entertainment centrepiece of the home, to something encountered while driving, or in doctors offices. The amount of YouTube I consume on my TV is a big sign (to me, at least) that this transition is already underway. Sure, I’m probably a leading indicator vs gen pop, but I’m also a 40-something dad. If I’m doing something, it’s likely not cutting edge.

Social media is dying. (The counterpoints you’re thinking about were never actually social media.)

This might be wishful thinking, but in a world where countries are banning under 16s on social platforms, where more schools are banning phone use, and where people generally feel like the promise of social media has failed, I don’t think it is. I know that there are bright spots and moments of influence, but I believe none of those are traditional “social media”. YouTube is a streaming platform with a low barrier to entry, so is TikTok. They’re more of a competitor to Netflix than they are Facebook, if we’re being honest. Discord and WhatsApp are community platforms, sure, but they’re primarily about closed conversation with in-groups, not about broadcasting your life or thoughts as a means of identity creation. I was there when social media started to go mainstream, and I believed it was going to change everything. It did, but not for the better. The decline is here, most of these channels are only ads & influencers (both of which are things I like, but don’t want to consume in isolation), and how they evolve is going to say a lot about how we communicate. From the vantage point of today, the most impactful thing social media accomplished was breaking the funding model for most previous forms of media, and creating a corpus of content that helped train Large Language Models. So, it may have actually been worth it.

We’re going to have a series of AI panics that make the social media panic look quaint.

I remember the (many) social media panics that pre-dated the current one focused on children. TBH, if someone wanted to take social media down, they should have started with protecting children earlier and louder, but the success of this current backlash is inversely proportional to the future prospects of social media, as referenced above. Fear about the negative impact of social media is a big, big deal right now. Fear of AI’s impact is making it look like a tempest in a teapot. We are already seeing serious backlash to not only AI job loss, but also: AI cognitive impacts, AI educational impacts, AI use by parents, AI use by children, AI use by professionals, how to litigate AI usage in situations where things go wrong, and how to credit AI vs AI users when things go right, and more. Each of these will be debated like holy war, with about as much evidence and possibly more passion. Because, AI breaks the model most of us have for how the world works, for how computers work, and for what makes us special and useful in a cold, vast and uncaring universe. The best model for a truly mainstream response to higher level understanding of our current AI models is probably somewhere between finding out your dog can talk, and finding out aliens exist. A recent survey showed 45% of people think AI is looking up the right answers in a massive database. Fundamentally not understanding something, combined with massive change related to that thing, is a recipe for fear. You can already see it if you look.

AI is changing things, but not as fast as you think.

That said, AI isn’t going to change everything today. It’ll probably change things slower than you’re assuming. It’s exciting but imperfect, and governments, companies, and people are generally slow to make massive changes in support of something exciting but imperfect. Right now we’re moving at a medium pace in terms of actual AI adoption and impact, despite constant press releases about AI-related layoffs, because moving away from a human-based working model is actually really really hard for legacy systems or organizations of all types, and comes with a lot of potential costs. For all the fear of AI in higher education, a few really boring analog changes would likely blunt the impact; I wrote essays about English literature for 4 years, in exam rooms and classrooms, by hand, in blue pen. If more work is done in person and by hand, more of it will be done by people. For all the massive AI disruption, the best use cases I’ve seen professionally aren’t about eliminating jobs so much as taking things that were previously unwieldy or too expensive, and making them affordable and manageable. Some people are putting this technology on par with fire. I see it more as on par with the internet. It changed EVERYTHING eventually, but it happened somewhat gradually, as a person who experienced the roll out of broadband, the popularization of laptops, the first smartphones, and the launch of social media, between puberty and finishing university. Looking at it from today, this feels a lot like that. We’re very likely overestimating the amount of change in one year, and underestimating the amount of change in ten.

The geopolitical map is being rewritten.

A year ago I talked about 2025 as a time of Political Inversion, and, well, yeah. I didn’t expect the wholesale dismantling of the post-war global order, but that’s where we’ve ended up. In Canada we’re completely rethinking our level of trust in our global alliances, and much of Europe seems to be doing the same. I woke up recently to news of increased military action around Taiwan, there are (still) multiple wars happening around the world, and what was once settled politics in most of the west is now very much up for debate, and a potential wedge issue. This means uncertainty is going to infect everything until we hit a more stable point, but the grand problem is that a dog doesn’t need to bite you twice, for you to develop a life-long fear of dogs. Policy and behavioural shifts from the USA, China, Russia and others are already reshaping how people see the world, and those impacts are going to be around for a generation, regardless of upcoming elections. Whatever the next stable period after this time looks like, it won’t be the same one I knew growing up. Which means today is a great time to do some introspection, and think about what parts of your theory for how the world, and people, work, are artifacts of a specific global dynamic and belief system, and which are inherent truths. Start today, because sticking to old mental models in times of change is almost always a recipe for mistakes.

This sounds both more and less grim than last year, but I’m actually really optimistic about our current moment. A bunch of things are breaking, but maybe they needed to. Maybe this is the crack the lets the light in. There’s a tremendous opportunity in times of change, both to make something new, and to understand yourselves better. The only enlightening context, is one that changes.

Happy New Year. Thanks for reading.

What became quickly clear is that there are many definitions of the word, and while they overlap, the differences in definition are the source of most conflict about who does or doesn’t understand “brand”.

Three versions I’m familiar with, that might help illuminate this issue: the ‘ad’ brand, the ‘design’ brand, and the ‘ops’ brand.

Each of these versions will use similar language to explain what a brand is in conversation. They’ll generally talk about how brand is more than just product or design, more than a logo or tagline. They will still mean completely different things while saying that. It’s an industry-specific version of Rashomon.

The Ad Brand

In an ad agency, a brand is an active thing. It’s a very large series of actions, and the principles that define them. There will be a document, somewhere, explaining the foundational truths and choices that help something to be on brand vs off, but the actual thing lives in the doing.

Many years ago, Noah Brier had a project called “brand tags” that basically invited people to tag a logo with the words they associated with it. This is a great example of the agency (and maybe agency strategist) vision of brand; it’s something that lives in the minds of consumers, and we only ever have partial control over it. It’s by DOING THINGS, putting products, experiences, content, ads into the world, that we play a role in nudging the broadly accepted definition of a brand into a specific direction.

This POV is challenging, largely because clients prefer to buy certainty, but the only certain thing is what a brand means right here and right now. Everything else lives in probabilities. (The previous two sentences were indirectly advertising for digital performance marketing, oops.) But the lack of absolute control over brand is also the root of its deep value; a well established brand is trusted implicitly because it’s co-created over time. The mix of heritage, history, and earned social perception, is magic.

An ad brand is exhaustively defined, but inherently somewhat flexible. Because in order for the outputs to be good, to be creative, there needs to be room to explore.

The Design Brand

I have been lucky enough to work with some truly talented designers in my career. And when working with maybe the most accomplished designer I’ve ever worked with, I got an invaluable gift - about 30 minutes of “this is what I actually need from strategy to do this work”. It was, of course, entirely different from what I was providing. Most good learning experiences are this kind of humbling.

What I remember most from that conversation was a deeper need for understanding how the brand should be perceived relative to other brands, and to the audience. It wasn’t as much about a central challenge or insight as it was deep understanding of context. It was less make-it-clear, and more let’s-go-deeper. Understanding the business and ethos it was supposed to represent, but also the people it was supposed to connect with and what they were like.

Nearly every design company I’ve worked with has had a strong preference about working with their own strategists, largely because the needs are so specific, and the interaction requires a lot of discussion and trust. “What do you/they connect with and why” is a crucial question for defining a brand, for a design audience. An ad agency audience often leans more into “who are you and what are you trying to say”. When working with design-led companies on branding projects, there’s more of a consensus in what forms, colours, words mean. Less ambiguity, more direct references.

The last big difference, of course, is that when a design-led company talks about a brand, they are also talking about the logo, word mark, usage guidelines and rules, and how they create an entire system of showing up consistently and recognizably in the world. The actual engineered structures that will signify and evoke what the brand means. The things you etch into stone.

The Ops Brand

The brand is almost indistinguishable from the company from an operations (or ops) lens. It’s not a constraint, it’s a label. All three perspectives conflate brand and business to some degree, but in my experience this group considers them synonymous. I’ve met some people client-side with this lens, and some people agency side, that believe the brand is the company, and so if they decide to change it, it can and will change. And there’s truth to that. The way a business operates will change perception of the brand to a significant degree. But customers have more power than the ops lens often considers. They can reject your changes, they can insist the brand is what they have always believed it is, but most importantly, they can just get confused, and stop buying. There may be no harder communications challenge than getting people to believe “we’ve changed, but you’ll love it”.

The vast majority of brand work I’ve done, and seen done well, has been about taking existing truths, and using them to define future direction. An approach rooted in the question of “who are we really, at the core?” But from an ops-focused perspective, this is looking backwards. Sometimes this more functional approach comes from an acquisition, or a strategic shift, that conflicts with the pre-existing brand perception - the business has changed (or will soon), and the brand needs to catch up. The ops lens sees brand as something that can be defined based on strategy and will, rather than based on past and present perception.

This can work well. But it can take a long time to get from “we have decided to be this, now” to consumers agreeing with you. The trough in between can be treacherous. Jaguar, for example, is in that trough right now. We’re still waiting to see if the new products and new audiences validate the shift in the brand.

When Tim Hortons starts introducing pizza, that’s an example of ops-led brand thinking - the business opportunity defines where the brand goes, rather than the brand shaping how business opportunities are perceived. To be clear I don’t think this is inherently wrong. It’s just a completely different way of conceiving of brand.

Co-Existing

On many projects these three conceptions of brand run into each other. You have a detailed breakdown of the (design) brand, that the ad agency has real trouble translating into actions, experiences, ideas. So they take a pass at ‘refining’ the (ad) brand, so that they have a stronger sense of what it looks like in action. And then they present to a client, who feels like this is a miss given broader market trends, and the potential they see in the business and the (ops) brand direction.

No one’s wrong. We’ve just fallen into a very common problem for our modern era. Different groups using the same words to mean different things.

Either deciding to use different words (unlikely) or clearly explaining and addressing the disconnects between different conceptions and aligning on roles and definitions (more likely) are two simple but hard ways to close this gap.

As with many things, that sounds simpler than it is. So let’s discuss in detail.

Curious.

A good strategist is curious, because you have to find things interesting, and be willing to learn about them, even when there’s no immediate or probable payoff in doing so. This curiosity is your engine, because even when you’re starting from scratch on a brief, a client, a category or an industry, you are never actually supposed to be starting from scratch. You should have a brain full of material that can react to, connect with, or contradict the things you discover when you dive into audience research, read through product testimonials, or explore the history of a company.

I have the (maybe unfortunate) opinion that curiosity is essentially innate. You’re either curious, or you aren’t. That curiosity is maybe the most essential part of a good strategist; the idea that things are worth knowing, or learning about, just because they’re there. You can be discerning, you can have taste, but you also need to have that desire to just *know* gnawing at you a bit. That’s what’s going to get you to go the extra hour into research, to ask the follow up question, and to find anything you’re asked to understand, at least somewhat interesting. And figuring out why someone (whether they be the audience, a creative team, or a client) would be interested in the subject at hand, is the heart of the matter.

Curious people know things already, and they want to know more things. If you don’t have that in you, strategy is going to be hard. Because if you’re not filling your brain with new things on a regular basis, you’re starting every single project at a deficit.

Outsider.

This is the one that’s going to get me in trouble. I believe that if you’ve never been an outsider, it’s going to be really, really hard to be good at strategy. Luckily, this isn’t innate; it’s experienced, and available to most people if they seek it out.

When I say outsider, I don’t mean “edgy bad-ass”. I mean someone who does (or did not, at a formative stage) align with, fit in with, or participate in, significant areas of the mainstream culture around them. This could range from coming from a different place, having a different culture, having notably different interests, having a notably different identity, etc. But I think that experience of being an outsider is important, because that’s how you learn to see culture and behaviour, rather than just experience it.

A quote I trot out too often is “I don’t know who discovered water, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a fish”. Most people, in most places, are fish. I don’t mean that to belittle them, but the average person believes they do not have an accent, because nearly everyone around them has the same accent. Culture is like that, too. And if you grow up steeped in the dominant culture, dominant identities, dominant experiences and interests, you’re unlikely to be able to easily and critically dissect what is a series of choices, and what is an innate part of life.

There are a million ways to experience being an outsider, and each of them prepares you to see things for what they are, the causes and structures underneath things, rather than taking them at face value. If you’ve never had that kind of experience, and still want to be a (better) strategist, my biggest recommendation would be to go live somewhere else for a while, and see what you learn about other people, and yourself, when you no longer get to be “normal”.

Understand & Understood.

Someone who cares about understanding more than being understood, would struggle in strategy because they’d only be interested in doing half the job. They’d say things like “I shouldn’t have to dumb this down for you”. Someone who cares more about being understood than understanding, would struggle in strategy because they’d be more interested in explaining their own point of view, than they would about uncovering something novel, challenging their own ideas, and validating the theory they’re sharing.

Everyone starts on one end or the other of this spectrum, but before they become good at strategy, they figure out how to strike the balance.

Strategy work is about finding things out, and then convincing people to act on them. It’s about learning and leading in equal measure. To do that, you need to find equilibrium between understanding things, and being understood. If you understand something, but can’t make other people understand it, the impact is indistinguishable from you never having learned about it at all.

This is something anyone can learn, and that any strategist has to learn, on the path to being good at this. This is the difference between being smart or interesting, and being effective in the work.

A curious outsider, who wants to understand as much as they want to be understood. That’s the recipe for someone with the potential to be a good, or even great strategist. One innate element, one lived element, and one behavioural element.

These things don’t guarantee someone will be a good strategist. But they have generally been great markers for potential.

The most widely read thing I’ve written since launching ABC 6 years ago, was very, very practical. It was about why growth had stalled. Today, we’re going to talk about straightforward things you can do, to get better at strategy.

Take The Bus
I don’t exclusively mean ‘ride public transit’, but I do mean ‘make choices that give you an opportunity or obligation to observe and interact’. We are (largely by choice) living more and more isolated lives now, and a big part of your job is understanding how people think, and why they do the things they do. Taking the bus, or drinking your latte inside the coffee shop, or sitting at the bar and engaging people in conversation, isn’t necessarily a form of research, but it’s a form of grounding. Go into the grocery store, physically. Take 3x longer than you need to. Observe and think and do so *without* a set agenda. When you take the bus, you see humanity. If that’s too easy, do it without headphones. The things that will occur to you when you’re surrounded by people (and a little bit bored) are generally pretty interesting.

Force Online Insights Into Offline Context
Most strategy in 2025 doesn't get closer to a human being than asking Reddit Answers what ‘average’ people think. And that’s a problem, but not one that invalidates online insights altogether. The issue is, when you refuse to examine your online insights in offline context, you end up with a very skewed version of the world. It’s easy to be chronically online. It’s harder to be chronically online to your bank teller. Before you root your thinking in a measurable and observable online finding, try pushing that finding into an offline, in person, context. See what you learn about how universal or actionable or defensible that insight actually is, when you need to express it to a human being. Note: this often makes things feel MORE true. That’s a positive outcome, too.

Ask ‘What Was It Last Time?”
History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes. Culture rhymes too. Most trends, shifts, or emerging behaviours have a historical precedent. Labubus are Funkos are Beanie Babies are Tulip Bulbs. They’re never perfect analogues, but they provide a framework for analysis. Almost nothing is truly novel, and pretending that it is, is how you get sycophantic hype. However, when you acknowledge that culture rhymes, you can narrow in on the actual unique PARTS of a cyclical whole, and that contrast between otherwise comparable things, is usually where interesting lives. Ultra-low-rise jeans are coming back? What context has changed since last time? Maybe the ensuing 20+ years of body positivity and acceptance will make this time less toxic and more empowering? Maybe not. But Comparison is often the best starting point for analysis, and we have a tendency to compare this apples and oranges because huge contrast makes it easy. Usually we should be comparing Red Delicious and Royal Gala.

Watch For False Equivalencies
This is a common trap for strategy types, because culture rhymes (see above), metaphors are really effective, and they can sometimes lead us to confuse two different things that share some visible overlap. The most popular example of this is the tendency to treat a government budget and a household budget like they’re analogues, despite massively different objectives, priorities, and operational realities. But hundreds of millions of people the world over are convinced to vote largely based on the premise that these things are equivalent. If you have a good metaphor for what you’re trying to explain, let it be a metaphor, not a framework. the problem comes when you start treating categories, products or markets that have very little in common with yours, as the foundation for a plan to succeed. For example: your brand is probably not Duolingo, Patagonia, or the Zohran Mamdani campaign. The things that worked for them, either won’t work for you, or would only work for completely different reasons. The successful cases you’re thinking of as a rebuttal worked precisely BECAUSE the equivalence wasn’t false.

Every one of these could be the foundation for a shift in approach, or a new strategy, or even just a great meeting. Most of strategic work is just thinking around corners. But to do that, you need to know where the corners are.

I mean, not exactly, but stick with me for a minute.

One of the many things Eno is famous for, is the concept of “scenius”, which is effectively the idea of the collective genius of a (social or creative or professional) scene. Think of it as the inverse of the “great man theory” of history. Rather than humanity being moved forward by heroic figures who are uniquely gifted (intellectually, creatively, strategically, rhetorically, take your pick), scenius points to the unique alchemy of certain places at certain times, where the right people influence, inform, and challenge each other, and amazing things happen. So: Art in Paris in the 20s, the birth of modern computing in Silicon Valley, or (to be really Canadian about it) the 1970s Toronto comedy scene that included the young versions of John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Gilda Radner and somehow, more.

Layered into the concept of scenius is the idea that it’s naturally occurring, and that you cannot force it to happen. Scenius is, at surface level, a more democratic sounding concept than a lone genius, but it’s just as random and elusive. It comes down to the idea of a moment, a group, and a place and a crew being the apex of achievement, rather than the gifted individual.

Engineering this is, of course, what nearly every single ad agency in history has tried to do, in terms of writing, visual art, film, digital, experiences, etc. To build a community, a team, and a culture that has a higher-than-normal frequency of genius moments. It’s a Frankenstein kind of thing; we know what genius feels like, we have experienced it close up a couple times, and now we’re going to re-create it from spare parts, lightning, and hubris.

The vast majority of agencies are really just a very small but incredibly talented group of people, at their origin. As agencies grow, and inevitably realize they can’t scale the attention of a few individuals, they try to systematize that thinking, process, and creativity, recruit others of the same (or better) talent, and try to build a machine that can reliably generate those moments of genius.

The goal is to create the right mix of skills, process and culture to create better-than-reasonably-expected outcomes. The difference between this and ‘traditional’ scenius is both the external direction and external competition.

By external direction, I mean the reality that clients, market dynamics, and business realities shape what we’re doing. We solve the problems we get paid to solve (often by solving related but distinctly different problems), and we often create things based on pre-existing boxes we can put them in.

By external competition, I mean that beyond internal agency cultures that have a healthy sense of creative competition, the ad industry is also always in competition and conversation with different versions of the itself; other ad agencies, working on other brands, in the same marketplace. When you see two ads for competing delivery app brands that look similar, that’s two groups of people in two completely unrelated agencies trying to crack a novel and meaningful human statement about the joy of laziness convenience. And those people really, really want to win, partially because that’s the job, and partially because being outdone by someone in the same scene is motivating, if you’re doing it right. Our “scenes” are larger than ourselves, but we’re still trying to build something distinct and separate that does what the larger whole can.

This isn’t exactly a shocking thing to say, I know. “Ad agencies are trying very hard to do exceptional work” isn’t a stunning thesis. But I think it’s important, because not acknowledging this is why advertising can be so disappointing right now.

If you should be building a machine for genius, but instead you’re working towards a machine for efficiency or personalization or surveillance… you’ve missed the core part of why an (external) agency adds value, in my opinion. You haven’t bothered to check if you’re solving the right problem, rather than the one your boss (client, holding company CEO, or shareholder) has asked you to solve.

In the first of this series, I said that the point of advertising is to give things meaning, sometimes beyond their functional value.

In the second, I said that the job of strategy was to see things (problems, truths, opportunities) that most people don’t, and communicate them to other people in a useful way.

Today I’m saying the point of an agency is to create the conditions for repeated moments of (creative) genius. To build and maintain a machine for genius.

That’s the value our industry used to sell - the idea that building a machine like this of your own was a very tall order, because 1) it requires a culture that would be incredibly difficult to maintain inside an existing corporation, 2) the people that fit well into agency structures may not want to work within a traditional corporate culture, and 3) this kind of machine requires divergent thinking bordering on dissent. So you had an agency, because getting people to care about something, during an intentional interruption of the stuff they actually want or need to do, is kinda hard and kinda important. This has changed in recent years, though. Not only do people think they don’t need an external agency to get to good work, they may not even need a human to create infinite versions of targeted work.

When you read about the legendary agencies or campaigns of the 20th century, you never have the thought “Why didn’t that big company bring this in house?”. As the industry takes a moment to mourn DDB, we might remember that it’s unlikely anyone in-house at Volkswagen would have recommended calling the beetle a “lemon”. That came from an outsider perspective, by necessity.

The pursuit of a more corporate, more polished, more efficient and more predictably measurable industry is in many ways the exact opposite of pursuit of moments of creative genius, rooted in unexpected ideas, with a focus on building meaning around brands or products.

To be clear, I’m not saying this shouldn’t be a business. I think ad agencies need to be MORE aware of how they actually make money and what value they offer, and stop hiding behind attribution models that can trace their lineage back to a mission of “try to divert budget from TV to search ads”, or vague but passionate pronouncements about creativity.

Our industry went from building machines for genius, to pursuing the most efficient ads possible. Which might be why some of the biggest companies in the world are funded nearly entirely by advertising, and betting their futures on getting further into advertising, but the prevailing narrative is that the people working in advertising are doomed, and the average person considers advertising a pox on their existence.

There’s an opportunity to do a lot better. It begins with remembering what all this is for.