What I'm thinking about.

Everyone knows what a spanner is. Everyone knows what a car is. And there’s a very important gap: when the car coughs, splutters and dies at the roadside, how many people know which spanner to reach for, where it goes, and at what point in the repair? That's the whole thing. The difference between someone who can hold a spanner and someone who can fix an engine isn't determined by ownership of the tool. It's knowing which tool to use, where, and when.

AI is a spanner. A remarkable, intimidating and energy-intensive one for sure, and a good deal lighter than the sturdy chrome thing that lives in a box in the boot. But the same logic applies with an uncomfortable precision. Having access to the tool tells you nothing about whether the person wielding it can actually fix the car. We've handed the entire population a gleaming toolbox and somehow concluded that everyone is now a mechanic.

They are most certainly not. And that difference is now the most valuable thing in marketing.

Think about what actually lives in a good mechanic's head. Not just the tools, but the sequence. The diagnosis before the repair. The knowledge that you loosen this before you touch that, that the obvious fix is sometimes the wrong one, that the noise the engine is making points to a problem two systems away from where it sounds. None of that lives in the spanner. It lives in the years of opening up engines and (in the early days at least) getting it wrong much of the time. The access to the tool is the easy part and it always was.

This is where most organisations are asking the wrong question. I know a marketer whose boss opens every copy review with the same line: "Did you use AI to write this?" He thinks he's protecting standards. But he's revealing that he's misunderstood the entire thing.

It's the equivalent of a creative director squinting at a layout and demanding to know whether the designer used Illustrator,  InDesign or Photoshop — or all three. Well…of course they did!

What did you imagine they used? The tool isn't the question. And the use of it is simply assumed, the way we assume a writer used a keyboard rather than chiselling the copy into stone. Asking whether the tool was used is a category error dressed up as diligence.

The only question worth asking is where the human entered the loop. Because that, and not the tool, is where quality is ultimately decided.

Here is the part that the "did you use AI" crowd keeps missing. It doesn’t actually matter very much what the tool produces in its first pass. The draft, the option, the raw output — that's the engine running but still rattling and belching some unfamiliar smoke from the exhaust. The critical moment, the one that separates forgettable work from work worth putting your name to, is when an experienced human takes that output and reviews it, interrogates it, cuts the parts that are merely competent, and refines what's left into something with an actual point of view. That moment requires judgement the tool doesn’t have and cannot fake. It requires knowing what good looks like, which is a thing you earn through experience and not a thing you can merely prompt.

So I don't much care whether someone on my team or anywhere else used AI. I'd be faintly suspicious if they hadn't, the same way I'd wonder about a designer who insisted on doing everything by hand to prove a point. What I care about is what they did after the tool stopped.

Did they bring taste to it? Did they know which parts to keep and which to throw away? Did they enter the loop at the right moment, with the right standard, and make it better?

That's the toolbox that matters. Not the one you can spend small or large amounts of money on. It’s the one you build by spending many oil-smeared and sweat-soaked years under the bonnet, learning where the spanner goes.

These days anyone can hold the tool. But knowing exactly what to do with it is still rare. It always was.

It's in the eyes.

When someone tells you about a genuine passion, a light comes on immediately. And it's so obvious to see. When someone gives a rehearsed answer, the kind people think they're supposed to give, the light stays off and the words just...hang there.

"I love to travel...."

"I really like gaming...."

Sorry - but that sentence that trails off as you quickly break eye contact doesn't quite cut it. Personally, I've never found a way to fake that switch, and I've never met anyone who could.

So over the years I've mulled this over and created a hierarchy, and very often we tend to muddle the three levels together. There are: things we like, things we're passionate about, and things we're obsessed by.

They're not the same, and the differences matter hugely.

Liking something is easy and inexpensive. It’s passive. I like strong iced latte and Saturday afternoon naps. I like a well-made argument. Liking asks nothing of you.

Passion is the next level up, and it's where the eyes light up, because passion has a cost. Not just money, or time, but something in your soul. You give it time, money, attention, the occasional indignity. You can have many passions, and that's a fabulous thing, as they make you more interesting and, I'd argue, much more useful.

Obsession is the top tier, and actually rather rare. An obsession is the thing your brain defaults to when it isn't actively occupied by something you’re actually doing and which requires concentration.

It's the thought waiting for you the moment the meeting ends (and very often, when you're still in the meeting, not needing to talk and starting to zone out); the thing your mind drifts to in the queue; the last thing you see in your mind’s eye before sleep. You don't choose it so much as discover one day that it's already there. It has wriggled into your subconscious in the same way a mitochondrion successfully wriggled into a human cell one day when we were in the infancy of our species. And in my experience you can only handle one at a time, because by definition it's the thing that shouts the loudest in your mind during those rare quiet moments we all appreciate so much.

Mine, for the last year and a half, is shot put.

Yes, the big metal ball you were forced to throw in school for a few weeks, then never gave it a second thought as you moved on to hockey or football or whatever your school actually cared about.

For those of you who don't know me very well, I'm aware of how odd that sounds.

While gentlemen and ladies of my vintage have been bravely (or foolishly) taking up Hyrox / Crossfit / triathlons or learning to bake sourdough, I went back to a heavy metal ball I'd last thrown 22 years ago. It's not the standard-issue midlife crisis. But I picked it up again, both literally and figuratively, and I made a quiet decision: if I'm going to do this, I'm going to aim as high as I possibly can.

In my first outing I won the Singapore Masters title for my age group in 2024, then won it again in 2025 before setting my sights higher towards the Asian Masters' Championships in Chennai in November 2025 — winning the silver medal. The next step is the World Championships in Daegu, Korea this August. And I think about it more than any sensible mammal should. That's how I know what it is.

Here's where this connects to the working world, and why I think it's worth more than a personal footnote:

If you spend your days working at something you're genuinely passionate about, then you've won at life. Not because the work is easy, but because the light of passion has been switched on. It doesn't have to be your obsession, because that tends to be personal and the universe only gives us time for one. But the qualities that drive a passion, the willingness to be a beginner again, to be measured honestly, to chase a standard that doesn't care how you feel.... these carry over very nicely indeed.

The discipline of throwing a metal ball a few more centimetres than last month is the same discipline that makes you better at anything you take seriously. And the people I most want to work with are the ones whose eyes light up about something. Anything. Because that capacity for genuine passion is portable, and it shows up everywhere.

So I'll keep asking that question in interviews. And I'll keep watching to see if that unmistakable glow appears in their eyes.

May 18th is the 46th anniversary of the Gwangju Uprising, the day in 1980 when South Korea's military dictatorship sent troops and tanks into the city of Gwangju to suppress a pro-democracy movement, killing hundreds. For most South Koreans, it's one of the most solemn dates in the modern national calendar. For Starbucks Korea's marketing team, apparently, it was a great day to launch a drinks container.

When a 3 minutes of time investment using Google was skipped, it turned an error into a catastrophe.

And the consequences of this schoolboy error were swift and severe. The CEO was fired. All 1,800 stores closed early for mandatory history training. The South Korean president posted on social media calling the campaign 'inhumane.' Government ministries announced boycotts. Protesters smashed Starbucks cups in the streets of Gwangju. The chairman of the parent company, Shinsegae Group, bowed in public apology twice in a fortnight. Starbucks global headquarters called it 'unintentional' but said it 'never should have happened.'

At least that last part is accurate.

The easy conclusion to draw about this story is cultural insensitivity: that a global brand failed to understand local history. That's true, but it's also the least interesting thing about it. The more uncomfortable question is actually a structural one. How on earth does a campaign reach execution, across a market the brand has operated in since 1999, without a single person in ANY of the relevant rooms knowing what the 18th of May means in South Korea? That's not just a gap in knowledge, it's a process failure with the knowledge gap as a glaring, throbbing, incandescently combusting symptom.

I've spent almost all of my career working across Asian and Middle Eastern markets, and the version of this mistake I've seen most often is a variation of Hanlon's Razor ('Never ascribe to malice that which can otherwise be explained by stupidity'). So it's not down to malice. Rather in this case, it's down to distance. Creative and marketing decisions more often than not, get made in rooms that are geographically or organisationally removed from the markets they're speaking to.

Local teams exist, but they're often downstream of the decision, brought in at execution rather than concept. The brief arrives to them fully formed and dripping with foundational flaws.

The calendar is set. The question 'does this date mean anything here?' doesn't get asked because nobody upstream thought to ask it, and the people who would know aren't in the room yet. This is lamentable naïveté and yet again makes me think of the Korean Air flight 801 that happened because the First Officer was too terrified by cultural convention, to question the actions of the Captain.

Global brand consistency is a real discipline and it matters. But consistency of visual identity and tone isn't the same as uniformity of process. The brands that operate well across multiple markets aren't the ones that have eliminated local judgment. They're the ones that have built local judgment into the brief rather than the approval. By the time a campaign reaches final sign-off, the local knowledge should already be embedded in the idea, not shyly waiting at the door to be consulted as a compliance step.

There's also something worth naming about the specific nature of this failure. Starbucks Korea isn't a Western brand parachuting into an unfamiliar market. It's been in South Korea for 27 years. It has 1,800 stores. It has thousands of Korean employees. If the institutional knowledge to avoid this wasn't present somewhere in that organisation (with…how many hundreds or thousands of people??), the question isn't 'how do we improve cultural training?' It's 'who are we actually listening to, and at what point in the process?'

The closing of stores for history training is a meaningful gesture, and certainly the right one. But it's a response to a failure, not a prevention of it. The brief that prevents this isn't a cultural sensitivity checklist. It's a process that takes local knowledge and the people who possess it, seriously enough to include it before the idea is formed. And not after the cups are smashed on the pavement in Gwangju.

The word 'strategy' is doing a lot of work it was never designed to do. It appears in job titles, deck headings, workshop agendas, and annual reports. It’s attached to things that are, on closer inspection, plans. And sometimes tactics. Occasionally it’s just a list of activities with a confident font and a timeline.

Strategy has become the label we lazily slap on to thinking we want to sound serious about. That is a problem, because conflating strategy with planning produces a very specific kind of expensive mistake: the mistake of executing beautifully in the wrong direction.

My most recent MA focused on military and political strategy from ancient Greece and Rome, which is a subject most marketing people would find rather disconnected from our day-to-day jobs, yet I would argue that most marketing people should really be thinking about it a lot more. Not because warfare and brand-building share obvious mechanics, but because the strategic thinkers of antiquity were grappling with the same fundamental problems we face today: how do you make decisions under uncertainty, with incomplete information, in environments that resist your attempts to control them? This is not a military problem. It is the only problem strategy ever really addresses.

Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, understood something that most strategy documents and decks miss entirely. Strategy is not about knowing what you will do. It is about understanding the conditions in which you are operating so clearly, that you can adapt when those conditions change. Which they always do. The plan is not the strategy. The plan is what you do while the strategy is working. When conditions shift, the plan changes. The strategy, if it's any good, tells you how to think about what to do next.

The Athenians had a plan at Syracuse in 415 BC. One with brilliant generals, naval superiority, numerical advantage and detailed logistics. They also had a fundamental misreading of the political environment they were entering, a refusal to interrogate their own assumptions about Sicilian and Syracusan belligerence when under attack, and a public debate back in Athens that had confused enthusiasm for analysis. This was the foundational weakness of direct democracy. The result was the worst military disaster in Athenian history.

The plan was, by most accounts, operationally sound. Yet the strategy was absent. And here we are, nearly two and a half thousand years later, watching the same mistakes being made in marketing via detailed channel plans, precise budget allocations, immaculately crafted creative briefs.

And a total failure to ask what actually has to be true and intimately understood about the competitive landscape, the customer, and the category for any of this to actually work.

Real strategy starts with knowing the terrain, not creating a plan. It starts with the honest questions that tend to be skipped in planning meetings because they are uncomfortable and may not fit neatly into a slide.

What do your competitors actually believe about this market?  and where specifically are they going wrong? What are customers doing that they haven't yet found language for? What assumptions are you holding that the evidence no longer supports? What would have to change in the next eighteen months to make your current strategy irrelevant? These are not questions you answer in a two-day planning offsite. They are the questions that determine whether the plan you build is pointing at anything real.

The strongest strategies I've been involved in were written to be tested, not defended. They held a clear hypothesis about the world, named the assumptions sitting beneath it, and built in the mechanisms to identify when those assumptions were failing before the failure became beyond rescue. This is deliberately uncomfortable work; and it requires a leadership team more interested in being right eventually, rather than being right just when everyone’s present in the room — and willing to revisit conclusions when new evidence comes to light.

Sadly, most organisations are not built for this. They are built for consensus, for quarterly reporting cycles, and for the comfort of a document that looks like certainty. Thucydides (or Sun Tzu or von Clausewitz) would have recognised the problem immediately. History’s first proper historian spent twenty-seven years watching what happens when capable and even talented people confuse the quality of their plan for the quality of their thinking. The plan is never the point.

Understanding why it might fail, and what you will do when it does, is where the strategy actually lives.

I have spent years working inside airline and hospitality programmes, and the moment that reoriented everything for me was simple. We were celebrating hitting 20 million members in Emirates Skywards. The number was real. The loyalty, in many cases, was not. Membership and loyalty are not the same thing, and confusing the two is expensive. You can have 20 million members and a churn problem at the same time.

The brands that genuinely retain customers do not lead with points. They lead with recognition and with memory. With the small, repeated signal that says: we know you, and we are glad you are back. That is not a technical problem. It is a human one, and it requires a different brief entirely. The brief is not 'how do we make the programme more rewarding?' It is 'how do we make the customer feel more known?'

When we launched My Family as a new capability within Skywards, the insight was not about earning rates or tier thresholds. It was about the fact that a family travelling together is a fundamentally different emotional transaction than a frequent business traveller. A parent managing two children through an airport at 6am is not thinking about the points or Miles they will earn. They are thinking about how they can avoid someone in the group having a meltdown before they all reach the departure gate. The programme that meets them there, that removes friction, that makes the whole thing feel considered rather than just processed, that is the one they come back to. The lever was not a mathematical one. It was about making parents feel seen and heard. And revenue followed because the relationship did.

The mistake most programmes make is optimising for the metric that is easiest to defend in a boardroom or senior management meeting. Active members. Redemption rates. Cost per point issued. These are real numbers and they matter, but they measure programme activity, not actual customer attachment. A customer who redeems their points and then quietly disappears to a competitor has contributed to your redemption rate and subtracted from the business. So celebrating that is a category error.

There is also a structural problem that nobody wants to name. Many loyalty programmes are built by finance teams rather than marketing ones, because the liability sits on the balance sheet. That shapes everything: the incentives, the language, the definition of success. When the people designing the emotional architecture of your customer relationship are primarily concerned with liability management, the customer can feel it. Maybe not consciously. But they can feel it.

The brands getting this right are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated technology or the highest earn rates. Rather, they are the ones who have asked the harder question first: why should someone (anyone!) feel something (anything!) about us?

Points fund behaviour. They can make a customer do something once. But relationships change behaviour. They make a customer choose you by default, recommend you unprompted, and even forgive you when you get something wrong. Until the brief starts there, the programme is just an expensive way to buy customers that you don't actually keep.

Brief writing that could have been a template. Research that was really just Googling with better formatting. Copy that sounded like everyone else's copy because it was built from the same reference points. Social post captions produced at mass volume with minimal thought. Monthly reports that reorganised data without interpreting it. If AI can do those things faster and cheaper, that's not a threat to good marketing. It's an indictment of how those things were being done, and a signal about where the real work actually lives.

What AI can't replace, and won't for a long time, is discernment. The ability to walk into a room of work and know, without being able to fully articulate why, that something feels off. The judgment that comes from having been publicly incorrect a few times and learning what that actually costs. The instinct to know when a brief is actually asking the wrong question, and the confidence to say so before anyone has spent any money answering it (incorrectly). These things aren't what you develop by just reading about them. They accumulate through decisions made under pressure, with incomplete information, in front of people who are watching how you handle it.

I use AI tools regularly. For research, for first-draft structure, for pressure-testing arguments by asking the model to steelman the opposite position. It is genuinely useful for the mechanical and the generative. What I don't use it for is the judgment call — as that can only come off the back of years of experience. Which idea is right for this brand at this moment? What's this customer actually feeling but they have not said? Is this campaign honest, or is it 'clever' in a way that will embarrass us in twelve months? Those questions require context, experience and a point of view that's been built out of years of trial and error. A language model has the first in abundance, and the other two….not at all.

The marketers I have watched thrive in this environment are not the ones who use AI least, or the ones who use it most. They are the ones who treat it like any other tool: ruthlessly useful for the mechanical, and firmly kept away from the decisions that actually matter. Machine speed, human taste. That is the pairing. It's no different to those who were using Google in 2002 instead of time-consuming manual research. It's not complicated, but it does require you to be honest about which parts of your job are genuinely creative and which parts you have just been calling creative because the alternative leaves you too exposed.

The risk is not that AI creates bad marketing. Bad marketing has always been abundant and has never needed technology to help spray it hither and thither. The risk is that AI writes average marketing very efficiently, and that average starts to look like a ceiling rather than a floor. The volume of competent-but-forgettable content has increased dramatically and will continue to do so. In that environment, the brands that stay interesting, that say something distinct, that have an actual point of view (even if it's not a popular one), will be the ones where a human has still decided what interesting means. That human needs to know what they think. Not what the model suggests they think. What they actually, genuinely think.

That turns out to be the resource with the greatest scarcity.

The false choice works like this: brand people argue that performance metrics miss what they do, and performance people argue that brand cannot be measured, so why fund it. Both are partially right, which is exactly how such bad framing survives. They each contain enough truth to feel like a position. And in the meantime, the marketing function spends a significant portion of its energy on an internal argument that the customer neither knows nor cares about.

The brands that actually win are not the ones that resolved this tension by picking a side. They're the ones that stopped treating it as a tension. Brand and performance are not in competition. They operate on different time horizons, and conflating those horizons is where the argument breaks down. Brand is the reason someone considers you when the moment to buy arrives. Performance is the reason they convert when it does. We need both, in the right sequence, measured at the right intervals. Measuring them with the same ruler is like measuring a shot put throw with a stopwatch.

What changed my thinking wasn't a framework; it was watching what has happened to brands that cut brand investment in a downturn to protect short-term performance numbers. The decision always looked defensible in the moment: the bottom-funnel metrics held form, the CFO / Finance Head was satisfied, and the marketing team had demonstrated sound fiscal responsibility. The immediate results looked okay. Eighteen months later, the consideration numbers had quietly dropped, the media rates had gone up because nobody remembered who they were, and the performance team was spending more to achieve less because the brand was no longer doing any of the heavy lifting upstream.

Brand investment isn't altruism. It's not an act of faith that you ask finance to tolerate while the real marketers do the measurable work. It's the mechanism that makes performance marketing cheaper and more effective over time. Every dollar, dirham or riyal you spend building genuine brand preference is a dollar, dirham or riyal you don't have to spend trying to persuade someone who has never heard of you. The brands that understand this stop having the debate, because the question answers itself.

The measurement problem is real but it is not unsolvable. Brand tracking, share of search, consideration studies, price elasticity analysis, long-term revenue attribution. None of these are perfect. All of them are more honest than pretending that 'brand' can't be evaluated at all — which is a position that tends to be held by people who have never tried very hard to evaluate it.

The brief I would write now is simple: build brands that also convert, and measure both honestly. Not the same metrics, not the same window, but both with rigour and both reported to the same room of people who genuinely know how to understand the results. The moment brand and performance teams present separately to leadership or management is the moment the false choice gets institutionalised. So put them in the same conversation, with complementary evidence, and the either-or framing falls apart. Anyone still defending the argument at that point is usually the person who benefits most from the confusion persisting.

Culture isn't what you say in the all-hands meeting. Culture is what you do when the deadline moves, when the budget gets cut, when a team member makes a mistake in public, when someone junior says the uncomfortable thing in the meeting and the quiet in the room becomes deafening. It lives entirely in the edits: what gets approved, what gets killed, what gets praised, and what happens to the person who told the truth that nobody (particularly the management) wanted to hear. Watch those things for a month in any organisation and you'll know more about its culture than anything an extensive internal communications team would be able tell you.

On both agency and client-side I have led and worked with marketing teams across very different sectors, and the variable that predicted team performance more reliably than any other wasn't strategy, or budget, nor talent density. It was whether people felt safe enough to say what they actually thought. Not comfortable. Safe. There is a difference. Comfortable teams avoid friction. Safe teams bring up the uncomfortable thing early on — when addressing it won't come at an even more uncomfortable cost. That safety is built, or destroyed, in small decisions made every day by whoever is in charge. Not in retreats or in team-building exercises that involve falling backwards into someone's arms.

The edit that builds culture is the one where you take a piece of work that is technically correct but not quite right, and instead of approving it because you are hangry or because the meeting is overrunning, you sit down with the person and work through the 'why'. That normally takes no more than half an hour. But that's half an hour that most leaders feel they don't have. And it demonstrates something that a values paragraph cannot: that the standard is real, that it applies to everyone, and that the support to reach a better direction or conclusion is genuine. People remember those half-hours for years. They forget the offsite by the following Friday.

The inverse is also true. The edit that immeasurably damages a company's culture is the one where the leader approves work they know is not good enough because challenging it feels like too much effort, or because the person who produced it is too senior to hear it, or because the deadline makes honesty inconvenient. That decision takes thirty seconds. It tells the team everything about what the standard actually is, regardless of what the values deck says. And it's the type of behaviour that has had catastrophic results for aviation and resulted in wholesale changes across an entire industry.

There's also the question of who gets to be right. In high-performing teams, being right is not correlated with seniority. The best idea is the best idea, and the person who finds it is celebrated regardless of where they sit. That sounds so stupidly obvious. Yet it's more of a rarity than you might think. Most organisations, when you watch them honestly, reward the confidence with which an idea is delivered, more than the quality of the idea itself. Leaders who correct for that bias, consistently and visibly, build something genuinely different.

If you want to know what a team actually values, don't bother reading their mission statement. Watch what they do at 4pm on a Friday when no one senior is in the room. Watch how they talk about the work when the client or the bosses aren't listening. Watch who gets listened to when it matters. That's the culture. The list of values and paragraph explaining them is what the culture aspires to be, on a good day, when the food ordered in is from a nice cafe and the coffee is abundant. Everything else is the actual job.

I worked on a Hilton activation in Shenzhen in 2024, this fact was brought home with the strength of a clenched fist. The brief was clear: create something that would live long in the memories of those who attended: culturally relevant, brand-centric and with production so flawless that even the push notifications on the app would be flawless to the minute. I added that last one as it was one wrinkle that did come along, but only once and it wasn't a show-stopper. We had to craft and execute three flawless days with more than a thousand of Hilton's senior leaders from APAC and their global management team. There wasn't any wiggle room for error.

The planning process was revealing across 9 months. Every decision about the physical experience, the arrival sequence, the pace of the evening, the hierarchy of moments, the sensory detail, the points of unexpected delight — all of it turned out to be a brand decision in disguise. Where the friction was, told you what the brand prioritised. Where the generosity was, told you what the brand actually valued versus what it said it valued. What we chose to cut, because it was diluting the central idea even though someone had spent money on it, those were not event production choices. Rather, they were the most direct expression of brand values I have encountered, because you could not hide behind the edit.

The weak ideas appear quickly in experiential activations, and they do so publicly. The concepts that only worked on a slide, that had no physical logic once you tried to build them. The activations solving the wrong problem, designed to impress the client rather than move the guest. The moments that felt meaningful in the debrief, yet felt awkward in the room. You find all of this when gazed upon by the attendees — and that's a very expensive place to find it out. The strongest events I have been involved in were also the ones with the tightest briefs, which held strong under the most pressure. The clarity of ideas is the only protection you have when the clock is running and the rooms are full.

There is also something experiential does that no other medium quite replicates: it creates shared memory. A film is watched individually, even in a cinema. But an event is experienced collectively, and the shared nature of that experience changes its emotional weight. When something delights a room simultaneously, the delight compounds. When something falls flat in a room, that also compounds but with a deafening crash of silence. The collective experience is the product. This is why brands that do experiential activations or events well invest so heavily in what happens in the first few minutes. The emotional contract with the audience is shared, reviewed and signed almost immediately. And it's very very hard to renegotiate.

What Shenzhen confirmed for me is that experiential activations or events aren't marketing channels you add to the mix when you have some budget left over. They are the clearest brief you'll ever write — and the most unforgiving media you will ever work in. The brands that treat it as decoration, as a party with a logo on it, waste the opportunity entirely. The ones that treat it as the most comprehensive possible expression of what they believe, with every detail in service of that, build something that lives in people's memories long after the room is cleared.

If you want to understand what your brand actually is, put it in a room with people who did not choose to be there, give them ninety minutes, and watch. What happens next isn't a metric. It's the unfiltered truth.

I want to be careful here, because this isn't a criticism of any of the agencies involved. Ogilvy, VML and AKQA each have genuine creative heritage and myriad incredibly talented people. The question isn't about the quality of what they do. It's about what happens to distinct creative cultures when they're merged under a shared P&L, governed by a holding company that needs to find half a billion pounds in savings — publicly stating that most of those savings are at the expense of people.

The holding company model was always built on a particular argument: that you could own multiple competing agencies, keep them culturally independent, and sell that independence to clients as a feature rather than a bug. Clients got genuine creative competition.

Agencies kept their identity.

The holding company took a margin.

It was a reasonable model when the economics held.

But the economics stopped holding. Clients started taking work in-house (something I've increasingly seen first-hand), AI started compressing the cost of production, and the talent premium that justified agency fees started eroding. The margin fell… then disappeared, and what's left is the structure without the justification.

What concerns me about the WPP move isn't the logic of it as in a business where your cost base is predominantly people, if you need to rapidly cut costs, buying less premium sparking water for the office isn't going to do the trick. So you cut people. That's not a cynical view — it's merely arithmetic.

What is most concerning is the creative consequence of merging agencies that have built distinct positioning over decades, then assuming that the sum will be at least as good as its parts. Creative culture isn't a spreadsheet line. It's the accumulated result of who a place hires, what it rewards, what it's willing to do and refuse, who leads it and what they care about. You can't preserve that in a merger deck and inch-thick report to management.

I've worked with and inside agency structures across my career, and the pattern is consistent. When agencies merge under financial pressure, the short-term savings are real and the long-term creative output suffers in ways that don't show up in the quarterly numbers until we've all travelled much farther down the road. The clients who valued the distinct voice of one of those agencies quietly start to look elsewhere. The talent who built that voice starts leaving. The merger that was supposed to create something stronger ends up with something larger, more faceless and more bland.

The harder question, which few if anyone at a holding company level seems to want to address directly, is whether the holding company model itself is the right structure for what clients actually need in 2026. If clients want integrated, AI-enabled, data-driven marketing delivered efficiently, a holding company with premium pricing and multiple overlapping agencies probably isn't the answer. If they want brilliant, distinctive creative work with genuine cultural authority, merging those agencies and cutting the headcount isn't the answer to that either.

WPP isn't alone in this. The whole sector is doing versions of the same thing, reorganising around a challenge they don't yet fully understand and are adapting to day-to-day, week-to-week. That's not a result of incompetence, but rather one of uncertainty. But calling it 'transformation' when it's actually survival doesn't make the decisions better.

As Judge Judy said in the title of her 1997 book: Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining.

The fraud itself is fairly simple to describe. A case study film is an agency's evidence that a campaign did what it claims to have done. It's the artefact that goes to the judges, that wins or loses the award, and then gets shared across the industry as proof of effectiveness. If the case study fabricates its own evidence using AI (faking the coverage, the results, or the real-world impact) then what's being awarded isn't a campaign. It's a fiction. The award, in that case, isn't for doing good work. It's for producing a convincing enough story about having done good work.

The uncomfortable truth that the industry is dancing around is that the incentive structure that produced this fraud has been in place for decades. A Cannes Lion changes an agency's commercial trajectory. It attracts clients, justifies fees, elevates careers. The award is worth more than the work it was supposed to celebrate. When the prize is so valuable and the verification is so weak, no-one needs AI to create the conditions for fraud — but AI does make the fabrication cheaper, faster and harder to detect. The technology industrialised the problem rather than just create it.

I've been in enough rooms where award entries were being prepared to know that the gap between what a campaign achieved and how it's described in a case study has always been….malleable. Results get selected for their persuasiveness. Numbers are chosen carefully. The narrative is drafted and crafted. None of that is necessarily dishonest, as good communication involves presenting evidence in its most compelling form, but there's a spectrum; and AI has made it much easier to slide toward the ill end of it without anyone noticing until the nice sparkly Lion figurines are already on the shelf.

What Cannes has now introduced in terms of mandatory AI disclosure, detection tools, a code of conduct requiring signatories to confirm their entries are factually accurate — is the right response. But it's a response to a symptom rather than the cause. The underlying question is what the awards are actually for. If they're for celebrating real creative work that produced real results for real clients, then the verification infrastructure needs to match that ambition. However if they're for celebrating the craft of persuasion (including and perhaps specifically aimed at the persuasion of awards judges), then perhaps what happened was just someone playing the game with better tools.

There's a version of this that's straightforwardly about integrity, and I think that version is the right one.

The industry benefits from awards that mean something, and awards mean something only when they're trusted. Once the possibility of fabrication is on the table, then the value of a Lion becomes contingent on whether the judges happened to catch it, which isn't a foundation anyone wants to build a career on.

But there's also a version of this that's a genuine opportunity.

The moment Cannes starts rigorously verifying that case studies reflect reality is the moment it becomes a much more valuable signal about what actually works in marketing. Not what can be made to look like it works in a slickly edited four-minute film with an energising soundtrack.

What actually, verifiably works.

Now that would be worth flying to the South of France for.