The film I’m gonna write about is Yesterday. It’s a nice film. It had charismatic actors, a passable romance, great music, and was generally well made. I’ve seen a hundred other films that I could describe in the exact same way. “Nice”, but not especially memorable. Yet where other decent movies blended into an amalgamation of generic impressions and lukewarm feelings, perhaps popping back into my head if I saw a clip, Yesterday carved out a place for itself in the back of my mind and hasn’t gone away since. It was only recently that I figured out why.

For those of you who didn’t see it, a short summary is probably helpful. Yesterday is about a singer who, try as he might, cannot catch his big break. His music just doesn’t resonate with people. But after getting into an accident and performing a rendition of Yesterday, he finds his friends blown away by the music of The Beatles. Music that they have never heard before. The plot device of him being hit by a bus and waking up in a world that has forgotten a slew of pop culture icons is random, but it serves the purpose of the film so let’s just go with it. From there, he writes down every Beatles song he can remember; performing them to international acclaim, achieving the success he always dreamed of, and giving it all up by releasing the songs for free as they never belonged to him. Like I said, it’s a nice story, but there are many others with similar themes.

So, what sets this film apart? Well, it turns out that the reason I couldn’t forget it was that my inner nerd noticed something that didn’t quite add up. Something I wasn’t able to put words to until I was sitting in my room last year, trying to figure out what a 19th century philosopher called David Hume was prattling on about so that I could write an English essay about Shakespeare’s continued relevance. I’m not gonna rehash the essay or Hume’s extensive and tangential thesis (unlike him, I hope the person reading this actually enjoys themselves). Instead, I’m gonna condense it down to one sentence:

“Some art is just better.”

Hume’s belief that certain works of art possess a timeless, universal appeal which makes them popular across generations and geography is almost perfectly mirrored in Yesterday. The film proposes that it doesn’t matter who’s singing, who’s in the audience, or when the songs were “written”; they are just better. They have those indefinable qualities that make people listen, think, and feel. They don’t just fit the zeitgeist or play into trends. They are the zeitgeist, they define the trend. They’re “Lightning in a Bottle”.

Personally, I think that that’s bullshit.

Why do I think that both Hume and Yesterday are wrong about art like the Beatles’ music? Aren’t they one of the most popular, successful, and widely acclaimed bands of all time? Isn’t there some art that is acclaimed as timeless and universally appealing? What right do I, a trainee who only graduated a month ago, have to contend with the immortal significance of Shakespeare, Tolkien, Nolan, Hockney, or the many others who are known by most and will likely continue to be discussed and studied years after I’m dead?

The answer is simple. You’ve probably already seen it in life and definitely experienced it yourself. It’s the blend of confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, and peer-pressure that makes food taste better when someone tells you “it’s really good”, or your friend inevitably feel that the film you just watched was “underwhelming” after reading a plethora of negative reviews. Humans are unable to evaluate in isolation; we are ghosted by our past experiences, experiences that invariably include the evaluations of others. As much as value is innately subjective and personal, value judgements are inherently self-perpetuating.

This, in my opinion, is what Yesterday gets wrong about the songs of the Beatles. Its success wasn’t inevitable. Its meaning cannot be divorced from the musicians who wrote it, the time they wrote it in, and the people who first heard it. Those authors and audiences are as much a part of our current evaluation as any chord or lyric. To say that they aren’t is to say that composition, form, technique, or any other combination of qualities is solely responsible for making art “better”. It says that there’s a formula for “Lightning in a Bottle”, a repeatable recipe that only the most talented can replicate. It says that only those who are now celebrated for capturing lightning in a bottle were the ones able to do so.

The eagle eyed among you might’ve noticed that I only listed men a couple paragraphs ago, men who all share a notably similar complexion, class, education, and preference. I’m not going to spend time trying to prove that they weren’t the only people capable of making timeless, universally appealing art because of course they weren’t. The “universal appeal” of their work was decided, shared, and perpetuated by a similarly select group of people who compared their art to that of a similarly select group until, years later, it has become so embedded that it perpetuates itself.

Regarding the question of whether we can catch “Lightning in a Bottle”, I’d say yes, it is possible, it’s just not as objective as it seems. As much as I’ve discussed the flaws in the philosophical undertones of Yesterday (ideas that I’m sure were very intentional and that I certainly haven’t given too much thought to at all), I do like the music of the Beatles. I also like Shakespeare’s plays, love Lord of the Rings, think The Dark Knight is amazing, and appreciate that David Hockney is probably pretty good (I’ve always struggled with art). My point in writing this is not to tell you that they’re terrible or that there’s something inherently sinister in agreeing with the cultural consensus around a piece of media. I just think it’s interesting to explore why some art is thought of as simply being “better”. I think it’s important to question whether someone caught something electric and intangible in a piece of glass or if it’s just a trick of the light.

This is a man that has spent millions of pounds and months of planning, just so he could crash a real Boeing 747 into a real building. This is not a man that opts for small scale models or CGI. He wants a full-size aircraft to destroy an airport hangar all for one scene in Tenet. This is, by any reasonable definition, insane. It is also, I’d argue, exactly the kind of insane we should all aspire to.

Why? Because through that, Christopher Nolan has created a brand for himself. You know what to expect when you’re sitting down to watch a Nolan film. Large format. Practical Effects. Non Linear Storytelling. Some sort of trauma dump around Nolan’s personal daddy issues. But beyond all that, you know that what you’re getting is something that has been deeply considered. The fact that “the way Nolan intended” has become a well established meme shows the power of that personal brand. Someone that has become so synonymous with particularity that it becomes humourous to watch something he makes on the screen of a 2009 iPod Nano?

You may be wondering what ‘creatively high maintenance’ actually means - well since I’ve completely made up the term, here is my definition:

Creatively High Maintenance
Adjective
Someone that has an attention to detail, high standards, and is very particular about bringing their creative ideas to life, regardless of difficulty (and sometimes rationale).

Take The Odyssey.

The Cyclops could have been built entirely in CGI. Instead, Nolan built a real 60-foot puppet and filmed it in a Greek cave. The “giants” who tower over Odysseus aren’t scaled up in post — they’re seven-foot stunt performers shot against body doubles under five feet tall, so the size difference is real in camera. Even the Charybdis is created by jet skis, used as the literal physical guide for actors to react to. Even the men turning into pigs was done in camera.

Would any of it have made a difference to us as viewers?

Most people would say no, but I’m actually going to argue yes.

The story structure wouldn’t have changed, but the integrity of the film would have. Odysseus still would have made it home but you’d have lost a level of craft and care and attention that you’ve come to expect from a Nolan film.

The Odyssey was immersive, it was impressive, and elements of that would have been lost if Nolan wasn’t insanely committed to being high maintenance in all aspects of his film making. I wouldn’t have looked up at the screen (yes IMAX, obviously) in the same way.

Beyond his commitment to the bit, there’s been a lot of discourse about Nolan’s creatively high maintenance decision to shoot on IMAX. There are limits to where you can see it, there are limits to the production process. But again, I admire it. All of it adds to the scale. The Odyssey is an epic - so it makes sense to do everything to make it feel as epic as possible.

And this is where Nolan and I are the same. Because I too commit to the bit. What feels like eons ago, I was working on a shoot for Ford, we were shooting the new Capri paying homage to all of the culturally iconic appearances of the original car - gangster movies, music videos, computer games - it had a rich history and I wanted to convey that in a more modern way.

As we moved into production, I said “I want to shoot this on film” - my producer rolled her eyes (Laura is very used to this from me). This was going to make production slightly more complex, the budget was going to increase, arguably was it even worth it - but I wanted to make it work, because it was worth it to me. Shooting on film felt more aligned to the concept, it was all about paying homage to the past. Shooting on film gave it a level of premium that separated it from other car brands being able to create a gaming asset just because. It became part of the story.

And for me it’s not just limited to a throwback shoot for Ford.

It’s everything I work on. And without sounding insanely egotistical - I’d like to think my brand as a Creative Director is just as solid. I often hear “this is very Saff’ or something is ‘Saff Coded’.

My brand often consists of provocative ideas, premium aesthetics, usually some sort of humour at play, and a lot of grain. But being this creatively high maintenance doesn’t mean I’m difficult to work with (Laura might disagree) but it does mean that it’s much easier to get on the same page with the team around you. One team, one my dream.

I was in a meeting this week where something was termed as my ‘hill to die on’, my response was to joke ‘I think every hill is one to die on’. Except, I wasn’t really joking. That’s not to say I don’t know how to compromise, but I do believe it’s our job as creatives to make decisions that protect the integrity of the work and take something from good to great.

Sometimes that means flying a real plane into a building, sometimes it means shooting a Ford Capri on film.

There is nothing more common than when you’ve won something to say, “I’ve been through so much to get here.” It’s practically a badge of honour.

I used to love Britain’s Got Talent as a child. I used to watch it with my family every Saturday night and even voted for my winner on the finale episode. One thing that they all had in common was they all had some sort of story of emerging from strife to become an embodiment of confidence on stage. Every act had a backstory, whether that was growing up poor, being bullied for being gay, or a sudden loss in the family. Something that would pull on my heartstrings and make me root for them.

If we didn’t show the adversity that led to the art we create, would anyone actually care? The answer is no. Adversity is what people buy into.

A painting of a rich woman from the Renaissance - boring! However, a painting of a rich woman stolen from the Louvre in 1911, rediscovered in a random hotel room in Italy two years later?! Now that is theatre. That is art. That is the Mona Lisa. Propelled into fame and a household name from a heist by a handyman hired to build the very glass that was supposed to protect her… it. Without the story, Mona is just another rich lady from the Renaissance.

Art historians call it provenance; we call it a hook.

But has the idea of struggle for art gone too far? Do we now need it for validation? And it makes me wonder - as artists, do we need to endure turbulence to make our work validated?

“Although his past seems slightly controversial as he is of black origin and adopted from an orphanage, his flair and powerful mix between classy & already used chic creations, seems to have worked for Balmain” — quoted from an article about one of Olivier Rousteing’s early collections at Balmain.

You see, I know there is no real harm in giving the audience context on his background, as seen here in this quote. But there is something slightly performative when you realise that this is the only reference to Olivier’s childhood in the entire article. The tone instantly changes to talk about his work afterwards. It questions whether his artistry and notoriety at the time were strong enough on their own, and whether an emotional hook was needed to keep the reader. But even though it saddens me to admit, I believe this was needed for him to achieve the level of success he is now regarded with.

So, as an audience member, do we need to witness an artist’s suffering before we feel justified in supporting them?

As a creative, our personal opinion is always being scrutinised, and our one anchor to lean on is the hardship that it took to get us to where we are.

When I was an actor, I used to draw on my personal life experiences to strengthen my character, but as I was literally 18, I always felt like my bank of experience was shallow compared to others around me. Those who had travelled, lived alone, been in relationships, been stuck in a different country, been kicked out by a landlord, or been cheated on by an ex. They honed in on those experiences to create their art; I couldn’t do that, but it didn’t mean my performances were any less sincere. Instead, I learned a different technique:

Break the emotion down into its simplest form, connect that to a memory, then use that as my inspiration for approaching the scene. A technique called empathy and emotion. So it is true that experience does help with creativity - for some - but it isn’t the only way.

I feel like these references are seen every day. Grit is needed to validate success even though the success speaks for itself. But have we now reached a state of self that needs such continuous dopamine that success isn’t good enough unless it is forged from anguish?

Will we ever reach a point where our validation doesn’t come from our struggle?

Perhaps our greatest tragedy isn’t that artists suffer. It’s that we’ve learned to admire the suffering almost as much as the art.

This year, I attended Cannes Lions for the first time.

The experience was, in summary, everything, everywhere, all at once.

Illuminating, humbling, energising, exhausting, inspiring. A heady, extremely sweaty, café au lait and rosé fueled, sensory punch in the face.

But most refreshingly, it was a reminder of what’s actually important.

Of the enduring creative truth that remains, but often overlooked, when blinded by the shiny corporate window dressing of the Croisette.

My objective for the week was clear - be a sponge.

I threw myself in - absorbing the work, the programming, meet ups, meetings, parties, trying (and failing) to see friends - both in awe and overwhelmed by the pace and volume of ideas, insights and recommendations. All whilst feeling a familiar creep creeping of imposter syndrome as the days went by.

‘I should have been there, done that, met this person, organised this thing, shown up in this way etc etc’. I was stuck in a IRL LinkedIn nightmare where comparison was trying very hard to steal my joy.

By the end of the week, I could feel myself spiraling.

Not worthy. Not good enough. Not successful enough. Definitely terrible at my job. Hosting my own little pity-party-mid-life-existential-crisis in the South of France.

But on my final day, just as I was about to write myself off completely - I went to a session that thankfully gave my busy brain the creative resuscitation it desperately needed.

Speaking alongside fellow industry leaders Nils Lennard (Uncommon) and Franki Goodwin (Saatchi & Saatchi) on a panel discussing ‘Taste’, Justine Armour, Global Chief Creative Officer from US based creative agency 72andSunny, was asked how creatives can develop and nurture their own creativity.

It sounds dramatic, and the lack of sleep, marginal hangover and 35 degree heat probably (definitely) didn’t help - but her words hit me. Hard.

‘Live an interesting life’.

Goosebumps, lump in my throat, hard.

‘It’s the accumulation of everything you’ve ever been obsessed with - every life experience, your whole humanity, which becomes your intuition in the work.’

I’m not a Creative by trade, but conviction in my taste and intuition has always been central to how I work. My unique, individual experience, perspective and creative instincts provided clarity when the outside noise got louder, and confidence in rooms where my working style or approach challenged the status quo.

But somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten to live that interesting life. Sidetracked by growing extra-curricular responsibilities - AKA kids - and a never ending to-do list.

Despite being a vocal advocate of exactly this - it’s literally what Bornhub was built to celebrate - I’d completely neglected to recharge my own cultural battery.

Go back a few years, I was deep in the nerd category. A collector of books, records, magazines, clothes, art - the proud owner of every single copy of The Face, from 1980 onwards. Building a personal and curated treasure trove of references and inspiration that were individual to me - tactile and real in a way that social media could never. Feeding my taste signals like a carefully crafted superpower.

Cut to the present, mindless scrolling, ticking off the to-do list and never ending life admin had rounded my edges.

My references slowly narrowed, the things I ‘like’ simply references or recommendations from someone else’s social feed - borrowing other people’s taste. Slowly falling victim to the dreaded ‘tasteslop’.

I was stuck in the digital void.

I was the homogeneous blob. The homogenous blob was me.

Justine’s words were the reminder I needed to bring the outside in. Focusing on the things that fill your cup outside of work. Relationships, travel, books, films, learning a new skill…

To invest time in your interests. To stay curious and open-minded.

To sharpen your edges.

To become the reference.

Now I’m aware I’m not saying anything revolutionary.

But when life and work gets busy, and the seduction of the scroll feels too strong, this truth becomes all too easy to forget.

So let this be the reminder Justine’s words were to me.

‘Go and get nerdy about something that’s got absolutely nothing to do with advertising.

See everything, read everything.

Get fascinated by all kinds of art and culture.

Be in love; getting your heart broken is really good for getting into poetry.

The collisions of you and all those things become your creative taste.’

Make a life, not just a living.

I am not, and have never been, a hardcore Pitbull fan.

I know the choruses. I don’t know the verses. But I went to his show last Friday anyway, because silly felt like exactly what I needed.

What I didn’t expect was to leave with a fully formed opinion on two words I’ve spent years quietly cringing at in marketing meetings: authenticity and community.

They show up in every brand deck and “purpose statement” workshop, years of people trying to earn them and prove they have them.

And yet here was Pitbull, a 45-year old nostalgic hitmaker whose biggest songs are a decade old, doing both effortlessly with a sea of strangers in latex bald caps.

The night itself

The numbers alone are ridiculous.

70,000 people turned up, the highest attendance in BST Hyde Park history for a single show. Of those, 22,141 wore bald caps, officially setting the Guinness World Records for “largest gathering of people wearing bald caps”.

No one had ever attempted it before, which feels appropriately Pitbull. There was no record to beat, so he just made one up and then broke it.

When he was handed the certificate, Pitbull said: “Who would have thought a first-generation Cuban would be record-breaking and record-making?” And later: “Record breaking, record making, history in the making.”

Kesha came out for “Timber,” their first time performing it together in 13 years. Lil Jon brought “Gasolina” and “Crank That” energy that had zero business working in a London park at 8pm on a Friday.

And then completely unannounced, Pitbull covered Oasis’s “Wonderwall”, the unofficial anthem to England’s Worldcup run this summer.

I stood in a sea of bald strangers, arms around each other, screaming a Britpop song at a Cuban-American rapper, and thought: ok, this is what people mean when they say “community.”

Why it actually worked

The problem with authenticity and community as marketing buzzwords is that everyone wants the result.

They want loyal fans, user-generated content and a sense of belonging. They are less interested in the part where you have to look a bit silly before anyone else is in on the joke.

Pitbull didn’t decide to be “authentic” last Tuesday. The Mr.Worldwide costume didn’t start as a marketing stunt. It started as a meme of fans dressing up as him at his own shows. He could have ignored it but instead, he joined in.

That’s the atmosphere of the whole night. Nobody needed to look good. The TikToks in the run-up were full of women getting ready in bald caps and having the time of their lives. No filter, no “fit check”.

Once you were in a crowd, the costume gave you an instant way into conversations with strangers. Bald men found each other. Hen dos threw inflatable globes over the crowd. Dads had their kids on their shoulders shouting “Hotel Motel Holiday Inn”.

It was silly, but it was being silly together.

And Pitbull never tried to sand that side of him down.

There is something very marketing-brained about removing the weirdest edges of a brand until what is left is technically correct and completely forgettable. Pitbull has done the opposite. He has let the jokes, the memes and the Mr Worldwide mythology get louder.

The Wonderwall cover was part of that too. It felt less like part of some multi-year touring setlist and more like he had a “read of the room” and decided to give the crowd something they already loved.

That kind of relationship is hard to manufacture because it takes time. You have to let people play with what you have made, even when it gets a bit too silly.

What this night meant for me

I made my way to Hyde Park on the Jubilee line with a £7 bald cap and crooked aviators on. I was mortified for exactly one stop until I clocked three other people in my carriage in the same latex cap, and we just started laughing at each other.

It’s ok to be unserious once in a while. It might be the entire point.

So here’s my actual takeaway from the record breaking, record making night: authenticity isn’t a value on a slide. It’s what happens when you stop trying to make your thing look more dignified than it is.

Pitbull never stopped showing up as exactly who he is until 70,000 of us decided to show up as him too.

So after an evening of screaming my lungs out in 34 degree London heat, I can safely say, I am officially one of the baldies.

Dale.

This time next week, you’ll be by the pool, prosecco in hand. This time next week, you’ll be by the pool, prosecco in hand.

I repeated the line under my breath over and over. The wind beating against my face. Legs heavy. Neck stiff. Bones chilled beneath my thermals. Eyes laser focused on the back of my partner’s head, 40 feet in front of me. We’ve learnt I’m a better chaser than a leader. Ironic given my job.

We were 1.5 mountains into a three Munro hike. This would tot our Munro bagging total up to six.

BTW, a Munro is a Scottish mountain over 900 meters. Hike one and you’ve “bagged” it.

You’d think I’d be more prepared by now, but the panic-bought earmuffs and gloves from the Glenshee café shop two hours earlier suggest otherwise. My hands and ears were grateful. The rest of me was still learning just how cold and windy it gets at 3,000 feet.

The promise of lunch at the top - a cold, slightly smushed Beyond Burger with yellow mustard and a Diet Coke - kept me going. Turns out I’m incredibly easy to motivate: promise me a treat, and I’ll press on. And, of course, the thought of that glass of fizz on my holidays next week.

We reached the top of number three, elated. Snapped our traditional summit selfie. Hid behind some rocks for a snack.

By the time we got back to the car, our cheeks were red and stinging. A quick Google: wind burn. Cool.

I know, I know. I’m not really selling this yet.

But that’s the thing about hiking. There’s no glamour.

In fact, the princess in me still can’t quite believe that some of the best days I’ve had in the last two years have all been up a mountain. Yes, the same woman who’s fake-tanned since she was 14 now owns a camel pack, trek shoes, and poles (they’re pink, to be fair.)

If you’ve been on the internet in the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen the phrase “touch grass” - encouraging you to step away from your screen, log off, and spend time outdoors. What started as a reality check for the chronically online scaled into a campaign for The North Face before being officially added to the Cambridge Dictionary in 2025.

And whilst I love the sentiment - touching grass doesn’t actually ask anything of you - climbing a mountain does. And I’m here to persuade you to do it.

THE INCLINE

Every mountain is different, some are steep from the start, others are a slow meander to a scramble. Some surrounded by thick forest, some by rugged moors. They do, however, have one thing in common: they go up and down, and so must you.

The up is hard. There’s no getting away from it, and it doesn’t really get any easier. But what comes with the physical struggle is something unexpected. Because when you don’t want to think about your heavy legs, pinching feet and freezing face, your mind starts to wander further than your body.

You find you’ve finally got some time and space to go deep into you. The mountains don’t give you the opportunity to escape yourself - there’s no WiFi that high, no scrolling, no distracting yourself - you’ve got to see and confront your current state of mind head-on. Think the thoughts, feel the feelings. The mountain is listening. Steady. Solid. Calm.

I’ve come to embrace that unsettling feeling, when there’s nowhere for your thoughts to go but through you.

You might not find all the answers, but if you’re lucky, you’ll find some clarity.

THE PEAK

Whether you’re standing on Sentinel Dome at sunrise, freezing in the snow on Ben Lomond or soggy at the top of Scafell Pike the effect is the same. The sheer scale makes your world feel smaller right away.

Shout out John Muir who wrote: In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.

The things that consumed you at sea level suddenly don’t seem quite so all-encompassing. The mounting email inbox you can never get below 50 unread, the group chat WhatsApps you’ve read, mentally crafted a reply but never actually sent it, the block booked calendar that’s making it hard to see your own mum - all of that pressure and worry you’ve wrapped around yourself so tightly all start to loosen. Because the mountain doesn’t care. It existed long before you arrived, and it’ll still be there long after you leave. Genuinely, I find that fact so comforting. Nature will outlive us all.

THE DECLINE

And with that newfound clarity and perspective, you start to head back down to earth. This is often when the aches and pains really start to ripple through you, your head clear enough to finally tune into the rest of you.

Don’t let anyone tell you coming down is easy; it’s the part when your knees start to grind, your toes squeeze to the front of your boots, and your whole body feels heavier than before. It’s a push. And it’s usually the point I start to lose motivation. My snack supply’s depleted. I’ve had the big moment. Just get me back to the car.

But if you can push through that pain, things get fun. You’re out of your own head, and you’re noticing your surroundings more than ever, soaking in every step, talking about what you’ve just done, together.

And when you finally touch the car (as has become our tradition - yes, we like to time our hikes), cold, probably a bit wet, knackered, the sense of pride is unmatched. You got through, you kept going, you made it back to the start.

So no, it’s not glamorous, but in a world where we spend most of our time avoiding discomfort, ignoring ourselves and in constant motion, I think it’s necessary. We weren’t built to live our lives without challenge, without friction, without wilderness.

So sure, touch grass. But if you really want to feel something? Climb a mountain.

It’s not very often that I read something contemporary that can be considered folklore. A tale so vividly drawn that I can imagine the next generations whispering about it, in many moons to come.

I started reading Brom’s Slewfoot under a full moon, curled up in front of the roaring fireplace that holds court in my cottage living room.

It’s a deliciously dark fairy tale of pagan vs puritan.

Once I started, I devoured the story into the early hours. Until the fire faded to embers, and I was the one left burning.

It’s rare to read something that changes you.

That sparks something.

That stays with you.

Slewfoot’s protagonist, Abitha, was the spark I didn’t know I was missing.

A woman who, despite all she faces, has to decide whether to fight and fight again.

To refuse the easy path, even when it’s offered.

To choose bravery.

To dare to hope.

The uncomfortable truth.

As strategists, we all know bravery is often asked for. But when delivered, it’s hard to say yes to.

The uncomfortable truth is that the familiar or safe route is easier for clients to buy. And the even more uncomfortable truth? That’s not their fault. Bravery looks different when the work carries your name and your job on its back. Sometimes the industry itself sets the boundaries, and the guardrails clients work within are real. A good strategist knows the difference between a client who won’t and a client who genuinely can’t.

Most strategists understand that, but still quietly start to hope a little less with every pushback. Myself included.

That’s the real risk, not the rejected idea but the strategist who stops bringing them.

The privilege of a strategist is to be the bravest voice in the room, because that is what we are paid for. To delve into human truths and find the insight that sparks feeling and depth. To push brands toward something that may unsettle them, at first. Something that makes client services shift in their seats before the meeting even begins.

Not bravery for its own sake.

But bravery in service of impact.

To cut through culture.

To actually be felt.

The truth is, bravery is never easy and it isn’t always rewarded.

But neither is hope. And both are part of the job.

The lessons learned.

So, what can we learn from Slewfoot’s Abitha, but also folklore more broadly when it comes to holding onto hope when pitching a brave strategy?

The room goes quiet.

In folklore, the moment before everything changes is never comfortable. Jack doesn’t walk into the giant’s hall to applause. There’s a held breath. A stillness. The story turns on what happens next.

Learn to read the quiet in the room when you present brave work. The shifted glances. The pause before someone speaks. Most strategists learn to dread that moment and start unconsciously editing their work to avoid it.

But that silence is information. It means something landed that didn’t exist in the room before. A safe strategy gets nodded through. A brave one creates a moment of reckoning...for the client, for the brand, for everyone sitting around that table.

The job isn’t to fill that silence with reassurance. It’s to hold it long enough for the idea to take root. Truthfully, I’m still learning to sit in that silence. More often than not, I’m the one who breaks it.

When you lose hope

In folklore, resilience is rarely rewarded within the story itself. Characters suffer. They don’t always win. But the tale lives on for generations by shifting, evolving and finding a new form.

The job of strategy isn’t to present bravery once. It’s to make it inevitable. Sometimes that means reworking an idea until it becomes sellable. Sometimes the best thinking gets lost in the realm of Google Slides and that’s a genuine loss.

I’ve lost hope on ideas I still believe in. More than once. Opened old decks just to remind myself the idea existed.

But truly good ideas have a way of resurfacing. Reshaped. Reborn at the right moment, for a different brief, a bolder opportunity, a changed room.

Slewfoot is the best folktale for this lesson. Read it.

Because good ideas don’t die forever. Not if you don’t let them.

The key takeaway - the happy ending.

The true tales of folklore rarely have happy endings. Because that’s not the point.

It’s the journey to get there and the lesson learned.

So, if your bravest strategy doesn’t get signed off, if the work you loved is quietly buried, if you start to wonder whether it’s worth it…

remember Slewfoot’s Abitha.

When the journey is unsettling, dare to hope and lean into it… as maybe that’s the point.

“If it’s a witch they want. It’s a witch they shall get.”

Apparently the beautiful term ‘rawdogging’ has evolved to mean doing something without protection, distraction, or preparation. So I guess that means I can say I’ve been “rawdogging running for years”. Just me, my legs, and a catastrophic amount of unprocessed thoughts, and it’s become my secret to a peaceful brain.

It all started with my mum.

Doesn’t everything?

Her signature phrase when I was little, delivered with the energy of someone who had seen hardship (she hasn’t), was “it’s good to be bored”.

I know mum will never read this as she still calls the internet the “Yahoo thing”.

It drove me insane. In what world would smashing out “Motherlode” on the Sims or back-to-back Hannah Montana not be a better solution than being bored.

The thing is, back in the good old days, we weren’t really having to escape the entertainment, there were just loads of moments without it. Long car journeys, lots of queuing at the post office (not sure why I remember this as a prevalent moment in my childhood), waiting for the microwave for a full 90 seconds. And you know what, I guess our brains were regularly just found, pottering.

So mum, you were wrong then because I was always bored. But you’re right now. Because somewhere along the way I stopped being bored entirely, and my brain started quietly craving it.

So in the pesky pandemic I started running. For miles and miles. In the earliest hours of the day, preferably in the pitch black, where London was totally peaceful (apart from the other fellow weirdos like me - hi Ben Gateley).

One morning I didn’t charge my Garmin, my phone was out of battery and so I just left with nothing. It actually felt quite weird. Like I could turn at any point and no-one would understand where I was (sounding more unsafe than it was). But my brain was left alone for the first time since that microwave, and it started working.

Turns out it’s quite wild what your brain does when you finally leave it alone, unpestered by TikTok.

Each morning run, I’d work through my typical filing cabinet of worries: does my life-long friend not texting back mean she hates me, is the person I manage happy in their career, am I happy in mine, should I just move abroad and change up my entire life? You know the classics. But weirdly, after 2-3 hours the cabinet sort of clears. So I arrive at my desk and somehow feel ready to solve new challenges, and of course being dosed up on my favourite drug - endorphins.

But apparently there is some science in this. When you run without input, your brain drops to Default Mode Network (DMN). The mode associated with creativity, self reflection, and problem solving. It’s the same mode you hit just before you sleep, which is why I sometimes ask the helpful questions like “do you think we’ve made the right decision moving to New York” right before going to sleep. Nothing is competing for my brain at that moment, so the thoughts roam free.

If we’re constantly scrolling, we’re not actually tapping into DMN that regularly, limiting our moments of self reflection and creative thought.

It’s our job now to work harder to enter that mode. My advice? Attempt the rawdog run.

I know what you’ll all say, “Saz you don’t get it, I need music to get moving”.

Same. Genuinely, sometimes same.

I’m not here to be annoying about it. I have the same relationship with Strava as I did with Hinge - I deleted it. I said goodbye to the virtual world and hello to the non-existing chat-ups at the bar, re-downloaded it the moment I needed a bit of validation, stared at my kudos count when I uploaded a run the other day. It all feels good.

I’m just saying, every now and then, try it. A walk, a run, an extended moment without a screen. Even 20 minutes for you time-poor parents out there.

It’ll feel a bit weird. You’ll be confronted by your own brain, but your ability to sort through that filing cabinet will improve.

And you’ll arrive at your next moment much clearer.

Aah to be an Italian in London working in the creative industries.

What a blessing.

What a curse.

Or, how I would say it, “purtroppo, o per fortuna”.

Per fortuna, I’ve met some of the smartest, most down-to-earth, effortlessly cool people I’ve ever come across, right in this city. Actually, right at this agency. And that’s coming from someone who’s career started in the fashion industry in Milan - so the bar was already pretty high.

But, purtroppo, I’ve been dealing (and still am) with pretty intense impostor syndrome and constant brain fatigue on a daily basis. The kind where your brain never really switches off, and you’re always questioning if you’re actually good enough to be in the room. But at the same time your brain is never fully switched on? Does that make any sense?

I could give you a full on pros and cons list, two pages filled with why moving here has been the best decision I’ve ever made for myself and simultaneously why it’s the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life. And the weird part is, both things can be true at once.

But let’s start from the beginning.

I always wanted to move to London. I was 12yo the first time I told my parents I was going to move here and live my British dream. In my head, London was this idyllic place where the grass is greener and taking the double decker bus is a romantic experience - like I’m the main character in a Disney movie. A Shoreditch princess, waiting to be saved by her prince charming. And if you know me, you know who I pictured my prince to be…

*drumroll*

Harry Styles (I know, cliché) and even if that has not happened (as of yet) I do believe in slow burns. Manifestation takes time. I’m nothing if not patient (this is a lie).

My dream became my reality at 22yo, exactly 10 years later, BUT it came with a price - price being youwillneverbelong either in Italy nor in the UK, AND you will feel stupid in both languages - which is something not all the Brits will understand. Isn’t it great? Truly, a niche hobby. A personality trait, even.

The meme I see all the time is “imagine if my friends/co-workers in the UK knew how smart and funny I am in my first language”.

No words have ever been that real to me. I feel them deeply. As a matter of fact, I am quite funny in English too (I stand by this), but in a work setting the amount of times I find myself looking for the right word - searching for a “smarter way to say that”.. Trying to locate a synonym while staring into the nothingness in front of me aka the Principal Tower. It’s exhausting. Like my brain works at 0.5x speed.

And I know it’s my choice and I’m not looking for sympathy for this. I decided to move to this country and to work in my second language. Character building, they call it. I sometimes call it… humbling.

I know my fellow expats will understand me on this - it’s only 3 or 4 of us Europeans at the agency at the moment. Then we have our besties from the other hemisphere. And even if sometimes it does not feel like it, they do speak English. (Sally this one is for you, I will never forget when you asked me to “fix the deck” with your beautiful kiwi accent. I’m still not entirely sure what i fixed, but I gave it my all)

When I say you will never belong here nor there, I also meant that I feel that in some part I’m losing my roots, my Italianness. My friends in Italy tell me I’m too British - which I assume means I say “sorry” too much - and my local friends can clearly tell I’m not from here. Maybe because I got confused when they mentioned “Ally Pally” thinking it was a new colleague? Or because I have no business getting a pint at the airport before a flight. (I know, controversial. I’m working on it. Integration is a journey.)

We all fight with impostor syndrome in a creative space. But even more when you’re sense-checking everything that comes out of your mouth because it might be the most inaccurate and inappropriate thing a person has ever said. Asking 100 times a day “what does this mean?” or “can you explain this in another context?” - like a human pop-up notification no one can disable. Add that I’m neurospicy to all of this, and there you have it - the perfect mix.

It’s usually fine. People tend to be very nice in this country and they will explain things twice if I have questions. Sometimes three times, if I add a confused nod for dramatic effect.

But I can’t help but feel dumb at times. Not just dumb - misplaced. Like I’m permanently in translation. Like I will never really fit in and be fully part of one of the two countries. And when I’m back home, heaven forbid I forget a word in Italian and reach for it in English. Suddenly I’m the biggest disappointment of my bloodline. Or worse, a “show off”. choose your fighter.

So yes. I’m living my dream. My dream is ridiculously frustrating at times. My dream is also incredibly rewarding.

I work for a creative agency doing something I truly enjoy. I’ve built life-long friendships in this country. I’ve created a version of myself that exists somewhere between the subtitles. I love the life I built for myself and the version of myself this city allowed me to create. This freeing feeling of being whoever you want to be and not feeling judged for it. It is something truly London to me. We don’t get that in Italy that’s for sure, not even in the big cities like Milan or Rome. You shall forever be judged by the Italians.

But I do wonder, from time to time, if I will ever belong to a single place. Or if I will be forever split between places, not belonging to any of them. “Leaving home to go back home”. The most confusing sentence ever created, but a true story.

And if you’re a fellow expat and any of this feels a little too familiar - I see you.

Truly. You might feel like you don’t quite deserve the life you’ve built. Like you somehow slipped through the cracks and ended up at a table that wasn’t meant for you. Like everyone else is more articulate, more confident, or simply knows the difference between “sensitive” and “sensible” (I still get them mixed up all the time).

But the truth is, coming from a different background is exactly what makes you, you. It’s what gives you a different lens, a different voice. It’s your edge. Your slightly chaotic, but very resilient superpower. A strong little soldier, if you will. Maybe I don’t fully belong to either country anymore - but honestly, who really feels like they belong anywhere these days? It feels like part of the human experience now. We’re all just trying to find our place, something that feels like home.

I prefer to see it the Hannah Montana way - I’ll take the best of both worlds.

A little bit confused in each, but fluent enough to make it work.

And somehow, that feels like enough.

We want to be magnetic in culture.

We want to be culturally relevant.

We want to embed our brand in culture.

“Culture” has become an industry dirty word. The c-word of advertising. A cliché that’s lost any semblance of meaning after repeated hackneying. Truthfully, it’s the most important term for us to get right.

I am guilty of being laissez faire with those three phrases, but there are nuances behind them all. From my experience, they’ve become accepted by agencies and brands as catchall objectives to suggest:

a) Fame through talkability amongst consumers and media

b) Becoming “cool”

c) Becoming “culture” itself

Fame and coolness are separate metrics to measure (albeit “cool” is less quantifiable and more subjective). Whereas believing that a brand or product can become a representation of culture, or that they can shift culture entirely, is an arrogant assumption.

Cultures are systems. Formed of interconnected rituals and moments united by shared beliefs and ambitions. They build communities based around passion and purpose. Lifestyles exist and are fully embodied because of these systems. Religious beliefs, heritage and ethnicity, even being an Arsenal fan - almost all behavioural decisions are made in service of the culture that’s being inhabited.

Your brand, almost certainly, does not foster this. An isolated brand experience, viral comment, or well-performing campaign is not enough. No matter how many consumers or followers you have, the brand is not the magnet. The magnet is something far greater with a much stronger pull.

Take a look at Arsenal. It had been a while since I last saw a grown man cry in the street, but they made it happen.

It was down Shoreditch High Street at around 8pm on Saturday May 30th, just after Arsenal lost the Champion’s League Final. Sat on the kerb in his red and white jersey, I saw this man sobbing helplessly into his hands, surrounded by equally distraught fans comforting him through the pain. If anything was going to make a man show his emotions, of course, it would be footy. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who happens to support Chelsea, couldn’t have been happier to see the Gunners lose. “Inject it.”

Then on the following day, I faced the challenge of travelling through North London during Arsenal’s parade. Despite the crowds, I felt lucky to bear witness to masses of fans, who were still disappointed by Saturday’s results, come together in celebration of the club’s success in the Premier League the week before.

This is culture. It’s the flares lighting up Holloway Road in a red mist. It’s the chants echoing through TfL’s corridors. It’s wearing the same beer-soaked kit from the day before without taking it off. It’s the artist painting the parade on his roof as spectators cheer for his final piece. It’s the impromptu sound systems and vendors selling knock-off scarves. It’s the strangers stood arm in arm. It’s Arsenal haters commenting “LET IT ALLLL WORK OUT” across every related post. It’s celebrating together and it’s crying together.

Now I’m not even an Arsenal fan or a football follower at all (supporting England in the Euros and the World Cup is the extent of it), but it’s hard not to feel enamored by people caring so much. To see people be part of something so much bigger than yourself, to see genuine connection during a time where divisions feel deeper. There’s no wonder every brand is chomping at the bit to do a World Cup campaign.

As a brand, you often don’t choose the culture that you occupy. More often than not, the culture chooses you. McDonald’s didn’t decide that their drive thru would be where you’d go first after you pass your driving test. Wetherspoons didn’t advertise the tradition of having an airport pint with your full English breakfast before your morning flight. Pop Mart had no idea that LABUBU would become a global sensation. The power is in the hands of the people.

Not all brands are this lucky, so artificially embedding a brand into culture requires more than a one-off campaign. If cultures produce lifestyles, cultural relevance means having a consistent place within it. It means finding an ownable touchpoint within the system. In a sentence, this is what your brand’s goal should be:

Introduce product consumption behaviours which are adopted as rituals.

Guinness is a useful example of this framework. Pub culture is a long-established British tradition; Guinness found a way into it with tilt tests, singing pints, and schtick. Small rituals which are never that serious, but offer memorable moments within a broader cultural activity for people to participate in.

Grown men likely won’t cry over your brand, and that’s okay. Actually embedding your brand into culture isn’t about carrying heavy emotional weight, it’s about playing a role within the bigger story and finding a genuine reason to be there.

Consider what tension you’re solving, or what experience you can make more memorable. Ensure that you’re additive to the culture, and never extractive. Ultimately, be intentional with the c-word.

So if you’re a brand in search of cultural relevance, your role is not to be the parade, but to start conversations along the route.

Currently, a clip from Sex and the City is a trending sound on TikTok. The audio is taken from the scene where Carrie is hitting Big with her bouquet of flowers after he left her at the altar. The scene is burned in my memory - the petals falling onto the roadside as Carrie overflows with shame and fury, forcing Big back into his car and out of her sight. It was painful to watch for many reasons, but primarily because we knew it would happen. She knew she would never be enough for him. We watched Carrie for years as she meandered through this toxic relationship, bound to Big through lust and desire.

Whenever I bring up the iconic quartet, I ask, “who would you be out of the girls?” I am always faced with an astounding confirmation - nobody wants to be Carrie.

The star of the show? The writer with a wardrobe that could only be rivalled by Andy from The Devil Wears Prada?!

The reason is that even though she was the main character, she was the only one who showed a kink in the team’s impenetrable armour.

* Charlotte was curiosity. She saw the world with naive, doughy eyes, never afraid to follow the crowd in pursuit of discovery.

* Miranda was the rock. She thought in facts and was unwavering in her opinions. Her persona was gritty, almost warrior-like.

* Samantha was empowerment. From her inspiring career trajectory to her battle with cancer, there was nothing she couldn’t conquer.

Throughout the years, we watched these ladies grow, evolve, and, most importantly, learn from each other’s mistakes. Their characters changed drastically. By the end, Miranda and Charlotte both had children, and Samantha actually settled down. If that doesn’t show growth, I don’t know what does.

The only person who demonstrated not the slightest amount of change was Carrie. Her Achilles’ heel never changed. She folded whenever Big reintroduced himself into her life, whether she was in a relationship or not. And that’s why we’re all afraid to be Carrie. We’re afraid to admit that we aren’t capable of change.

There is something really profound in that. Though we’re all stubborn in our own ways, we all have something that gives us a sense of familiarity like none other, a sense of comfort. Unfortunately, Carrie found that in a someone, instead of a something or a somewhere.

I think that’s the problem. That’s what we fear, the thing we trust the most letting us down. To avoid that, we refuse to put ourselves in positions of vulnerability. Carrie wasn’t the strength, the curiosity, or the tenacity of the group - she was the vulnerability.

She allowed herself to be unequivocally defenceless. No matter how many times she was deceived, she still allowed her heart the chance to feel. That stance of openness is often seen as weak in our society, especially when it’s witnessed by those around you. But sometimes, being vulnerable and taking the risk is the only way we can learn who we really are.

So I guess the question is: are you really “not a Carrie,” or are you just not strong enough to take a chance and fail?

A couple of months ago, I was watching Instagram Reels, habitually skipping videos halfway through their runtime, until I came upon something that paralysed my scroll.

The Reel consisted of an AI generated scene in which a woman – hiking with a teal water bottle in hand – approached a fellow male hiker in possession of this same water bottle.

“Is that one of those water bottles that means you’re open to connection?”

This Reel was promoting an indie product that promised to build human connection. The consumer would buy one of these water bottles, carry it on their person out in the world, and it would signify to others that they could be approached (whether this was platonically or romantically was unclear).

I have since tried to find this Reel again but have had no luck. According to the Gemini, it was likely a trial ad to gauge consumer sentiment toward a conceptualised product.

So, the almighty water bottle of friendship is not real. Regardless of this, what is real is that someone felt there was a market for this sort of product; a product that facilitates human connection.

Such products are not alien to us as atomised individuals. Consider traffic light parties, where attendees wear wristbands (or some other paraphernalia) to signal whether they are single (green), taken (red), or something in between (amber). Consensus on traffic light parties, however, isn’t favourable. Whether it’s due to lack of courage or fear of perceived desperation, online communities do not think they truly work.

Another example of an explicit social signifier product is the “Ask Me About” t-shirt–those painful millennial calls for conversation which doubtfully work because, in an era in which most of our social interactions occur online, we simply aren’t very good at approaching one another. As one Redditor comments, “Never [sic] been in a random convo over a shirt.”

What we can learn from the failure of these products is that seeking connection for the sake of connection is futile. In other words, carrying around a water bottle that signals you are open to platonic or romantic connection doesn’t mean you will be approached by others with the same desire.

The issue at hand is the current crisis brands and people are facing alike: How do we build community, when we have lost our capacity to do so organically?

You might think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. Loneliness levels are through the roof; the number of third places – spaces people can commune outside of work or home – are on the decline; and, overall, reliance on social media has led to people focusing on short bursts of shallow connection as well as an incapacity to follow social etiquette in real life.

Personally, I regularly experience the perennial inability of young people to be empathetic, friendly, and community-minded. When I go to events alone, it is incredibly rare that anyone will introduce themselves to me. I’m always hearing testimonials from friends who are too scared to ask out the cute stranger at the bar. Overall, people stick in their safe, albeit complacent, social order. They are far too awkward to do otherwise.

Social media and the rampant individualism it nurtures has also led to alienation through the lens of energy conservation. That is, there is a sentiment amongst Gen Z that one ought to “expend energy only on that which serves you.” Interactions are transactional, and therefore not representative of true connection. Ostensibly, young people have become fixated on the idea that putting effort into being kind to random people (people who aren’t your friends, and can’t promise to have a positive impact on your life), isn’t a necessary task. Online, you’ll often see these kinds of ideas masquerading as self-care—putting yourself first. Looking after yourself.

When I was complaining about this trend to a friend, he retorted “no one owes you politeness.” While I disagree with my friend here – I think we all owe each other at least baseline decency – he is onto something.

What my friend was getting at, whether he realised it or not, is that Gen Z are quintessentially oriented against social etiquette. We, en masse, no longer think that you should ingratiate yourself with someone just because that’s the thing to do. Ultimately, we are a narcissistic generation: what we care about most is who we are and what we are interested in.

But, here’s the catch: this narcissism isn’t mutually exclusive with community.

The concept of human connection doesn’t unite people. What unites people are values, interests, passions, emotions. This is why the aforementioned water bottle of friendship would ultimately fail at its promise. A teal water bottle says nothing about what type of person you are, apart from the fact that you were eager enough to buy a fake product from an Instagram-based start-up. Canonically, water is not personal, it is essential to life.

Alternatively, when we say who we are, when we engage in brands and products that reflect our values and our interests, a space opens up to connect with others that share these coveted qualities.

I am a big fan of the brand Perfectly Imperfect – a small NYC based magazine/social media/events platform which hinges on the belief that our tastes can bring us together. Specifically, PI reflects the founder’s wish for online “places where the purpose [isn’t] clout or influence,” but “connecting over your shared interests.” While some of PI’s ventures are outwardly a-social (interviews with cultural figures or party reports), the PI.FYI app is inherently social and the brand organises meetups across the world. PI does a great job of making Gen Z’s preoccupation with “me” a way to engage with the greater “us.”

Overall, the message that we can garner from this, even when “this” includes asinine product concepts, is that brands can create community, but they have to do so strategically. Notably, brands must appeal to the inherent narcissism of the modern age if they want to connect people through their products.

We’re all too selfish to connect for the hell of it. Perfectly aligned to this contemporary narcissism is the invitation to connect based on shared interests and common values.

Community nowadays, whether we like it or not, must stem from “I.”

I’ve been working in Social Media for 12 glorious and tumultuous years. I’ve seen a lot of change in that time: organic to pay to play, the emergence of influence, the acquisition and subsequent murder of our beloved Twitter. But the one thing that has reigned supreme in all the change: disparaging comments about the industry I work in that, not always but a lot of the time, were inherently GENDERED.

The intern! The social girls! The dreaded “marketing girly”! Left, right, and centre, you work in this field, you better believe you’re going to catch strays for… let me check my notes… doing the most prolific comms role known to man????

I remember an old boss asking me why so many of my all female team were… well… women! Wouldn’t it be good to get some boys along? And whilst yes - there are an unbelievable amount of talented men in the social spaces, its funny how often they neglected the role of Social Media or Influence Manager and made a bee-line straight for the perceived ‘juicy’ stuff - “I was thinking I was more of a Creative Director, would I be able to transfer departments?” said one would-be candidate in an interview once. “I think my skillsets are just better suited to the Strategy team” Said another. One colleague had ‘ad-man’ in his bio when he was quite literally the community manager on Lynx.

This isn’t one great big slam dunk on all these talented individuals. I loved them all, in their own ways, and went on to hire a couple of them after some expectation setting. But all of this is to say: Social Media, Comms & PR roles have had their fair share of dismissal and misogyny, despite their pivotal role in the marketing and advertising ecosystem.

In generalisation so often lies a nugget of the truth: despite the prominence and necessity of these roles, they are the quickest to get diminished by the big bad ad daddy’s. And also, for some reason, that guy you went to school with who insists on commenting ‘give the intern a raise’ on a multi million pound company’s nuanced, hilarious, and well shot product launch.

I once sat through a talk at Ad Week where a (still) pretty prominent industry figure waxed lyrical about how social is a ‘pink-collar job’. Shudder.

But recently, there has been something lurking in the water.

Suddenly, job boards are being inundated with Growth and GTM roles. The marketing space is being flooded with ‘engineer’ jobs: content engineers, brand engineers, MARKETING ENGINEERS. What are these newfandangled roles in a pretty established sector?

Well, The Fast Company reported on this masculinisation, citing the now viral MirandaDoesBrand TikTok that called out the marketing industry rapidly rebranding so ‘boys can do it too’.

Ultimately, the theory is this: AI has made coding so accessible that anyone can do it, so roles that typically read more ‘male coded’ are in jeopardy. This leads them to seek seemingly more stable industries in the wake of AI: apparently, this is creativity and comms. Whilst AI isn’t ignoring these fields, there is a much less obvious instant cannibalisation. The role rebrands are seemingly a way to cross pollinate from more ‘technical’ corporate jobs and for some reason give them a bit more gravitas.

Miranda reckons this is history repeating itself. Before the 1980s personal computer boom, the job of ‘programming’ was typically held by women, seen as a soft skill whilst men did the hard work of building the machines. But once the machine was mass accessible, the industry realised programming was where the money was, and programming became the software engineer role. “It was feminised when it was clerical, masculinised when it became high status”. Sounds eerily familiar, dontyathink?

But in the face of adversity, we rally. The once marketing girlies (I petitioned to end this infantilisation the moment it reared its head but unfortunately misogyny is a disease that permeates everything) have been due a rebrand worth the weight of what they bring to the table for quite some time. And therefore, I’ve never been happier to be given the gift of an Instagram DM from my friend Sarah of a post by @Betches declaring our new catch all: WOMEN IN SPAM.

What is a woman in SPAM you ask?

SOCIAL

PR

ADVERTISING

MARKETING

The creative big sister of women in STEM. The gravitas and swagger worthy of the women who built this industry brick by brick.

The name worthy of the jobs we all wanted growing up watching Sex and City, Mad Men, 13 Going on 30, What Women Want, Ugly Betty, The Devil’s Wears Prada and Absolutely Fabulous.

The claw clipped and creative angels who have been making beautiful things happen since this industry began. These are not GIRLS and all the silliness and foils that categorisation seems to suggest, but the WOMEN who walk head first into problem solving, sell and scale strategy, and curate creative like no tomorrow.

Whilst AI’s osmosis will forever be both a real time and existential threat, there is the inherent taste, cultural understanding, humour and wit that has long been the terrain of our people. Our skillsets are in high demand - it’s no wonder those in the lagging industries are looking for a new home under our well designed wings.

I know what you’re thinking. Are we girl-bossing too close to the sun with this one? (Don’t get me started on the whole girl boss thing,I really will go insane).

I really don’t want this to be Mrs. Feminism 101, nor do I want to downplay the very real gripes and pitfalls this industry places on women. But the fervour this simple entrant to our shared lexicon has generated in the 24 hours since I first heard it has to count for something. A joint frustration we can all relate to. A slight embarrassment when explaining your role to your mum’s best friend at Christmas. A cutesification of the very real ins and outs of the job to make it palatable to your pals. We let this important part of ourselves be dumbed down or derogated, whilst the SERIOUS work got championed in rooms we couldn’t even get into until pretty recently (I’m looking at you Cannes 💋).

So, whilst I welcome the attention and flowers on our industry, however overdue, and seek any and all support in how we survive creative industries in the wake of AI armageddon, I will be wearing my SPAM badge with pride.

I will spam the SPAM message far and wide.

I will never let SPAM be left on the shelf again.

Because what we do should always have been heralded as aspirational and important, not just because there’s now an opportunity to masculinise it.

To all those who worship at the altar of our patron saint Samantha Jones, welcome to our newly formed club.

Much like the real SPAM, we will never expire.

I have been passed around in my time.

Prior to joining Born I worked as a bar manager (terrible), a cocktail bartender (better), a pub bartender (best job in the world when they’ve got Sky Sports on all day) and a football photographer (genuinely worst one of the bunch). I had a brief stint as a motion designer at another agency but it doesn’t really count because I never passed probation which means actually really: Born was my first proper job.

I joined self-trained and lied through my teeth about my experience. I leave much more visibly haggard but also genuinely smarter, having learnt from and been surrounded by so many really talented people.

In an attempt to exorcise my demons and break-up with my job of (almost) 5 years (longer than all but 1 of my relationships) ((which thankfully is still intact)) I wanted to try and pull together three crucial lessons I learnt across my time at Born. I hope there is some wisdom in there amongst the nonsense.

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Everyone is allowed to be creative (even client services)

Sometimes we Creatives can be a bit touchy about who comes up with the work. After all, we get paid to do it. So we inherently recoil when somebody else comes along and attempts to stick their flag in our ground (shoutout to the Strategy team).

However, in my last 5ish years I’ve decided to treat this collective willingness to be Creative as a perk, not a downside.

Everyone’s job can, at some point or another, feel isolating and lonely - one time at school I knew a kid who tried to build a whole house on his own and sometimes it really does feel like that (he only ever finished one wall about 3 foot high). Therefore, everyone wanting to do your job for you is nothing but a benefit. You would not believe the ideas that get thrown out by the ones you least expect, and the best part of the whole thing is that in 4 months time everyone’s forgotten whose idea is whose and you get to pretend they were yours the entire time anyway. It’s the nuts.

So, if you’re a Creative I implore you to lower the gates and let the common folk in, and if you’re Client Services - keep on suggesting “annoying, silly, out of budget and un-strategic” ideas. They’re normally actually pretty good.

Execution-based roles are everything

Like Sisyphus rolling that boulder, Executioners (crazy title) are absolutely everything when it comes to your project. The drive and determination that shines in all of us to create good work shines brightest within the team who are head down and pushing and making it every single day. They are invaluable to the process and make the biggest mark when brought in early and consistently collaborated with.

The makers also often understand the work best. Their brains work on similar frequencies - they can see things before they exist. This might sound like the most obvious point ever made but I truly believe they’re the most important part of our entire workflow. Without them my work is worth jack shit. It’s nothing more than some sentences on blank slides.

That’s never going to win any awards.

Most people are just as scared too (fake it till you make it)

I remember ages ago when I was still a Motion Designer I got nominated to stand up and do a quick presentation for Guinness. Me and three others had to come up with an idea and pitch it to the team in just a 5 minute segment. I was absolutely terrified - my hands were shaking, my voice was cracking, my arse was sweating.

Then, suddenly, it was over.

I spoke to people afterwards, confiding in them just how scared I was, to which all of them replied that they’d never have known. I couldn’t understand why my very physically-obvious fear hadn’t translated to the audience until I realised one thing: everyone is just as scared as you are.

Some people are obviously better at hiding it than others, but we all get equally nervous and stressed when in stressful situations. You are not an outlier or less-capable for feeling stressed or nervous or scared or worried. Everyone is feeling it and they’re feeling it most of the time. Right to the very top.

It’s important then to give yourself some grace and sit in your emotions. To acknowledge and accept them. Then to look around the room at everyone else and realise everyone else feels like that too. And that’s alright.

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Upon reflection, when trying to recount valuable lessons I’ve learnt, I was initially a little shocked at how few of them were related to the day to day doing of my role.

Like, why weren’t they more actionable lessons such as “always make a copy of your Google Slides deck before you send it to the client with your profanities and brain dumps littered in the comment section”? It’s an important lesson, for sure, but it’s an individual one.

Individual skills and lessons are learnt day to day whilst, for example, head down in a ,deck desperately trying to find a reference GIF that’s as good as the rest of your peers (Yoann you are the bane of my life). But the stuff that’s actually felt important always came out of working as a full team.

And so, all of my lessons are somewhat themed around that.

Togetherness, empathy, collective work.

It’s so cliche and pastiche but that is genuinely what makes it worth dragging yourself in every day.

I’ve been at Born for 5 years (well not quite but who’s counting? Kate?) and that’s what’s always rung true and always stuck out.

Collaboration is key.

Who’d have thought that the LinkedInfluencers would be right.

When people hear I once ‘starred’ in a Channel 4 reality show, they usually assume one of two things - that it was either glamorous or horrifically mortifying.

Truth is, it was actually neither.

It was properly fun and ridiculously surreal… but looking back, I also realise how unexpectedly insightful it was. As a creative, it was quite something to have a front row seat to how a large-scale TV production works, all whilst living inside it for five days.

So what was the show called, I hear you ask?

Well… ahem. It was called ‘Five Guys a Week’ (yes, I see you smirking).

The premise was simple. Five strangers move into your house, you get to know them, eliminate one each day until you’re left with, as they call it, “your perfect match.”

But here’s the thing.

What I didn’t realise when I said yes was this. I wasn’t just signing up for a dating show. I was actually stepping into a crash course in storytelling, production, performance and people - which, let’s be honest, turned out to be far more useful than any fame-hunting boyfriend.

So why am I telling you all of this?

Because it’s one of those experiences that’s stayed with me. I sometimes get asked if I regret doing it, and the answer truly, honestly, is no. If anything, it reinforced something I really believe in: say yes to things that scare you a bit. You never quite know what you might discover along the way.

So, in the spirit of that, here are some of the things it taught me….

1. Say yes, even when your instinct is to run

A production company reached out shortly after my divorce. I genuinely thought it was a joke. But I was in a phase of life where I was saying yes to things and seeing where they took me so, naturally, I went along with it.

Six months later, I’m told I’m in the final three being considered for the pilot show. A camera crew is in my house filming test footage…and a few weeks after that, I get the call saying I’ve been chosen. (oh shit.)

That’s the moment everything in me wanted to back out.

But something in my gut told me to go with it (plus they were offering to pay for my house move costs - including packing and unpacking - as filming was scheduled the week before. Now if that isn’t an incentive, I don’t know what is.)

Not long after, my house was being rigged with cameras, production trucks were outside, and containers were set up along the street. It was surreal, slightly terrifying, and also absolutely brilliant.

Some of the best things I’ve done have started with that slightly uneasy feeling of “what am I getting myself into?” And if nothing else, I like the idea of collecting stories I’ll still be telling from a rocking chair one day. This is definitely one of them.

2. Nothing is accidental, everything is crafted

Watching my home turn into a TV set was fascinating.

Art directors came in and redressed rooms so they would look better on camera (including some questionable red cushions in my bedroom that I’m still not over). Shelving was installed to hide cameras. Lighting was constantly being adjusted. There were around 30 people involved in making it all work.

Even the casting followed that same thinking. I’d spent ages describing my “type”, thinking they’d find me my perfect match. Instead, I was introduced to five completely different personalities.

At first I thought, have they listened to anything I said?

Then I realised it wasn’t about that. It was about creating a story that would work on screen.

Case in point: by the time we got down to the final two, I had a bit of a moment. I didn’t particularly fancy either of them, and suddenly thought… why am I picking someone just because they’re here?

So I texted the producer from my bedroom (they were in the production truck outside) and pitched what I thought was quite a strong feminist ending: “What if I just choose myself?”

The reply came back fairly quickly: “Nice idea, Amy. But this is a pilot. You need to pick someone.”

Fair enough.

But it did make the point very clear. This wasn’t about real life playing out naturally. It was about shaping something that made sense as a story.

And that’s something we as creatives are doing all the time - making choices in service of the story, not just the moment.

3. Direction shapes the outcome

People always ask if it was real.

The conversations were real. But they were definitely ‘guided.’

Every so often I’d get pulled aside for what was called a “mic check”, which was really a quick chat with a producer, out of earshot from the lads, about what had just happened and how I felt about it. They might suggest a different way of looking at something, or encourage me to explore a thought a bit further.

Then I’d go back into the room and carry on.

It wasn’t scripted, but it was shaped.

And I actually had quite a lot of fun with that. At some point, I started to see it as a bit of an acting job - being placed into moments to help move things along.

It made me realise how much good direction is about influence rather than instruction. You’re not telling people exactly what to say; you’re helping them get somewhere better.

4. Energy is contagious

One of the most interesting things I noticed was during the one-to-camera interviews.

The way questions were asked had a direct impact on how I answered. If the producer was upbeat, I was upbeat. If they slowed things down, I naturally followed.

Simple, but it stuck.

I use that all the time now, whether I’m directing talent, running a meeting, or presenting. The energy you bring into a space tends to come back to you.

5. Rapport makes everything better

Filming was intense. Long days, cameras everywhere, and not much freedom to just wander around my own house. (shout out for the top notch catering though).

There were also moments where I’d spend a good couple of hours doing absolutely nothing, essentially a prisoner in my own bedroom, while action was unfolding downstairs. Then suddenly I’d be called in and expected to pick things up straight away.

What made all of that work was the people.

There were loads of crew members coming in and out throughout the day, all doing different jobs. The ones who took the time to build a bit of rapport made everything feel easier.

It also made me really appreciate how many people it takes to make something like that happen. Everyone has a role, and when it clicks, it really clicks.

That’s something I try to carry into every shoot now.

6. Be ruthless with the edit

We filmed for five days. The final programme was one hour.

Whole scenes didn’t make it in. Things I thought would definitely be included were cut.

Not because they weren’t good, but because they didn’t serve the story.

That was a big creative lesson for me.

You can’t hold onto something just because you like it or because you’ve spent time on it. If it doesn’t make the final piece better, it needs to go.

Easier said than done, but necessary.

7. Being “on” is a skill

Two years after filming, the show aired and I ended up doing a week of press. Newspapers, radio, and a slightly surreal appearance on ITV’s This Morning.

What struck me was how quickly everything happens. You get a quick run-through, and then suddenly you’re live.

Watching seasoned presenters switch from chatting normally to being completely “on” the second the cameras rolled was fascinating. It’s not about being fake; it’s about being able to focus, deliver, and show up when it counts.

That really stayed with me. Because in our world, there are moments like that too - pitches, presentations, big meetings - where you don’t get multiple takes. You just have to be ready.

8. Regret is worse than embarrassment

It’s not something I ever planned to do, and it’s definitely not for everyone.

But it gave me a completely different perspective, and a lot of insight I still use today.

And no regrets.

Also, a very solid story for when I’m 99.

The unexpected takeaway

Needless to say, I didn’t find the love of my life on that show.

But I did come away with something more useful. A better understanding of storytelling, of people, and of how teams come together to make something work.

And I think that’s why it’s stuck with me.

It wasn’t just a random, slightly chaotic life experience. It was one of those moments that quietly shapes how you see things afterwards - how you direct, how you collaborate, how you make decisions.

So if something comes your way that feels slightly unexpected, slightly uncomfortable, and not entirely on plan…

Say yes.

You never quite know what it might turn into.

The week prior, I ran the Manchester marathon in 2 hours 49 minutes. And I think you should care.

Not because running 4 minutes per kilometer for 42km, inadvertently setting a half marathon PB and showing pure, unadulterated grit to hang on in the final 5km is impressive (it is, but that’s not the point).

You should care because I cared. Deeply.

Six months of going all-in, through illness, inconvenience, and the slow creep of maranoia in the final few weeks. I made my sub-2:50 goal public too, albeit slightly downplayed. That way, I had just enough wiggle room to protect myself if it all went wrong.

Because that’s the instinct, isn’t it? I can’t fail if I never really cared anyway.

I’m a pretty laid-back person. I don’t get visibly anxious or angry, excited or impassioned. It’s both a superpower and a character flaw. Because on the surface, laid-back looks a lot like apathy. “Not being interested in or enthusiastic about something.”

Growing up, that was cool. The “too cool to try” archetype was everywhere. Dropped from the lacrosse team? Didn’t care anyway. Got dumped? Whatever. Total loser. The details might skew slightly ‘American High School’ in my head, but we all knew the apathetic types roaming the corridors. You’re probably thinking of one now.

It’s one of the oldest self-protection techniques going. If you don’t care, you can’t fail. Or at least, you can pretend you didn’t.

The problem is, you also can’t really succeed.

Because the things I did care about - football, grades, the odd fleeting ambition, they mattered. And when they didn’t go well, it showed. Quiet frustration, the occasional outburst, a missed sitter that somehow felt like it meant more than it did. Caring has a way of surfacing, whether you like it or not.

Somewhere in early adulthood, I realised something simple. The opinions that mattered came from people who cared about me. And those people tended to care about the things that made me happy.

Running is now one of those things.

One of my close friends put it best, after I’d explained a particularly long weekend run:

“I’m happy it makes you less not-happy”

Poetry.

Caring feels exposing at first. Declaring a goal, putting a number on it, letting people in on something you might not achieve, strips away the safety net. You can’t hide behind irony or underplay it after the fact. You either did it, or you didn’t.

And in the final 10km, when things start to wobble and the maths gets uncomfortably real (and boy oh boy did it), that’s exactly what you’re confronted with. Not just whether you’ll hit your goal, but whether you were willing to risk missing it in the first place.

That’s the bit we tend to avoid.

We hedge. We soften. We say “we’ll see how it goes” so we’ve got an exit plan if it doesn’t.

But all that really does is cap the upside. Apathy protects you, but it also limits you. And I think, culturally, we’re starting to realise that.

Cool used to be detachment. Now it’s devotion. People who are deeply, sometimes strangely invested in something (the goth renaissance, being a non-performative book boy, Clarkson’s Farmophiles etc), they feel far more interesting than those floating above it all pretending not to care about anything. Even Timothee Chalamet is at it.

I could go on about how this shows up in the creative industry. Back the bold ideas you actually care about, instead of defaulting to the safer option you can distance yourself from if it doesn’t land. That’s still apathy. Just in a nicer, presumably less sweaty outfit.

To fully commit, and to do so publicly, is to lay it all bare. It tests you. It shows you where your ceiling actually is, not where you’ve quietly placed it to stay comfortable.

Nevermind “what if I fail?” What about “what if I never really tried?”

So yes, I ran 2:49.

More importantly, I cared enough to find out if I could. And I think that’s pretty cool.

Picture me, in an interagency meeting, proudly brandishing some custom made condoms to talk about what was - if I’m being humble - one of the best campaigns I’ve ever come up with in my life. I can’t show you, and all I can tell you is that it centred around S-E-X.

The language, the visuals, all borrowed from the world of getting hot-and-heavy. For my brief in particular, it made something arguably unsexy, suddenly very hard to ignore (in my humble creative opinion).

But there must be something in the water, as it turns out I’m not the only one thinking of some afternoon delight in the middle of the work day. We’re all at it like rabbits - and by ‘it’ I mean, selling in ideas that are bordering on NSFW. And to be entirely honest with you. I fucking love it.

I’ve seen lots of sexy work out in the wild. Slutty copy, overly suggestive art direction, innuendos - and I want more of it. Why? Because it tells me that brands are getting braver, and that’s every creative’s wet dream.

Sex isn’t the taboo subject it once was. Sexual wellness brands are getting cooler, look at the likes of The Oh Collective and Maude. You’ve got genuinely aesthetic sex toys on the shelves of Selfridges, no longer behind that weird curtain at the back of Ann Summers.

Quinn has also taken off and become more mainstream, reeling in ‘of the moment’ celebrities to narrate such as Rob Rausch from Traitors US and Jamie Campbell Bower from Stranger Things. It feels less hidden smut, and more cultural, even donning giant branded headphones so the world knows exactly what you listen to. Even Harry Styles is trying to get the masses off (as if he wasn’t already) via Pleasing. And it would be remiss of me not to mention BornHub, our Substack baby born out of innuendos and dodgy websites.

We’re in a new era of sex-positivity. This has trickled down to other brands, who are finally opening their eyes to the fact that sex does indeed still sell.

But let’s make clear I’m not talking about the old ad days of misogyny and female sex appeal trying to reel in male customers - I’m talking about the act itself, the art direction, the innuendos - when used correctly feel surprisingly witty, not lewd.

But what does “done right” feel like?

Humour feels like a key factor in a lot of the sexy work I’ve seen out in the wild. Whether that’s through punny copy like “Do Hand Stuff” to talk about drawing on an iPad, or borrowing the visuals and language of a sex toy ad to flog a hearing aid. The work is fun, it’s not taking itself too seriously - it sits safely in the realms of playful rather than feeling crass.

Fun feels key here too, not in the work itself but in the people that made it. Because not only was my idea good (can you hear the horn i’m tooting?), but it’s also the most fun I’ve had building out an idea in a really long time (clients I hate to break it to you, but when we say ‘this brief was so fun’, sometimes we’re lying). And when your creatives are having fun, it really shows. I didn’t feel reigned in, I felt like I was going to show the client something really provocative and that meant that all my excitement for the development of the idea really showed up in the work. I was positively fizzing with excitement pre, during, and post meeting. That’s how you want your creatives to feel, because that’s great work.

Perhaps one of my faves recently has been OMHU, a sofa brand who flypostered Paris with photos of… “explicit imprints” in their sofas. Not just for fun, but to talk about how their sofas have ‘valentines day proof covers” that are washable and changeable. Now sure, they could have illustrated this through a spilt glass of red wine on the sofa, or a muddy puppy - but would I be writing Substacks about that? Probably not.

They took the braver option for the sake of memorability and standing out. Not only that, it’s not sexy for the sake of it, they’ve linked it to their product proof point. It’s smart. And it’s surprising, like an 18+ campaign to get people to register to vote. It’s so much more effective and stand out than what you usually see around elections. And although an oldie, this one has been living in my head rent free since. Voting is HOT AF, so is this campaign.

These ideas are all heavily crafted too. There have been deliberate choices around art direction, visual treatment, copy. Work that feels braver or more scary also requires more rigour to make sure it’s right. It’s harder than it looks, but there’s pay off.

But work like this doesn’t land in half measures, it only works if you’re willing to be bold and unapologetic. You can’t leverage sex as a selling point to your creative if you’re trying to water it down to avoid ruffling feathers. Brand bravery, when done right, feels like authenticity, and sex feels human. This step into sexy work feels exciting, because it opens up the door for more bravery on the whole.

So when your next brief comes in - I urge you to lie back and think of… good creative.

‘You’re too nice’ is feedback I’ve received on more than one occasion in my career.

Too nice as a leader.

Too nice to work in a certain role or sector.

Too nice to people that - subjectively - don’t deserve it.

At school, the word ‘nice’ was banned as an adjective. Considered lazy, unimaginative and uninteresting. So being referred to as ‘nice’ - even without the aforementioned ‘too’ - felt like an insult - a small chip chipping away at my personality and as a by-product, my self-esteem.

Was I bland? Boring? Weak? Forgettable? A pushover?

A recent ChatGPT enabled birth chart reading (Pisces Sun, Virgo Moon, Pisces Rising - get to know) was the catalyst for a reset in my perspective. A much needed reminder that actually being ‘nice’ isn’t something to be ashamed of or shy away from, particularly at work. There is power in the understated.

I grew up with a pretty solid sense of self. I knew who I was and I like the grown up I’ve become. Confident in my instinct and taste, my 13 year old self who devoured books, magazines, films and music would be proud. Shout out to my Dad, i-D, Vogue, Indie Sleaze, Kirsten Dunst and Sofia Coppola for the cultural education.

So why did it take a ChatGPT generated birth chart to remind me of that? That perhaps being ‘nice’ was something to own and be proud of, rather than making me feel less than?

Facts - I’m a chronic people pleaser and perfectionist. An enneagram 3 - IYKYK - ambitious, competitive, with a driving desire to feel ‘valuable’ and validated. Things I work hard on every day to funnel into positive outcomes, rather than slip into a crippling confidence crisis and some major anxiety. Which definitely happens more often than I’d like to admit.

And I’ve weathered some storms in my 39 years.

I’m the eldest daughter - TikTok has taken me into many corners of therapy-tok to explain what this means - and my mum died when I was six. Being ‘brave’ and holding in my emotions became the norm. Never be difficult, too much, or remind other people they are sad. Be solid, easy, ‘happy’.

This was followed by the ‘dark years’, a period of time living with someone who did all they could to live up to the ‘evil stepmother’ stereotype. I learnt to make my emotions small to make other people feel comfortable. Being ‘perfect’ or ‘nice’ to uphold the legacy of someone I didn’t ever get the chance to know, or be invisible to someone who didn’t want to have me around.

I also spent the first 15 years of my career working in Fashion PR. Not an industry known for being nice. I could start a separate Substack just dishing the dirt on the bad behaviour I experienced most days. A phone call on Christmas day from a show sponsor to scream at me about a table - a fucking TABLE - was a highlight. Or the time I had to lock myself in my room in Milan (tiny violin) because my two bosses were having the mother of all fights.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

When I finally decided enough was enough, my boss - who had always really struggled to square away my ‘niceness’ with the industry - told the team I was leaving to get married and have a baby. Because ‘nice’ girls just wanted that domestic life. It wasn’t remotely true, and problematic on so many levels. Her way of making me make sense, rather than admit there were some deeply unhinged and toxic things happening in her business - and the industry as a whole.

10+ years later, I am married with kids, but I’ve struggled with the automatic assumptions that often come with motherhood. My god, I adore my children, but being a mum doesn’t come easy for me. I’m certainly not a natural or innately maternal and that side of my life often feels in direct conflict with my career. Admitting that publicly… definitely not nice.

The sunshine from these particular storms is the resilience you gain, plus a little life lesson learned perspective.

But ‘nice’ also becomes the shop window, a pleasant, welcoming front door that is firmly locked to hide your internal house of horrors. A default setting even when you feel pissed off, frustrated or sad.

Nice is never the whole story.

But as I approach the end of my thirties, I’ve come to the delayed realisation that I’m done feeling bad about being ‘nice’ - embracing the negativity or perception around my ‘niceness’ to feed my ambition and goals. Being underestimated is a powerful motivator.

Because the immediate assumption of being ‘nice’ at work or in leadership often means you’re ‘soft or weak. Incapable of having difficult conversations, making tough decisions or being an effective, clear communicator.

I would argue the opposite. That people who are ‘nice’ are usually pretty excellent at their jobs.

Yes, I spend a lot of time investing in building and investing in my relationships with people. But that effort is rewarded and reciprocated tenfold. Yes, I probably (definitely) care too much - but that care, passion and grit means my standards and expectations are high, but the goal posts are very clearly marked.

Most importantly, through being ‘nice’- I’ve earned and built trust. And trust is essential for bravery and growth. For your own and the people you lead. It’s permission to take risks, experiment, stretch, try new things, or challenge the status quo.

And for the record, being ‘nice’, doesn’t mean being a ‘yes’ person. It’s about creating a safe space for people to deliver their best work, encouraging them to think what’s next, what’s possible, to fail, to try again. Less yes, more yes, and…

And that’s the whole point. These (often lazy) labels or descriptors we use for ourselves or others are in fact stopping us from looking at the whole messy, contradictory picture. Two things can be possible at once.

Just because you’re nice, you can also be angry. You can be compassionate but also direct. You can care ‘too much’, but also be calm and level headed. A mother and ambitious.

You are in fact not defined by the way others perceive you, the assumptions they make because of a surface level interaction, or that personality test you took on the internet.

The complexity is what makes us human. And in my humble opinion, the best leaders are the ones who can wear their humanity with humility and pride.

In a world that actively and increasingly rewards and platforms controversial, polarising, and divisive opinions - being ‘nice’ is at a premium. And I’m leaning in.

But if you just think I’m ‘nice’, you don’t really know me at all.

Who knows what it was that stuck to my developing frontal lobe to make me the way I am?

There are some quite obvious through lines: my media diet is, and has always been, whatever the Criterion Closet equivalent is for 90s Romcoms and High School Dramas. From the tame (Wild Child) to the disturbed (Jawbreaker), I hold a flame as the patron saint of teenage angst. Most of my world view and fashion sense can be boiled down to a VHS tape (age jumpscare) of Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion, recorded on a VCR.

A spell of not good Mental Health™️at college saw me either staying up until 4 in the morning watching Greg Araki and Todd Solondz movies, or out trying to recreate Parker Posey’s life in Party Girl - the first half, though thankfully, I did become a born again librarian á la Parker, consuming just as much baba ganoush in the process. Access to content I shouldn’t have consumed at formative ages made me who I am today.

I never did catch Twilight, but thanks to 10 Things I Hate About You, I knew I wanted a Prada Backpack from the age of 7. Twenty years later, I had saved up enough to buy one.

It didn’t stop with movie madness. Hours playing The Sims: Hot Date lay the foundations for the comfort I find in red pleather booths in bars or luxuriating in hot tubs.

Friday nights in the late 90’s were often marked by my Mum fresh off the train from central, taking us to the home of weekends: TGIFridays to be precise. Whose to say whether this is why I own a Tiffany lampshade and love to pound Martinis as an adult?

What I can say though, is this: until very, very recently, I always felt entirely in control of my taste, both in what I sought out and what came to me. The two intertwined, as all interests deepened. The band got me to the festival, the festival got me to my new obsessions.

I always felt lucky I had a strong sense of self, and whilst any images from my school years will testify that I wasn’t immune to trying on every trend for size and to an extreme (yellow skinny jeans, backcombed hair, a lot of face metal), I felt like a very active participant in researching my interests, established or co-opted.

I knew the trap algorithms were luring me into. Being so in the Matrix that I’ve spent a decade working in Social meant I felt pretty clued up on what was following me around the internet, predestined to become my taste, versus what I had found knew to be true to myself.

But the other day I sat scrolling through my Spotify, sick of listening to the same 10 artists for the last 3 months, and had a haunting realisation I’d stopped actively searching for things. I had the intrusive thought that Spotify should be doing a better job surfacing up my new favourite band, by virtue of the fact I had spent 15 years stuffing it with personal data about myself. Why did I want to outsource the very intrigue and interests that have made me who I am today? Why did I level that personal responsibility of art and creativity on a machine?

And because Spotify knows me so well, as if by magic a new AI feature arrived. “Meet My New Favourite Artist” - a cheerful playlist artwork on the homage page baiting me in. Curious, I clicked. Against my better judgement allowed it to create me a ‘deep dive of an artist you haven’t explored yet’.

I acquiesced. And I balked. 30 seconds of listening to my on paper perfect match and I was revolted. Maybe part of it was my horrific stubbornness, wanting to prove the evil robots wrong. But was this really what fifteen years of loyal listening had boiled down to? Well, the data had found a pattern and suggested: yes! But data points aren’t emotions, no matter how much we try to make them feel like they are to make our jobs easier.

“I contain multitudes!” I regularly joke as if to contextualise the idiosyncrasies of my interests. But this is the least unique or interesting thing about me, or anyone. We all contain multitudes, but I worry that this is becoming a past tense idea. An idea from the before. I found myself grappling with a real life mortality and morality test, me against the end of my taste. I realised I used to take personal pride in identifying new things, and here I was upset that I wasn’t being served them right.

By definition, an AI or an Algorithm does not have taste. It has not experienced anything first hand. And its context is only what has happened before, not what’s happening now or in the future. No matter how hard it tries, it cannot convincingly tell you what to do like say or see in any parallel with the growth you experience as a real life human. The machines’ power and wealth comes from trying to make people as predictable as humanly possible to help obscure that painstakingly gaping creativity gap. There is no algorithm for culture, so flatlining taste and making it easier to predict is the most profitable path for platforms benefiting from mass AI adoption. The person who used to seek has become the person who waits to be shown, and that’s exactly where they want you.

But the path that has been planned isn’t the one we always take. Humans have an opportunity to pave their own desire paths - to cut across the grass and take the route that fills them with the most joy.

In Good Will Hunting, Robin Williams prepared us for this flatlining and the fallacy of approximated taste. “If I asked you about art you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.”

Whilst this 1997 Oscar Winner was upholding the value of lived experience vs the cock-sure attitudes of smug college students, the premise stays the same: you can sit and wait for your lines of code to get you so good its unearthed your new favourite film, or you can take the risk of sitting in the cinema seat and waiting til the credits role to find out if it moved you. The risk has always been the reward. But somewhere along the way we decided that art should be consumed, rather than felt.

When art loses that spark, when it becomes content that’s optimised and served rather than stumbled into and experiences, it’s not just the loss of a few cool and independent experiences. It’s the thread that has connected human beings to something bigger than themselves through every era, through every crisis and every turn of history. Taste isn’t just what makes us happy, it’s what makes us human. Erode the means by which that’s formed, and you’re taking away something innate in all of us.

The other clever thing about cultural homogeneity packaged as a solution is that it makes an enemy out of individuality. It tars “taste” as an expensive project - only for those who can wear them mad lil horse hoof shoes. But taste, in its personal and political execution, is an attention issue. And my plea is to pay attention to it: what are you willing to sit with, what are you willing to let in, what are you willing to seek?

John Waters once said “have faith in your own bad taste” - words we should all live by. Your ‘bad’ taste probably tells the world a lot more about you than your ‘good’ taste, because this is the heart of who you really are: the source material of your soul. These are the idiosyncrasies, the anomalistic data points on the demographic graph pinned up about you somewhere in the back end of our large language model. Holding onto these weird little spikes and keeping them intact is the best thing you can do for your preservation of being.

There are a lot of hot new takes coming down the track. Wait for them to cool off before consuming them.

Your tastebuds are there for you. Don’t burn them off to be more palatable to others.

There is a specific kind of spiritual ascension that happens somewhere in London at around 11pm, cycling back from a party in heels or cowboy boots or whatever I’ve decided is appropriate footwear for the evening, singing Rein Me In to whoever has the misfortune of crossing my path. It’s definitely ridiculous, but it’s also, without doubt, the freest I feel in my city.

Now, gentle reader, this isn’t about my favourite cycling soundtrack, but how London’s e-Bikes have built a bit of freedom in this weird world.

I’ve been riding Forest bikes around London for four years now. Through jobs, houses, lifestyles; the transport stays the same. If there’s a way to get there by bike, I’ll take it. Loving them makes up about 70% of my personality, a joke I made on Hinge last week in the hopes of impressing this cyclist I’d matched with. It wasn’t until recently though that I started asking myself why I’d become so attached.

The honest answer goes a little deeper than just the standard ‘oh i just love the fresh air’.

In 2019 I moved to London for University and within five months we went into a national lockdown and a global pandemic. What followed was about a year of life inside, and somewhere in that time something shifted.

I’d been pretty fearless before, having gone traveling alone and then settling into London life with night buses and walks home easily. Similarly to most of my generation, I came out the other side with an unsettling distrust of a world I’d previously moved through without thinking. It wasn’t a dramatic change, just a new habit of clocking who was around me, of calculating things I hadn’t felt the need to calculate before.

Then came the news of the brutal kidnapping and murder of Sarah Everard. I was already in that heightened state when it broke, mid-way through figuring out how to be outside again. I think it’s important to note here, that I know women have been unsafe for years, especially in Britain with a history of violence against women and girls. However, something about that moment made it land differently. The conversations that followed with my friends, online, and everywhere else just showed how routine that particular kind of fear was for most of us. How long we’d been quietly absorbing it and filing it away.

The hyperawareness that followed wasn’t abstract. It was every bus journey, every walk from the station, every mental calculation about whether to get the Uber or chance it. I stopped chancing it, and for a while I stopped moving around the city the way I used to at all.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever fully return to that freedom, but what Forest bikes then gave me, was control. I’m aware it’s not perfect safety — cycling around late at night comes with its own list of things to worry about, but there’s something categorically different about moving through the city on your own terms. I’m not sat on the bus anxiously clocking whether the man behind me is watching when I get off. I’m not holding my breath on the walk home.

There’s something a bit bleak about the fact that a bike hire scheme is part of what helps a woman feel free in her own city, but I’d like to hold some space for the lesser of all evils in this, my trusty Forest bikes.

Thanks for making me feel safe and a lil more empowered.

Rein Me In will be performed in your honour.