We’re launching a new business called Dose of Reality.

And if you subscribe to Meet the 85%, we’d really like you to subscribe to Dose of Reality too.

Not instead of this newsletter, but in addition to this newsletter.

Because the two businesses do different jobs, and will deliver twice the value into your inboxes.

Dose of Reality

Real human insight from around the UK. Dose of Reality explores what we can learn from people’s lives, behaviours and contradictions, and how reality can improve research, strategy and decision-making.

By Mark Hadfield

And, importantly, Meet the 85% is not going anywhere. In fact, it is stronger than it has ever been.

Every year since we launched, the work has got better, the thinking has got sharper, the client conversations have become more interesting, and our belief in the value of real human understanding has only grown.

Meet the 85% will continue to do what it does best: bespoke ethnographic research, strategy and human understanding projects for brands, agencies and organisations that want to get closer to real people across the UK.

That work continues - we still want those conversations and we still want those briefs. Because we’re enjoying it immensely.

We still want to visit homes, meet people, listen properly, and help clients understand the lives, behaviours, contradictions and contexts that shape mainstream Britain.

Working on Meet the 85% over the past few years, our work has taught us something else: Brands and agencies need more reality than the traditional project model can always give them.

The problem with reality

The need for real human understanding has never been clearer.

Businesses have more data than ever.
More dashboards.
More AI tools.
More social listening.
More trend reports.
More synthetic audiences.
More synthetic personas.
More quick answers.

But many are still making decisions from a distance.

Away from the homes, routines, pressures, trade-offs, beliefs, jokes, frustrations, worries and contradictions that shape how people actually live.

That is the gap we keep seeing between strategists, agencies and brands and and their customers.

A gap between the way brands imagine people, and the way people actually live.
A gap between what businesses measure, and what people feel.
A gap between what people say in research, and what they do in real life.
A gap between the clean language of strategy and the messy reality of homes across the UK.

We call that the Reality Gap.

Meet the 85% was built to help close that gap through bespoke projects.

Dose of Reality is being built to close it in a different way.

What is Dose of Reality?

Dose of Reality is a new research and insight platform built from real people’s lives, voices, homes, views, behaviours and contradictions all across the UK.

Real video.
Real audio.
Real photographs.
Real people.
Real contexts.

The aim is to create a searchable, growing bank of human reality that brands and agencies can access, explore and use to improve research, strategy, creative development, audience understanding and decision-making.

It uses AI, but not to invent synthetic people.
Not to create fake audiences.
Not to replace real lives with polished personas.

Dose of Reality uses AI to help users access the real human material inside the platform.

To search it.
Organise it.
Retrieve it.
Make sense of it.
Bring it back into the room when teams are making decisions.

We do not believe the future of research should be a race to create more convincing synthetic people, we believe the future of research is using AI to help people access more human reality.

How is it different from Meet the 85%?

Meet the 85% is a bespoke research business.
Dose of Reality is a searchable platform of human reality.

Meet the 85% helps clients answer specific questions through tailored ethnographic research projects.
Dose of Reality is being built to give users faster, broader, ongoing access to real human material across lots of lives, topics, places and contexts.

Meet the 85% is deep, bespoke and project-led.
Dose of Reality is designed to be searchable, reusable and always growing.

Meet the 85% takes clients into real people’s lives.
Dose of Reality is being built to make that kind of reality quicker to access, revisit and use over time.

They are connected by the same belief: real people matter.

But they both do it in slightly different ways.

Why now?

Because the world is moving quickly in the wrong direction.

The marketing and research industries are under pressure to be faster, cheaper and more efficient.

Understandable, yes, but the danger is that, in the rush for speed, we lose touch with the very people brands exist to serve.

Synthetic data will be useful in places.
AI will be useful in places.
Dashboards, surveys, panels and social listening all have roles to play.

But none of them should become an excuse to stop listening to real people.

Because real people are not neat.
They contradict themselves.
They change their minds.
They say one thing and do another.
They care about things brands never ask about.
They ignore things brands spend months obsessing over.

They make decisions in homes, cars, shops, WhatsApp groups, workplaces, pubs, kitchens, bedrooms and family conversations.

They do not live in categories.
They live in life.

That is what Dose of Reality is being built around.

What will the Dose of Reality newsletter cover?

The Dose of Reality newsletter will not just be a company update.

It will be a place where we share thinking about the future of research, strategy, AI, real people and British life.

We’ll be writing about why real human understanding still matters in a world of synthetic shortcuts.

We’ll explain how better access to real lives can help agencies, strategists, planners, researchers and marketers do better work.

We’ll share anonymised Reality Signals from conversations and visits around the UK: what people are worried about, what they are ignoring, what they are watching, buying, avoiding, feeling and quietly changing.

We’ll talk about the process of building the platform too: what we are learning, what we are getting wrong, what we are testing, and what it means to try and build a business around real human understanding.

Some posts will be about research.
Some will be about AI.
Some will be about Britain.
Some will be about brands.
Some will be about the gap between what people say and what they do.
All of them will come back to the same belief: if you want to understand people, you have to keep people in the process.

Why we’d like you to subscribe

If you subscribe to Meet the 85%, there is a good chance you already care about real human understanding.

You probably care about what is really going on in the UK.
You probably care about the gap between brands and people.
You probably care about better research, sharper strategy and more useful insight.

That is why we think you’ll be interested in Dose of Reality.

We are not asking you to leave Meet the 85%.
We are asking you to come with us into the next part of the journey.

Meet the 85% will continue.
Dose of Reality is the new venture we are building alongside it.

One is bespoke.
One is a platform.

Both are built around the same conviction: the best thinking starts with reality.

So please subscribe to the Dose of Reality newsletter.

Dose of Reality

Real human insight from around the UK. Dose of Reality explores what we can learn from people’s lives, behaviours and contradictions, and how reality can improve research, strategy and decision-making.

By Mark Hadfield

And if you know someone in strategy, planning, research, marketing, insight, innovation, media, AI or brand who you think would be interested, please forward this to them too.

Dose of Reality is about real human insight for a synthetic age.
We’d like you to be part of it.

Given the World Cup has just started, it feels like a pertinent repost.

I think we can say that Flower of Scotland is a rousing anthem - latest evidence below!

On a recent project, Shaping the Nation for GroupM and Mindshare we had the privilege not only to work with some brilliant and lovely people, but also to discuss and debate the findings from all the research we were conducting within the working team.

One of the many areas we discussed with them as part of that work, that came up a bit in our conversations around the UK, was the subject of national anthems.

In this post, we’re going to use some of the quotes we gathered from our travels, take a leap and share some provocations about the passionate subject of national anthems.

(There are loads of studies about national anthems, and we just want to focus on a few elements that we picked up on during our travels around the UK.)

Will he sing or won’t he?!

Recently, the UK national anthem was in the press and focused around football. Would Thomas Tuchel - the new England Men’s Football Team manager - sing it, he being German and all…

“God save the King” is the national anthem of the UK - but used predominantly by England as its anthem. England doesn’t have its own distinct national anthem, unlike Scotland and Wales.

But first… the difference between Nationalism and Patriotism

We had a really interesting chat with Finlay, who we met in Kelso on the Scottish borders about the differences between patriotism and nationalism:

“There is a difference between patriotism and nationalism. You can be fiercely patriotic and not necessarily be nationalistic. I'm a season ticket holder at Murrayfield. The boys come with me to Murrayfield, and we'll sing ‘Flower of Scotland’ as loud as we can.

I’m as patriotic as you can get, and yet I'm not a nationalist, and I think you can have a clear divide between the two. I think sometimes they get confused, and I think some nationalists feel betrayed if they see people as patriotic who haven't gone the full hog and become nationalist.

Whereas to me, nationalism is about putting up barriers between you and the other. And in Scotland's case, it would be putting up a barrier between us and England. Us and our biggest market. And my firm belief is that you should be taking barriers down, not building them up.

In this world, we shouldn't be putting barriers up. We should be breaking them down as much as we can. But you can break down those barriers and still have a healthy patriotism.”

So, put simply, what are the differences between Patriotism and Nationalism? ChatGPT tells us:

In (maybe overly) simplistic terms: Patriotism is positive and inclusive, Nationalism is negative and exclusive.

So - provocation - surely you’d want your anthem to be patriotic, and not nationalistic?

Wales and Scotland - lyrics and positivity about the people and the nation

When we’ve chatted to Welsh and Scottish people on our travels, we tend to hear variations on the theme of this quote:

“The Celtic in us [the Welsh]—and Ireland and Scotland—is something that draws us together. Unfortunately, that is not true of the English person.”

The Widowed Farmer now in town, Alwen in Llanfyllin, 80

For Alwen, there’s a clear sense of identity. Of what being Welsh, Scottish or Irish means. A pride of being united by the Celts.

Following this train of thought, let’s look at the lyrics to the Welsh and Scottish national anthems.

Let’s look at the lyrics of Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau (Land of My Fathers) - the (unofficial) national anthem of Wales:

This land of my fathers is dear to me
Land of poets and singers, and people of stature
Her brave warriors, fine patriots
Shed their blood for freedom

Chorus:
Land! Land! I am true to my land!
As long as the sea serves as a wall for this pure, dear land
May the language endure for ever.

Old land of the mountains, paradise of the poets,
Every valley, every cliff a beauty guards;
Through love of my country, enchanting voices will be
Her streams and rivers to me.

Chorus

Though the enemy have trampled my country underfoot,
The old language of the Welsh knows no retreat,
The spirit is not hindered by the treacherous hand
Nor silenced the sweet harp of my land.

Chorus

It’s a love letter to the people and the land. It’s about the place, but it’s also about the people - those who have gone before them, the poets and singers and people of renown… the people who have made Wales what it is. It’s an appreciation of people past, and a passionate plea to those who embody the country now.

It has positivity flowing through it - we’d call it more of a patriotic anthem and less of a nationalistic anthem.

I defy anyone to watch this and not be moved:

Or Flower of Scotland - the (unofficial) national anthem of Scotland:

O Flower of Scotland,
When will we see your like again
That fought and died for
Your wee bit hill and glen.
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's army,
And sent him homeward
To think again.

The hills are bare now,
And autumn leaves lie thick and still
O'er land that is lost now,
Which those so dearly held
That stood against him,
Proud Edward's army
And sent him homeward
To think again.

Those days are past now
And in the past they must remain
But we can still rise now
And be the nation again!
That stood against him
Proud Edward's army
And sent him homeward
To think again.

O Flower of Scotland,
When will we see your like again
That fought and died for
Your wee bit hill and glen.
And stood against him,
Proud Edward's army,
And sent him homeward
To think again.

It’s a defiant song, a middle finger to England. A battle cry of resistance. This is a song about agency. About people reclaiming themselves. Not waiting for anyone else’s permission.

Again, it’s a song about the people, owned by the people, sung by the people.

And boy, do they own that song:

So, what about England?

It seems for many, the English identity is the hardest one to pin down. And for those who can pin it down - in its modern guise - it has troubling associations.

This tension has emerged across multiple conversations over multiple projects.

It’s almost like Englishness is too loaded, too political, too tangled in guilt or embarrassment to be proudly claimed in the same way as Scottishness or Welshness.

England just seems too… complicated… compared to some other nations…

Can one song unify the patchwork of the UK?

The English national anthem is, strictly speaking, the UK anthem, and if ever a song was needed to pull together the nations into unity it’s now:

“I don’t think [the UK is] a whole unit. I don’t really think of it as a unit. I think of it as fractured.”

Moved About a Bit, Uma in Lewes, 27

“What does Britishness mean? That’s an impossible question to answer these days.”

Independent Seaside Shop Owner, Vanessa in Southwold, 51

“I’m not even British. I’m a human from planet Earth.”

The Community Kitchen Owner, Charlie in Tunbridge Wells

And whilst the Welsh and Scottish national anthems are a call to arms of the people, of positivity, of unity, the de-facto English national anthem isn’t about the people or the land at all.

It’s about religion and the monarchy.

God save our gracious King!
Long live our noble King!
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King.

Thy choicest gifts in store
On him be pleased to pour,
Long may he reign.
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King.

It’s not about the people. It’s not about the land. It’s not about unity. It’s not even really about the country.

Whereas Scotland and Wales talk about the people, the land, freedom and agency, the de-facto English anthem talks about being ruled over - by two divisive subjects: God and King. And they’re both hugely polarising.

Religion is divisive:

In 2023, a King’s College study revealed only 49% of British people believed in God…

The monarchy is divisive:

In 2024 NatCen told us that only 54% of the British population think it’s ‘very’ or ‘quite important’ to have a monarchy.

So, the very first line of a song that is designed to bring together people ‘shoulder to shoulder’, to make them stand proud, to rally them and energise them… to unite them - has key elements that half of the population don’t agree with.

I think you could call that ‘missing the brief’ for a national anthem?

An opportunity for unity

The NatCen research above tells us that the percentage of the population believing it’s important to have a monarchy ‘is the lowest proportion to be recorded by the survey since it first asked the question in 1983’.

And we know through lots of research - including the great work Steve does at The Outsiders - that there is a deep love for the monarchy from the working classes.

But - is there something here about a country going through tough times, in need of some unity more than ever? Is there an argument to be made that as a nation - as a group of nations - we are facing existential threats like we haven’t for many generations?

We could mention Russia, China, the ‘new’ USA and what that means for our ‘special relationship’, the potential rise of fascism, tariffs, Brexit, pandemics, global recession, the economy, the ‘population explosion’, the climate crisis… the list goes on.

Each of those alone is a big deal and divide opinion in the UK, but group them together and there are enough areas to bitterly divide populations. And history tells us when populations are divided, that gives opportunities for extremism to rise.

Provocation: we are in need of unity like never before and a unifying anthem is a key part of that

If you buy any of the above then a strong, positive, powerful national anthem should sit at the heart of an attempt at unity.

A song that tries to find threads of connection between us, not focus on areas that polarise and split us down the middle.

Without a national anthem that unites, what do we have to bring us together? Without a shared song what puts us shoulder to shoulder?

Postscript: North London Forever

Since writing this, I keep thinking about Arsenal fans singing North London Forever.

Written by Louis Dunford and released in 2022, it is a relatively new song. And yet, within a few years, it has become part of the emotional fabric of the club. A song about place, belonging and shared identity, now sung by tens of thousands of people as if it had always been there.

One club, yes. One small part of the country, yes.

But It shows these things can be created. New songs can take root. New rituals can form. A community can find a voice, learn the words, and make it theirs.

Earlier this year, we mentioned that the Meet the 85% business is evolving.

What we’re offering clients is coming at different levels, different shapes and different scales of budget but one thing is consistent:

If the question is interesting, we’re interested in working with you.

Here are a few of the things of different size, duration and complexity that clients have been asking us for recently.

The FMCG brand that wants to understand how people really use its products

We’re working with a global FMCG brand to understand what really happens in the home, and what really happens to its products in the home.

This goes beyond what a focus group can bring because it’s not what people say they do with a product, but the actual habits, rituals, behaviours that people are exhibiting in their homes. The behaviours you only see when you’re there.

We’re visiting families, teachers, mixed generation families, and we’re visiting them at meal times, breakfast times, and when they’re walking the dog - occasions that all bring different perspectives to their connection with the product.

As well as physically visiting each of these homes, we’re also working with the participants over a period of time and getting them to share lifestyle diaries with us at times when we can’t be there.

The aim is to capture something textured and real - insight that can feed comms, yes, but also shape thinking around innovation, packaging and the role the brand plays in everyday life.

This is useful to you: if you have a brand that you want to understand and go deeper on how your audiences actually use it, store it, and buy it.

The high street brand that wants to bring more humanity into its future

We’re working with a creative agency who are helping a well-known British heartland brand think about its future role in people’s lives.

It’s a brand with both a physical retail footprint and an online presence, so the questions are bigger than comms. They’re about what role physical spaces still play in communities around the UK, how digital and real-world experiences should work together, and what people might need from entertainment, community and local places over the next few years.

Rather than running a full research project, we’re acting as a kind of reality layer for their thinking - bringing in what we’re hearing as we travel around the UK, visit people in their homes, talk to families, communities, clubs, high streets and local businesses, and see how everyday life is shifting.

We’re not sharing anything confidential from specific client briefs. But we are helping the agency pressure-test strategic territories, sharpen creative provocations, and make sure the thinking is rooted in the texture of real life rather than just category language, trend decks or boardroom assumptions.

This is useful to you: if you’re working on a big strategic or creative question and don’t need a full research programme, but do need a quicker, cheaper, more human read on where Britain is heading and how your brand might fit into it.

The data-rich travel brand that wants to understand the humans behind the data

We’ve been talking to a travel brand sitting on a huge amount of data. They know where their audiences go, what they book, how often they travel.

But they don’t yet have a clear sense of who those people are. The data is telling them what is happening, but it is not telling them why the real people behind the data are actually doing what they are doing.

The task is to bring humanity back into that data - to understand the motivations, tensions and lived realities behind the patterns - and make it usable in a way that informs both strategy and creative work.

The outputs were presented in an all-agency and all-client stakeholder workshop. Documentary films were shared, and that human context is now being used around the business and with their sales teams.

This is useful to you: if you have a data-rich view of your audiences, but different teams are struggling to truly buy into and understand them because of a lack of humanity.

An agency looking for differentiation

We’re working with a creative agency looking to build something of their own, that stands them apart and will bring value to clients and new business.

Not just a one-off project, but an ongoing piece of IP that gives them a distinct point of view in the market. We are recruiting a specific audience with the intention of delivering some differentiating IP, but then also to keep that audience live as an online panel so the agency can utilise it ongoing.

Both the IP and the ongoing panel have been designed to help them with existing clients and also their new business drive, so the research is bringing them value in multiple ways: to differentiate them as an agency, to add value to live briefs with their existing clients, to give them something rich and provocative for their new business drive.

Because of our strategic experience in leading creative agencies, we’re in a unique position to understand what agencies need and how we can deliver something valuable to them in a cost-effective way.

This is useful to you: if you are a creative agency thinking about your new business strategy or how you can add value to existing clients, as well as differentiating your agency in a constantly changing and saturated market.

Understanding the role of a specific room in the home

We’ve been spending time with a furniture brand to understand what one specific room in the home actually means in people’s lives.

Not just as a functional space, but as somewhere decisions are made, routines are habitually performed, and family life plays out day to day. The kinds of things that we all do, day in, day out, from first thing in the morning to last thing at night

But it’s not just the space we’re looking at. Of course, it’s the people who inhabit it and what life is like for them from a reality-first, brand-second point of view: how is life at the moment? How is their money? How is school? Or work? How does all of that reality play out at home? For different members of the family?

The output isn’t just insight for marketing, it’s a clearer view of how the brand fits into real homes. The project is being discussed at a senior level and will help shape how the business thinks about its customers more broadly.

This is useful to you: if you’re a brand looking for jolts of reality at a C-suite level, that can inform and impact marketing and beyond - into NPD, pricing, promotion, and sales teams.

This is just a quick overview of four of the conversations we’ve been having recently at Meet the 85%. You can see they are different categories, different briefs, different clients, different durations, different budgets.

But the same underlying belief:

If you want to outperform your competitors, you need to understand the Reality Advantage^TM that real human beings can bring.

As some of these projects above come to an end, we’re looking for interesting projects to take us into the summer and second half of the year.

Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss how we can help you unearth your Reality Advantage^TM.

Not focus groups or surveys.
But cups of tea, open cupboards, and conversations focusing on life, love, money and the weekly shop.

One of the things that we have found interesting chatting to people, is how there’s a whole system around shopping.

And how that system dictates the meaning of value.

In Bath, one mum runs her week with precision:

Friday: order the shop.
Saturday morning: delivery arrives.
Meals mapped across the week.

“I plan the meals… rather than having cupboards full of food that’s just going to sit there and go out of date.”

And for this participant, value is not just about saving money.
It’s about eliminating waste, stress, and decisions later in the week.

Which starts to reframe the concept of value and what value means in her home.

The actual shop isn’t the moment of value. It’s just one part of it.

Value for her is achieved in multiple different ways:

• Comparing identical baskets across supermarkets before checkout

• Using loyalty points as a Christmas and special occasions buffer

• Freezing, batch cooking, stretching meals across days

• Blending full-price, discount, and second-hand purchases seamlessly

“I’ll do my shop on both [ASDA and Morrisons]… and see which one comes out cheaper.”

“I build [the points] up all year… then at Christmas it takes a big chunk off.”

Across all of these behaviours, value is playing different roles:

• Value from an economic point of view

• Value from a time point of view

• Value from a longevity point of view

• Value from an ongoing loyalty point of view

• Value from a range point of view

• Value from a CX point of view

So it’s key that supermarket brands understand that the role they play in people’s lives isn’t just about being the cheapest.

It’s a holistic value play across different elements of the buyers’ lives.

In Carlisle, we met a participant who is less planned and a little more fluid when it comes to his grocery shopping:

“I decide at tea time what I’m going to have that night.”

But that doesn’t mean less control because the cupboard is stocked with interchangeable ingredients.
For this family, meals are modular and flexible.

“We kind of know what we’re going to use… it’s always the same kind of things.”

And value, here, is multi-faceted in what it brings to the home.

In this home, similar to the last, there’s a balancing act going on:

• Price vs quality

• Time vs effort

• Planning vs flexibility

• Bulk vs waste

All within the constraints of everyday life.

And some of the smartest value plays cover the entire customer journey.

It might be the little perks of shopping online, knowing that you’ll occasionally get a free upgrade:

“If they don’t have it, they’ll send a better one… and you don’t pay more.”

Or just managing family life and instead of getting kids to and from a supermarket, and in and out of a car, and arguing over the trolley, the simple act of somebody bringing the shopping to you:

“Why should I carry all the bags when someone can bring it to the door?”

These too, are examples of what ‘value’ means to customers of supermarkets.

There’s a tendency in our industry to reduce ‘value’ to price, to mean the cheapest, but we’re not seeing that. We’re seeing value being ways that brands can add value to people’s lives in lots of different ways

Value is something people benefit from in multiple ways beyond money.

And we find that the only way to truly get under the skin of this, to truly understand and observe it, is to be there with people when it happens.

Another example of the power of Reality Advantage^TM.

I’m four hours from home, driving towards a hotel in Walsall ahead of fieldwork tomorrow. I’ll be spending the day with a participant at a theme park, capturing his reactions to experiences, environments, and moments that will eventually become provocations, inspiration and truths for a client.

Saying goodbye to my family at a weekend is never easy.

Giving my wife and the kids a hug, throwing bags into the car, and driving away for a weekend of work can sometimes leave me feeling quite low. This is a life I’ve chosen and one I’m deeply grateful for, but that doesn’t stop the emotional pull of home.

But today feels different.

The reason I’ve pulled over at these services isn’t tiredness. It’s because I feel slightly overwhelmed by how lucky I am to do what we do for a living.

A week of British Culture

This week alone I’ve soaked up British culture in so many different forms.

I’ve spent time talking to potential clients about a brief focusing on some products and categories that lower socio-economic audiences over-index in. That’s got me excited about where that project can go.

I’ve sat in the garden and kitchen of a young couple on the outskirts of Glasgow, talking about their lives, their hopes, their stresses, their dog, and the quiet optimism they have for the future.

I’ve been back through old studies like What The Fuck Is Going On? and Shaping the Nation, helping another client think about the role an entertainment brand can play in people’s lives — both physically and digitally — and what audiences actually need from places, communities and experiences now.

Last night, Hannah and I visited some participants in Leeds for an evening get-together for the Midlife Women Project we’re working on. I felt incredibly privileged to sit and listen to the lived realities of women in their 50s: their stresses, struggles, strains, but their joy, their optimism, their determination and grit to enjoy life, be good people, lead their families and lead their children in sometimes incredibly difficult circumstances.

And now, on the drive down south, I’m listening to BBC 5 Live.

One of the first things I bought when we moved back from Singapore was my TV licence. Living abroad made me realise the role the BBC plays in British life. It’s imperfect, of course it is. But when you don’t have it, you miss it.

As I drive, I listen to Celtic vs Hearts - one of the biggest games of the past 50 years in Scottish football. I hear tens of thousands of people emotionally invested in something bigger than themselves. Joy, despair, anger, hope — all tied up in the beautiful game.

Then the build-up to the FA Cup Final. Manchester and London colliding in one of the oldest English sporting occasions on earth.

At the same time, my wife messages to say there are people marching through Newcastle waving Union Jacks after she’s dropped our daughter at her drum lesson. An echo of the marches happening around the country, for the right wing and for the left wing. More physical and visceral examples of how divided we are as a nation.

British Culture is wide and varied

And I remind myself: all of this is British culture.

Not just the polished bits. Not just the fashionable bits.

The football. The protests. The BBC. The kitchen tables. The service stations. The hotels in Walsall. The conversations in Glasgow gardens. The tired bloke eating a Greggs walking past my car.

All of it.

As I sit here looking out through a rain-covered windscreen, I’m struck by how democratic service stations are. Regardless of the car you arrive in, everyone ends up standing in the same queue for a coffee.

We need to remind ourselves that culture is bigger, broader and more complicated than we sometimes want it to be.

It’s not just young inner-city kids creating new trends.
It’s not just influencers, food bloggers and people on the edges of trends.
It’s not just the tribes, communities are people that make you feel comfortable.

It’s families.
Football fans.
Retail parks.
Theme parks.
Service stations.
Marches.
Neighbourhoods.
Hotels in Walsall.

British culture is messy, emotional, contradictory and deeply human.

And I feel incredibly privileged that my job is to spend time trying to understand it.

Because ‘research’ makes me think of something traditional, ordered - question and answer sessions:

Participants walk into a room.
There’s a script, some soggy sandwiches, and a mirror where they know they’re being judged by strangers.
They’re told, before they even start, specifics about what they’re trying to find out.
There are questions.
There’s a sense that something is being ‘done’ and specific answers are needed.

Participants know what’s expected of them and so they behave accordingly.

Which means the opportunity to understand how people really feel about a specific area, and also the wider areas that impact it, is missed.

For the best research outputs, don’t do research

We believe the best human-led insights rarely emerge when everything feels like research.

We believe they are unearthed when people feel at ease.

That ease can come from time.
Spending longer with people.
Letting things unfold.
Seeing what happens when life just carries on.

Or it can come from how you frame your interaction with participants.
What you call the interactions.
How you frame them.
How much you control, dictate or set ground rules (or don’t).

The role of compliance

On some of our projects, of course, we have to call it research.

And from a compliance point of view, that does matter.

But when we’re with people, we don’t talk about it like that.

We talk about it as:

• An investigation into something

• A way of understanding a part of life

• A celebration of a product or behaviour

We almost never tell participants the brand that we are investigating unless there is a specific need.

We may tell them that we’re investigating a particular category, but generally we’ll never go into more detail than that.

For some briefs, we include red herring questions in screeners. If it’s a brief about automotive for example, of course we’ll ask about car ownership and income in the screener, but we’ll also ask about what their favourite washing powder is or their favourite content provider so that they don’t really know why we’re speaking to them.

That gives us an opportunity to understand the role of the category and the specific brand in the context of their wider lives without biassing them.

Being inspired by the best curious humans

We’ve been experimenting with this more in our proposals and projects.

Treating projects less like research studies, and more like something closer to cultural journalism.

A journey around Britain.
Time spent in homes, pubs, walking the dog, cafes, or shops.
Observing, having natural conversations and not interrogating.

More Louis Theroux than ‘Research Moderator’.
More Martin Parr than ‘Commercial Photographer’.

(And don’t get us wrong, we’re still also being inspired by the Pierre Bourdieu’s and Tony Parker’s of this world.)

The best thinkers think similarly

And from our recent project on the APG, looking at how the best award-winning strategists unearth strategy magic, a few key quotes jumped out at us relating to this line of thinking:

"I don’t like focus groups at all. I think people are always putting on a persona in a focus group… They’re either trying to please or trying to be deliberately obstinate and contrarian."
Frances Gibbs (talking about Very)

Frances there, talking about focus groups. We are not anti-focus group, and we do run them ourselves, but they’re more useful for certain things and less useful for others. Yet we find they’re the go-to methodology for the wrong kind of investigation. The default research, the catch-all for any kind of research. As with all methodologies, they have their pros and cons.

“We go into conversations with no pre-prepared questions… we don’t know what we want to ask until we ask the first question and then your answer to the first question will then take us somewhere else.”
Craig Mawdsley (talking about Poppy’s)

Craig above is talking about having a loose conversation guide. This is something we do as a matter of course at Meet the 85%. When we first share our conversation guides with clients, they’re a bit surprised because the way that we lay them out is more how real human beings have conversations. Ebb and flow, speed up and slow down, jump from one area to another.

We believe a discussion guide laid out in a word file that’s in a linear format with a beginning, a middle, and an end is not the way to go . That’s just not how natural human behaviour plays out when it comes to conversations. More useful for an online focus group but not when you’re sat down, spending depth time and having depth conversations with real people, moving about spaces with others coming in and out of the conversation.

“I’d always done it… with partners and... with clients who were there with clipboards and an interpreter and a cameraman and just, it felt very much like research... I wanted to get out there and do it myself.”
Tass Tsitsopoulos (talking about McDonald’s)

Tass here, really speaking to us because it’s essentially why we set the business up: to make research not feel like research.

We talk about the first phase of a depth visit being really important:

• The entrance to the space

• The body language

• The setup of the kit

• When you get the camera out

• How big the camera is

• What you point it at

(All covered in our training by the way - get in touch to find out more!)

And then, as your time with the participant evolves, following the energy of the session, understanding where their passions are, letting the movement around the space flow, and letting that energy flow freely.

… whilst all the while, of course, very gently, subtly nudging the conversation into the spaces you want it to go. To cover off the areas the clients are paying you for. To get the insights you need.

“Often they’re most powerful when they come from a human’s mouth because we’re selling to humans and we’re human beings ourselves.”
Matt Hayes (Müller Rice)

And lastly, Matt here talking about the power of human-led insight and ultimately how humans relate to other humans.

Because for all of the bluff and bluster about synthetically created AI personas, we’re yet to see a client who says they think synthetic personas and digital twins are actually better than human beings.

They might say they’re quicker, they might say they’re cheaper, but we’ve never heard a single one say that the insight they get from synthetic data can beat a real human being from a pure quality point of view.

Don’t ‘do research’, be a curious human

The more something feels like research, the more it can distance you from what you’re actually trying to understand.

It can feel a bit scary at first, but give it a go.

Whether it’s you or your research partners, experiment and explore. Let conversations flow. Let moments happen. Let your participants show you things rather than you asking specifically about things.

When you do that you don’t just get answers.

You get glimpses of real life.
The kind that stay with you.
The kind that spark something.
The kind that help unearth Reality Advantage^TM.

So, if you want to get closer to reality…
If you want insight that actually feels human…
If you want research that doesn’t feel like research…

Get in touch.

We’d be happy to have a chat.

It’s been an interesting first year as we’ve been fine-tuning our offer whilst working with some partners and helping them with their B2B research and strategy challenges.

We wanted to give you an update of three recent projects that we’ve been chatting to clients about, so you can see the kinds of things we’re adding value to.

To us, at first glance, they looked quite different, but then we realised that they all came back to the same thing:

Businesses trying to turn complexity into something simple, clear and sellable.

That complexity might be:

• Multiple products

• Fragmented and siloed teams

• Competing priorities

But the effect is the same: things become harder to articulate or harder to sell.
And ultimately, harder for real people to understand and choose.

Alongside that, there’s a second pattern that most of the existing understanding within each business is still too rational. Survey-led. Data-led. Internally framed.

But the real decisions - the ones that drive growth - are being made by humans navigating pressure, trade-offs, habits and relationships in the real world.

Broadly, the conversations we’re having tend to sit across four connected needs:

• Turning complexity into something sellable

• Understanding real human decision-makers

• Defining what a brand means in people’s lives

• Bringing real-world reality into business decisions

Here are three examples of the kinds of briefs we’re talking to clients about right now.

1. Retail Brand: Turning a fragmented offer into something partners can actually buy

We’ve been talking to a large retailer with a large physical footprint, a lot of data, and multiple partnership opportunities across the business.

On paper, there’s a huge amount of value they can offer third-party businesses in data sharing, partnerships and media swaps. In reality, it’s spread across different teams, channels and propositions that have evolved separately.

So the question they’ve asked us to look into is:

How do you bring all of that together into something simple, coherent and commercially compelling?

Not just a list of opportunities, written, stored, and understood differently across different silos in a large organisation.

How do you take all of that information and turn it into a unified story that partners can understand, buy into, and buy from?

That means:

• Multiple stakeholder interviews across the business

• Identifying the central organising idea

• Structuring offers around real customer moments, not internal silos

• Creating a narrative that’s easy to sell, easy to understand, and hard to replicate

2. Insurance: Understanding the people who actually drive growth

In another conversation, we’ve been chatting with an insurance brand where growth depends on a relatively small group of professional, consumer, decision-makers.

Stakeholders who act as gatekeepers - who are, of course, just normal human beings like you and I.

Again, the existing understanding is strong on the rational side:

• Pricing

• Product features

• Performance metrics

But weaker on the reality of how decisions actually get made by the real human beings sat in offices and home offices all around the UK.

So the question becomes:

What really drives choice in the real world?

• What pressures are these people under?

• What relationships matter?

• What feels risky? What feels safe?

• And where can the insurance brand genuinely add value beyond the obvious?

So we’re chatting to this particular brand about how we understand how these decisions are made, both from a business sense but in the human reality of these people being mothers, fathers, partners, providers, and professionals, of course.

3. Cross-Category brand: Defining what a brand should be famous for

And then there are briefs that are broader and talk less about a single proposition, and more about the direction and anchoring of their brand.

We’ve been talking to a cross-category brand operating across multiple verticals where the competitive set is shifting and expanding.

They’re known by their B2B and B2C customers across specific verticals in slightly different ways, which of course confuses matters internally from a stakeholder understanding point of view.

So the question becomes:

What should this brand actually be famous for?

Not only internally, but in the minds of the people using it across different verticals.

That means exploring - via stakeholder interviews and remote ethnography:

• Emotional and cultural associations

• How the category is evolving

• What different audiences expect and value

• Where there’s space to build something distinctive and ownable

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What we’re finding across these briefs with Business is Humans is that businesses are sitting on value.

But that value isn’t always:

• Clearly articulated

• Grounded in real human understanding

• Shaped into something that people can easily grasp and act on

And that’s where we’re finding clients are reaching out to us more because we’re helping them take complexity, reality, and human behaviour and turn them into something clearer, sharper and more commercially useful.

Bridging their Reality Gap with Reality Advantage^TM

If you’re working on something similar — whether it’s a proposition, a positioning, or simply trying to make sense of what you already have — it’s probably worth a conversation.

If in doubt, just get in touch by dropping us an email here.

We’re always happy to have a quick chat and help you work out whether we can help, or where we can’t.

At the time, it set out our belief that we’re living through a broader moment of distance and division — across society, communities, and culture — and that marketing and business are now operating with the same distance.

That human disconnect isn’t just a societal issue - it’s a strategic one too.

Since then, a lot has happened.
We’ve spoken to more planners, more brands, and more people across the UK.
And more recently, we’ve been exploring this idea through our “How to Unearth Strategy Magic” series.

Across that work, something has become even clearer: the very best strategies come from getting closer to real people.

This piece was the starting point for that thinking.

It outlines the Reality Gap — the growing distance between businesses and the people they’re built to serve — and introduces the idea of the Reality Advantage™ as a way to bridge it.

Given how many more of you are now part of this newsletter, it felt like the right time to reshare it.

1. The State of the UK: Distanced and Divided

We live in a time and a country of paradoxes.

Around the country, person to person, house to house, community to community we are:

Closer together, yet more lonely
While population densities rise in urban centres around the UK, loneliness has reached record levels. In the UK, 26 million people say they feel lonely “often or always”. And London — the most densely populated region — suffers some of the highest loneliness rates - with 700,000 saying they feel lonely ‘most’ or ‘all of the time’.

More wealth, yet more inequality
The UK has a serious inequality issue, having the 9th most unequal incomes of 38 OECD countries. The top 20% of people hold 63% of the UK’s wealth, while the bottom 20% have only 0.5% of the wealth.

More cultures, yet little interaction
We’re a country of those who ‘stick to their own’ with nearly a third of us saying we never or rarely meet people from different backgrounds.

As a people, all around the UK, street after street, we are distant and divided.

And online, the world of messaging and social media that promised to bring us closer together has made us even more distant and divided.

More information, yet a wider education gap
Google is a democratic information source that has brought us more free information than ever before in history, but it hasn't brought us closer together academically - the education gap has got wider, with research finding the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers has widened across all educational phases since 2019.

More access to ‘the other’, yet less understanding
The UK is a more diverse nation than ever before. Yet we’re more segregated. Attempting to understand ‘the other’ via TikTok reels and other short form content does not allow for depth nor nuance, and is highly skewed by the algorithms they are at the mercy of. This is creating a polarised online world where one side shouts at the other with their fingers in their ears.

More ‘news’ but less clarity
Which in turn leads to ‘news’ becoming OUR news and not THE news, as media becomes ever fragmented, less trusted and served up to us in a personalised, algorithm-fueled menu - reinforcing personal views and biases and rarely bringing us a rounded view of what is actually happening.

Less trust in the institutions
Journalists and politicians scratch this online world to try and understand what’s going on in people’s lives, and to try and understand deeply ingrained beliefs and behaviours. But as we know what’s online doesn’t chime with the realities people are living. Claimed behaviour and decisions are flawed: Poll after poll is incorrect and inaccurate. Polling repeatedly fails to predict societal outcomes accurately, as evidenced by the unexpected Brexit referendum result and the misforecast 2015 General Election.

And in this context of distance and division, businesses — consciously or not — are reflecting the same pattern.

2. The Problem with Brands and Business: Echoing the same distance and division

Brands and businesses were once created to serve people, and the best still do this.

“A business is simply an idea to make other people’s lives better”

said Richard Branson.

It is a tool to serve people, communities and society. But today’s businesses are operating at a bigger distance from the very people they exist to serve than ever before.

The marketing industry talks the talk of ‘customer centricity’ - but few are walking the walk and actually putting the needs, desires and voices of real people at the heart of their business.

As Brand Strategy expert Richard Huntington points out:

“... the distance between strategists and the people they are building brands to serve is a persistent evil…”

As capitalism runs rampant to the point that if unchecked, we may be looking at the end of capitalism itself, businesses are under increasing pressure:

• Commercial pressure, (the ever-increasing pressure to get more from less, quicker)

• Short-term shareholder demands, (the market pressure to increase share price, no matter what)

Which are, in turn, changing how those businesses strategise and make decisions:

• Risk aversion (Big Data bringing a “data told me to do it” culture that creates a ‘paint by numbers’ approach to business strategy),

• AI-driven shortcuts, (the promise of quicker, cheaper AND better - which is impacting headcount, confidence, skillsets… and we still don’t know what percentage of it is snake oil or not)

Due to these pressures and more, businesses increasingly rely on the seeming comfort blanket of AI (which are built from biased data and miss critical human nuance), and hide behind the comfort of category norms (which builds an ‘incremental’ mindset, when disproportionate returns are the ask).

The bottom line is Business and Brand Strategies, NPD, and business decisions are now routinely created by teams of people who are distant from the realities their customers are living.

The result is an ever increasing Reality Gap – a strategic blindspot in businesses that mirrors the societal distance and division outside the boardroom all around the UK.

3. The Consequences: Distance and Division harming Brand and Business

This systemic disconnection is harming brands and businesses.

In short: brands are being developed by people who are starved of reality and echo their own biases via AI, and businesses are becoming strangers to their own customers.

This is impacting brands and businesses in the following ways:

• Work that is not representative of the UK continues to be created from liberal agency teams who seek platitudes from their peers, not the real people around the UK.

• Which in turn means brands fail to connect with real people, with 74% of people saying they wouldn't care if a brand disappeared.

• Which ultimately leads to declining confidence in marketing spend - bad for agencies, brands, the marketing industry and the UK economy.

Distance and Division are a root cause of all of the above.

As Henry David Thoreau said:

“The path of least resistance leads to crooked rivers and crooked men”

Which is prophetic today in the era of algorithmic convenience and synthetic shortcuts.

4. Only Marketing has this arrogance

It seems that it’s only the marketing world that believes it can create ever-increasing returns, whilst all the while reducing - and sometimes eradicating - real human insight and interactions.

Other professions combine both technology and real human interaction to work together to maximise benefits:

• Doctors don’t diagnose from scans alone, they listen to the tone of your voice, they see the worry in your eyes, they feel the temperature of your skin.

• Lawyers don’t win by only interrogating paperwork, they look witnesses in the eye, hear the hesitation in a voice, and analyse body language.

• Architects don’t stare at a screen of CAD without reality, they walk the site, feel the wind, and see how light falls where people will gather.

• Detectives don’t only work with forensic data, they knock on doors, go deep into communities and earn the trust of people that brings the truth out.

• Social workers don’t understand a child’s world from the file on their computer, they visit the home, see the fridge is empty, feel the temperature in the room.

These professions all utilise cutting-edge data and technology, but they also guard the human encounter as sacred. They work with both, and see the value of both because that’s where the full truth lives.

Yet, as ever, Marketing is the odd one out. We are building brands for people, without meeting people. It’s arrogant and lazy.

5. The Solution: Reality Advantage^™

The solution is simple: true human understanding as an essential ingredient to success.

Reality Advantage^™ is about spending time with real people — observing, listening, understanding. It’s about re-establishing ongoing emotional and geographic proximity to the people of the UK, and their beliefs and behaviours.

• It’s about understanding the people your algorithms don’t show you.

• It’s about spending time with people who may not buy your products.

• It’s about observing the people who sit outside your over-simplified segments.

• It’s about hearing their frustrations to spot unmet needs your business can solve and capitalise on.

This simple notion of spending time and effort in the real world doesn’t replace quantitative research or AI models. It works alongside them as a key sense-check.

It acts as a ‘canary in the coalmine’ of Big Data and AI.

True human-led research isn’t suitable for every brief. It takes a bit more time than an AI prompt to your synthetic personas, and might cost more than a survey.

But at key moments — when shaping strategy, developing new products, or defining a brand’s role in society— understanding real people provides an incredible amount of value and should be a vital part of your strategic armoury.

As Scott Galloway says

“Leadership is doing the right thing, even when it hurts.”

Take a step back.

Imagine you’re telling a family member or friend down the pub how brands and businesses operate. Imagine telling them a brand is created to get people to notice them, think of them at the right time, warm to them, buy them, ‘love’ them…

… then tell them throughout that process, some brands don’t even care to chat to real people.

It’s arrogance on an industrial level.

We’re creating brands and businesses FOR people, without INCLUDING people.

If you can’t be bothered to even talk to real people, why should they care about your brand, and how dare you expect them to ‘love’ your brand.

6. The Benefits Reality Advantage^™ brings to the businesses that work with it

Internal Benefits (within a brand or business):

• Teams feel closer to their customers. (Meaning more people within the organisation can identify with customers and communicate with them more effectively)

• Increased confidence in bold/ disruptive decisions. (Less “the data told me to” thinking, and more confidence based on the depth and emotion of true human understanding)

• Shared understanding across departments. (Segments that are written in Marketing language are useless to the Call Centre or Sales Team - adding humanity increases understanding and usefulness)

• A cultural shift: closing the Reality Gap. (A powerful flag in the ground for an organisation. One that exemplifies being a truly ‘customer centric’ organisation - putting real people at the heart of their brands and business)

External Benefits: (benefits to a businesses customers, prospects, communities and society)

• Sharper strategies that connect. (Strategies that put real people at their heart, pull from real people’s lives and create more emotional engagement)

• More resonant creative work. (Creative work that is powered by the reality of someone’s life, not star or spike ratings)

And beyond the businesses that work with Reality Advantage^™, engaging with real human beings brings extra benefits:

• To the Participants themselves. (Real people all around the UK who feel in daily lives that they lack influence, finally feel their voices heard)

• To UK Society. (The insight that is published helps to give glimpses into the lives of others, delivering an opportunity to learn and understand away from the toxic polarity and ‘otherness’ of Social Media)

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7. Reality First, Brand Second

It’s time to embrace a Reality First, Brand Second addition to your existing research.

If you’re doubtful, you need to ask yourself: Do you want to achieve ‘good enough’ or do you aspire for more?

Using only Big Data and AI, a ‘good enough’ brand can produce a good enough strategy to power ‘good enough’ marketing and ‘good enough’ advertising. It’s a process of incrementality when your objectives demand more.

These are the brands and businesses who will ignore human-led research, and will mine Big Data and AI, and they’ll do that quickly and cheaply. They’ll enter the race to the bottom because there’s always someone else prepared to do it quicker or cheaper. They’ll eventually spiral into a price-led promotion doom-loop as they fail to connect with their audiences and become nothing more than a commodity.

Yet the brands and businesses with bold marketers and bold C-Suites will be the ones that spot they have a Reality Gap, and will welcome a Reality Advantage^™.

They recognise the benefits of human-led research. They know they need to go beyond narcissistic research focused on their brand or category. And they recognise the usefulness of Big Data and synthetic AI, but also know it’ll only take them so far.

They know that also understanding real life should be the strategic foundation for their brands and business.

8. From Distance and Division to Reality Advantage^™

Just as society needs reconnection to bridge division and divides, businesses need to do the same.

The Reality Gap isn’t just a research problem. It’s a cultural, creative, and commercial challenge.

Reality Advantage^™ is how you bridge it.

We chatted to nine authors of award winning papers from the 2025 APG Awards, with a loose conversation guide, but with a centre of gravity around: What mix of research actually powered the work?

We wrote an overview newsletter about the findings that you can see here.

And then to follow that up, Jo Arden, who is the Chief Strategy Officer at AMV BBDO and the Co-chair of the APG, shared her tips on what agencies and strategists should be doing to make it happen.

In this third post we’re going to share with you how we help our clients unearth strategy magic. From bigger, deeper, more expensive, all the way down to quick, nimble, and cost-effective ways of working.

We’re delivering strategy magic to clients in ways that reduce the barriers Jo talked about.

The need for human-led research is there, but so are the barriers to making it happen

In the first part of this series, we shared what we heard from APG award-winning planners. Across very different categories, briefs and campaigns, one thing came through consistently:

AI and Big Data are now table stakes.

But they’re not where the magic comes from to elevate your thinking from your competitors.

In the second post, Jo Arden built on that. And talked about the barriers that stop human-led research from happening.

“I don’t have the time.”
“I don’t have the money.”
“The audience is hard to reach.”

All real barriers. All familiar.

Which leaves a gap. Because whilst most strategists agree that getting closer to real people improves the work, we bet it’s the minority who are actually doing it consistently.

So the question becomes:

If you actually want to do this properly… how do you make it happen?

The ways we help you unearth Strategy Magic

Over the past few years, we’ve been building ways to answer that. And in the post earlier in the year over here, we talked about how our offer evolved last year as we focused more on interesting briefs, regardless of budget size.

Which means, depending on the brief you’re working on, the budget and time you have, there are ways in which we can help you:

1. On-Demand UK Tours

This is why we set the business up: to spend real time with real people all over the UK to understand their lives through a reality-first, brand-second lens.

That means we could be walking the dog with a vicar in Winchester. Or chatting in a pub in Wigan. Or a living room in Antrim.

And when we deliver our findings to our clients, it’s really stark - you’re not looking at a slide. You’re looking at how people actually live.

What’s on the shelves. What’s in the fridge. What’s being said, and what isn’t.

This kind of research is slower. It takes a bit of time to set up and a bit of time to mobilise, but the depth of reality that it unearths is unmistakable. It brings a whole host of value, primarily for the brief in hand, but also it unearths lots of extra value for different parts of the business.

This research is where a lot of the magic moments tend to come from.

Get in touch: to talk about how we could do this for you, the value it brings, and what some ballpark budgets are. We can also share with you some examples of where we’ve done it before (without sharing anything confidential).

2. Glimpses of Reality

Not every brief needs a full tour and sometimes you need something more nimble and faster, yet still bespoke to your needs.

This is where we blend physical ethnography with digital.

Where we blend spending real time in people’s homes with prompted tasks, diary entries, short films and photos from people’s lives.

And even over the course of a week or two when you do this you start to see patterns, contradictions and small human moments that don’t show up in data.

This research is a great way to blend self-reported human-led research with in-home observational human-led research.

Get in touch: and we can share with you the different shapes and sizes of past examples that we’ve done for clients. Some are lighter on the physical visits, (which brings cost benefits); some are blended in a more balanced way.

3. Conversations at Scale

Sometimes you don’t have weeks.

You’ve got a pitch on Thursday, and a decision to make on your insights, your strategy, or your creative.

And for your own benefit (and maybe to show the client that you’ve gone the extra step compared to the other agencies), you have something you want to sense-check with real people, quickly.

That’s where we can help. Over the past couple of years, we’ve started to build online panels of real people - real people who we work with across multiple briefs, across the UK that we can tap into at speed.

Some clients tap into these in the groups that we’ve organised. For example, they want some thinking from the middle classes or some thinking from the youth of the UK. Other clients want us to blend them and have a blend of different panels brought together.

These panels are quick to respond and always offer valuable insights. We work with them on prompted tasks, and also we can pull them into online focus groups quickly and cost effectively, which enables you to ask a question, test a hypothesis or get input into a creative direction.

This research is a quick, cost-effective way to bring real human voices into your thinking.

Get in touch: and we can tell you about our panels and how we’ve used them quickly and nimbly for agencies looking to sell in creative directions or agencies pitching, and the value they have brought them.

4. Strategic Consultancy

And sometimes even if you have your own human-led research or you’ve made some hypotheses or assertions in your thinking , the question isn’t: “What are people doing?”

It’s: “What do we do with this?”

You might be mid-project or mid-pitch and something doesn’t feel right. You’ve done everything as you usually do. You’ve got some interesting thinking, some interesting research, and some interesting ideas, but you feel there’s just something missing: a little bit of texture, a little bit of reality that you feel is just going to elevate your thinking a little bit more.

That’s where we step in.

Bringing 20 years of strategy experience, grounded in the reality we’re seeing every day. We mix our 20 years of brand strategy working at networked agencies across the UK, in London and across Asia, with countless thousands of hours of speaking to real people all across the UK on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.

This is where we don’t deliver the research to you, but it’s where we utilise all of our experience to add a layer of strategy magic to your existing thinking in a consultative fashion.

This offer isn’t bespoke research. It allows us to tap into overall themes, anecdotes, findings, and multiply that with our strategic brain to help your existing thinking.

Get in touch: and we can tell you how we’ve helped small independent agencies add a UK consumer lens to existing thinking, and how we’ve taken our learnings across multiple projects and added anecdotes and texture to agencies to elevate their strategic thinking.

Or… we can help you do it yourselves

There’s one more option, and it’s something we’re increasingly being asked for.

Because the reality is that for all of the different options that we offer across budgets, timescales, depth and breadth, it’s not possible to bring us into every brief…

So in the short term, and the longer term you may want to build this capability inside your team…

We run training called “From Slides to Sofas.”

It’s designed to help planners and teams get out of decks and into real environments.

To understand people not just through what they say but through what they do. What they show. What they live with.

At the heart of our training is compliance and safety, ensuring that if you’re going to do this, you’re going to do it properly and in a manner that reassures you and your planners.

In the training we cover:

• How to observe and engage with real people in natural settings

• How to capture their reality via video, photography and audio

• How to find the story without losing the truth

We marry the theory with best-in-class guidance. We give tips on the kit to buy, how to use it, and we have discussions and debates with you and your teams about the best way to edit and bring an unbiased truth to the table.

It can be a 90-minute session, a half-day workshop, or a full, in-the-field experience where we go out together.

Now, you only have excuses

So whether you want us alongside you or if you want to build the capability into your own team, there are now only excuses to use human-led research to elevate your strategies.

As we found with our research, the best strategies had that unlock moment by engaging with real human beings.

Yes, they used AI.
Yes, they used big data.
Yes, they used desk research.

But it was the human-led research that gave them that lift that other strategies didn’t have.

And now more than ever, it’s easier to work with research agencies like ours to input critical human-led research.

If you don’t have the budget to do that, get in touch and we can help you do it yourself.

We’re always happy to have a quick chat and help you work out what might be useful - even if that ends up being nothing.

Drop us an email here today if there’s anything that you think might be interesting. We’re always up for a conversation, always up for talking to interesting people, always up for networking with more people.

We chatted to nine authors of award winning papers from the 2025 APG Awards, with a loose conversation guide, but with a centre of gravity around: What mix of research actually powered the work?

We wrote a newsletter about the findings that you can see here.

This second post is touching on the end of our presentation, where Jo Arden shared some tips and tricks on how planners and planning departments can ensure that they’re maximising their human-led research impacts.

Jo is the Chief Strategy Officer at AMV BBDO and the Co-chair of the APG.

In her section of the findings she named the reasons planners and planning departments maybe don’t use human-led research at all, or as much as they should.

She didn’t share theoretical barriers, but real ones.

The ones that show up in the meetings you’re in, the timelines you have to stick to and the budgets you’re working with.

And then, one by one, she shared tips on how you can get around them to maximise the impact of human-led research

“I don’t have the time.”

This is the one everyone nods along to. And it’s easy to go along with this because your calendars are full. Your days disappear into endless meetings.

But Jo reframed it simply: zoom out to see the benefits.

A day spent with people inside a three-week project is not a delay. It’s an acceleration.

Because, as she put it, “an hour with a person is worth ten at your desk.”

And more than that, it changes the quality of what follows.

Less time rewriting the strategy.
Less time course-correcting creative.
More conviction, earlier.

You lose a day. You gain momentum.

So, in the constant pressure of time, it’s a case of not simply continuing on the treadmill but of pausing, considering, and then making an argument with your teams that doing something properly at the outset, inputting human-led research at the outset, will save time in the long run.

Her argument, I believe, is a really strong one.

In that, if you include a human-led research partner at the outset, you can tap into their mind ongoing throughout the project or the pitch. Yes, they’ll deliver the research to you, but certainly the way we work with our clients, we’re always on hand to hop on calls to discuss their thinking, their hypotheses, and to sense check that against what we’ve heard for their specific research, but also overall.

“We don’t have the money.”

This is something we constantly hear from our clients and potential partners, in that they don’t have the money for ‘proper’ research… Until you look at where money does go.

The reality is human-led research is rarely unaffordable. It’s just rarely prioritised, and the cost of research seems to be more heavily scrutinised than other costs associated with a pitch or a project.

Jo’s point was blunt: there is always a way to scale it, and always a way to afford it too.

From full-scale projects… to sitting in a pub buying rounds and asking questions.

To the best planners and the best strategists, human-led research is something worth fighting for. Something that improves everything downstream.

And if you can’t get the budget yet — start anyway!

Build the case through doing.

Far be it from me to give career advice tips, but certainly working to the mantra of ‘seeking forgiveness before seeking permission’ stood me in good stead throughout my planner career.

I’d be flabbergasted if your planning leaders or planning team saw it as a negative that you were getting out speaking to real people or speaking to potential research partners about how you could make the pitch or project better.

“The audience is hard to reach.”

Jo split this into two extremes:

• Those on the margins in society

• Those at the very top in economic terms

Both get labelled “hard to reach.”

Of these audiences that are apparently harder to reach, her view was: that’s precisely why they matter!

And if you can’t reach them directly, get closer to who is close to them.

Talk to the people around them.
The intermediaries. The experts. The ones already inside those worlds.

In one example Jo shared in her presentation, insight into ultra-wealthy audiences didn’t come from them at all — but from chefs, trainers and chauffeurs orbiting their lives.

Not perfect access. But real perspective.

If you think your audiences are hard to reach, simply ignoring it because it’s hard to confront will do you no good. Attempting to reach them or the people around them is something that a good human-led research company can do for you.

“A small group can’t shape direction.”

This is the comfort blanket of quant.

Something we have talked about lots and something we talked about in our part of the presentation. The continuing and growing mindset that ‘the data told me’. The security blanket that more clients and strategists are taking as they (fail to) make decisions

Big numbers. Statistical safety. But strategy doesn’t really work that way.

As Jo put it, “everyone’s story is the story of humanity.”

We don’t need 1,000 people to tell us something true. We need one person to say something that resonates, that we can feel.

Something that sticks.
Something that shifts how you see the problem.

One heartfelt truth can do more work than a chart ever will.

Planning leaders and agency leaders need to back their strategists when they have a piece of evidence that they want to throw their weight behind.

That piece of evidence does not need to be statistically robust.

Amazing, effective, growth campaigns all existed before big data; they all existed before AI!!

We need to remember that part of a planner’s skill set is spotting something that is magical, and that can be one single quote from one single person.

“I’m a bit scared.”

Going into someone’s home, asking questions, sitting in their world — it’s uncomfortable. It should be.

And instead of brushing that aside, Jo normalised it.

Of course you’re nervous. You’re in a stranger’s home.

The answer isn’t to avoid it. It’s to do it properly:

• Go with someone

• Use trusted partners (us or any number of other human-led researchers!)

• Get trained (we can help and have off-the-shelf training ready to go - drop us a line!)

• Build confidence over time

This isn’t about throwing planners into the deep end, it’s about reinstating this skill as a key piece of the planner’s armoury that has been lost over the past few years.

Clearly, we follow safety protocols and MRS guidance on how to best and safely meet with strangers, either in their home or in public places.

If you ever need any tips or any advice on this, just drop us a note; we’ll be happy to chat

Stealth mode

And then Jo ended not with a grand framework. But with a list of small actions that sounded like the Trainspotting ‘Choose Life’ manifesto: energetic, urgent, and meaningful.

Over time, spending more time as a strategist with real human beings in real contexts, listening, observing, conversing will bring you multiple benefits:

A habit of listening.
A sharper instinct.
A closer connection to reality.

Or as she put it:

“Talking to people is irreplaceable. You remember those conversations more than any deck or stat.”

If the first part of the talk made the case for a Reality Advantage™, Jo’s part of the presentation made it feel doable to a bunch of you out there.

We chatted to nine authors of award winning papers from the 2025 APG Awards, with a loose conversation guide, but with a centre of gravity around: What mix of research actually powered the work?

Across the conversations, spanning everything from Müller Rice to Dulux to McDonald’s, one thing came through consistently:

AI and Big Data are now table stakes.

But they’re not where the magic comes from.

AI is powerful. But it’s a mirror.

No one we spoke to dismissed AI. Quite the opposite. It’s fast. Useful. Increasingly embedded in the day-to-day reality of planning.

But it has (current) limitations and reflects what already exists. It spots patterns. It summarises. It optimises, and that can be a limitation for a hungry irrational planner’s mind:

As Yolanda from BBDO put it, talking about her Libresse paper:

“I think AI is just a mirror of society… it isn’t able to invent and create something new… It would have just told us, ‘make it blue’.”

Sometimes the best work doesn’t come from pattern recognition, it comes from breaking patterns and logic.

Data tells you what. People tell you why.

Big Data brings reassurance. It gives scale and confidence to an increasingly risk-averse industry and client base. A sense that “60 million people can’t be wrong” (to paraphrase Neil Godber).

But again, it has its flaws.

Across the conversations, there was a shared view that data can point you to the problem but that it rarely unlocks the answer.

There’s a sense that the ‘unlock’ only happens when you get closer to people.

Stuart, talking about his V&A paper said:

“The data showed what the problem was [young people aren’t interested], but the human-led research explained why [it doesn’t feel like a place for me]”

When you understand not just what people do (which the data might tell us), but why they do it, and how it feels to them, you can elevate your work.

You can’t feel data.

Good enough is easy. Magic isn’t.

There was a clear tension running through all the work - the fact that AI and data can get you to a “good enough” answer quickly. And in an industry under pressure to deliver faster, that’s tempting.

With so many planners under ever-increasing pressure and in what I call ‘output mode’ - relying on quicker tools that are ‘good enough’ is becoming ever more important.

But “good enough” doesn’t win APG awards, and probably won’t win you the pitch.

The standout strategies - the ones that land emotionally, culturally and commercially often come from places that feel illogical, unexpected or “dumb” (to quote Matt from VCCP) - and we found that those strategies weren’t powered by AI and Big Data alone - but by a combination of AI, Big Data AND human-led research.

Matt from VCCP said of his Müller strategy:

“I don’t think AI would have ever spotted that daft culture connection of Declan Rice and Müller Rice.”

The difference is texture

Again and again, planners talked about moments they picked up human texture. Not dashboards. Not charts. Moments.

Standing in someone’s living room, noticing what’s on the shelves.
Hearing how something is said, not just what is said.
Spending time where customers hang out.

The small, human details that don’t show up in data. The texture of reality.

And it’s in that texture that the work improves and takes leaps it wouldn’t have taken otherwise.

Craig talked about not what was said, but how it was said for his Poppy’s strategy:

“The caller paused, then asked, “do you do normal funerals?”… It was the way the funeral director was reporting that conversation and the look on her face. [A transcript] wouldn’t have captured the body language of the people or the feeling in the room. It’s as much to do with the way that the funeral director was reporting that conversation and the look on her face as she talked about it.”

The power of n=1

One of the more uncomfortable truths that we found was that a lot of breakthrough thinking in the papers didn’t come from large datasets.

They came from a single moment - often from a single person. A sentence. A reaction. A pause.

Something that made the authors stop and think: There’s something in that.

But acting on that requires confidence, because in an industry that embraces ‘the data told me so’ as a security blanket, “n=1” doesn’t look convincing in a deck.

Tass - author of the McDonald’s award-winning paper - expressed this when he said:

“‘Have you validated it quantitatively?’ You don’t need to. You don’t need to know that 70% of people steal fries… You just need to know that it’s true. And it resonates.”

So the role of the planner, and the wider agency team, becomes critical to not just find the insight, but to back it and sell it.

How to work with human-led research: Reality first, Brand second.

A consistent theme from the winning papers was how they worked with human-led research: The best work didn’t start with trying to validate an answer toward the end of a strategic process, it started with people early in the process.

Not with a tightly defined brief designed to prove a hypothesis, but with open exploration about customers of a brand, prospects of a brand, or just… people.

A lot of the planners did this at the beginning of the process, and chatted with real humans without knowing what they were really looking for.

They trusted that something more interesting would emerge. And it did.

Stuart said of his V&A strategy:

“We were never using research to commission a finding. It wasn’t that we had this hunch that we were desperate to prove. We went into it open-mindedly.”

If you do it the other way and “commission a finding”, you’ll probably get one, but you might miss a stronger truth.

How to work with human-led research: ‘Shed the snobbery’ and get out!

This sounds obvious, but it’s not happening enough. I’m not convinced it ever has happened enough, but it feels like it’s happening a lot less than the past.

And in the current climate there’s lots of discussion about working from home versus working in the office… yet there’s very little thought about working where your customers or clients are! Spending time with them, observing them, chatting with them. Soaking up their behaviours, language, culture, nuance.

Every author we chatted to - across different levels, and in different sized agencies - talked about the need to get out of the office, to spend time in people’s homes, to walk around shops and to sit with clients inside their businesses.

To see and feel the world as it actually is, not as it appears through a screen.

Frances said of her clients, Very:

“Spending time at Very in Liverpool... Liverpudlians are fun. They are fabulous. They are maximum… big hair, big lashes, big nights out. That is what Liverpool is. And Very as a company, you really feel that... it’s flamboyant, fun people. They love a laugh. They love a party. And you really get a sense of that when you spend a bit of time up there.”

And in this, there’s a laziness - and an arrogance - that planners, agencies and brands are building strategies and creative platforms without ever involving real people.

We’re investing millions of pounds to try and change human behaviour, to get humans to buy a product, yet we’re becoming arrogant enough to think we can do it without chatting to real humans.

We expect them to ‘love’ our brands, and yet we can’t be bothered to even speak to them.

Shame on us.

The risk: becoming the turkey

I want to be clear that the findings aren’t an anti-AI argument.

AI is here. It’s useful - an essential tool in modern planning and it’s only going to get better.

But there’s a warning emerging from all of this.

If planning leans too heavily on AI and Big Data for “good enough” answers we are effectively training the system to replace us.

Every shortcut teaches the machine what we do.

And if what we produce is incremental, pattern-based, predictable work…

It becomes replicable by an “AI slot machine” run by Meta, Google or others, and negates the need for creative agencies or planners…

Max from VCCP said:

“Great work relies on planning to safeguard the strategic skills technology can’t replicate - taste, nerve, intuition and timing. And the only way to nurture them is through proximity to real people”

So what should planning do?

Jo Arden closed the APG session with an important set of reflections.

If planning wants to thrive, not just survive it needs to:

• Protect time for getting close to real people

• Make sure investment is seen as valuable

• Be entrepreneurial in how it can access its audiences

• Appreciate that strategy magic can come from small numbers of people

• Provide a blanket of security and confidence for those leading human-led research

Because one of the enduring roles of planning hasn’t changed: To represent the voice of real people.

(Maybe I’ll ask Jo to pen a guest post to expand on those points above if we can find the time).

The Reality Advantage^™

What this project reinforced is something we’ve been exploring for a while - The Reality Advantage™

The best strategies don’t come from choosing between AI, data, or human understanding - they come from combining them.

But with one important shift: Reality first. Brand second.

Because AI can mirror the world.
Data can measure the world.

But only real people can show you how it actually feels and that’s still where the magic is.

We at Meet the 85% could bring the research excellence, and Max could bring the B2B strategy excellence.

And since then, we’ve been busy.

Meet the 85% has been busy (having our best year ever last year).
Onwardly (Max’s consultancy), has been busy.

And Business is Humans too - we’ve been listening, observing and learning.

Just like Meet the 85%, we’ve obsessed over delivering Reality Advantage™️ - just with a slightly more B2B focus, but as ever, everything comes back to people and their realities.

For Business is Humans, we exist to help bridge the reality gap between business, brand, and the lived experience of the real humans who drive growth.

Some of our audiences have been B2B decision-makers, some were employees, some were customers and some were prospects. They all matter. They all have influence.

“For the first time in 56 years, I feel so negative about this country.”

On the projects we’ve been working on across our businesses, we’ve done a lot of work with 50+ audiences.

And across a range of very different projects in disparate categories, we’ve kept hearing the same thing - from different perspectives - older audiences aren’t happy.

Some are quietly grumpy.
Some are frustrated.
Some are visibly p*ssed off.

Whether we’ve been talking to them about insurance, travel, entertainment, politics, technology, or their day-to-day lives, some common themes keep coming up.

Their ‘reality gaps’ are in how brands try and engage with them, how they’re ignored, how they’re misrepresented and how they’re mis-communicated with.

That’s not their fault. It’s marketing’s.

The role brands play in their lives

“You don’t ever have any decent films on and you treat your staff like crap. I’m out” - F62, talking about Amazon Prime

They hate it when businesses and their brands get it wrong, and they make them pay. They stop spending, they switch and they tell anyone who’ll listen why.

So for you and your brands:

• Has growth slowed, but you don’t know why?

• Has competition started outperforming you?

• Is customer satisfaction switching to dissatisfaction?

• Have customers left for no reason (that you can see)?

“The customer care was horrific. I won’t go with them again”
- M54, talking about a retail brand

One year in, even better understanding

It will soon be a year since we launched Business is Humans, and we now really understand how different organisations want to engage us.

As well as broader B2B challenges, if you have a specific 50+ audience, we can help in practical ways:

Bringing the 50+ audience to life for you:

• Reality Workshops: Helping teams better empathise and readjust to the current realities of the 50+ audience across the UK.

• Glimpses of Reality: Small, agile projects where there’s a specific issue to explore with your 50+ audiences across the UK.

• Conversations at Scale: Creating bespoke panels from our 50+ audience pool to get fast feedback and keep connected with their realities.

• Strategic Consultancy: Quick, nimble and cost-effective access to our brains, and 40 years combined experience, with your 50+ audiences.

Get in touch if you’d like to hear more.

We’ll leave you with a quote from national treasure, Dame Judi Dench:

“I can’t bear the thought of a day where I don’t learn something new. It keeps me alive”

Nor can we. Maybe, we’ll make t-shirts with that on the front.

This series is built from our work across multiple projects over the past few years. Some were shorter, some longer. Some smaller, some bigger. But taken together, they’ve allowed us to build a view of how people of all ages experience being online and how that experience is often more thoughtful, conflicted and self-aware than the narrative in the press suggests.

We’ve worked with teachers across a bunch of projects, with projects touching on technology, food, groceries and other areas.

Teachers: Uniquely in the crosshairs

In the wider cultural debate about young people and social media, teachers are often put into the position of being expected to solve the problem.

They are asked to manage distraction in the classroom, and to uphold the phone rules their specific school dictates. They are tasked to maintain attention in classrooms - but attentions that are also targeted by devices designed to capture it.

And seemingly, there’s always a new threat that those phones and social media bring into the school.

Recently, a social media trend has seen pupils dividing schools into “red” and “blue” teams online, a kind of rivalry amplified through TikTok and Snapchat. In some cases the posts have encouraged confrontations between schools, prompting warnings from police and headteachers.

Whether the threat is real or exaggerated almost becomes secondary. What matters is the reaction it creates within the social groups that are made up within - and outside - schools.

Messages circulate between students. Leaders are chosen and factions are formed. Parents start asking questions because they don’t fully understand what’s going on - often turning to the teachers they know for understanding. But often teachers don’t know either.

Those teachers are left trying to manage the disruption and anxiety those online memes generate, while still trying to get on with the job of teaching.

A profession under pressure

Teaching has always carried a weight of responsibility. An educations role and a pastoral role.

But in recent years the pastoral responsibility has expanded. As well as educating our children, teachers are also asked to safeguard wellbeing, manage behaviour, support mental health and increasingly help young people navigate the digital world. (And as we saw in post 2, they’re adults too trying to navigate this new world.)

Their pastoral role in some ways is eclipsing their educational role as parents require more support and help when it comes to their children, tech and social media.

At the same time, the structure of the job itself has changed. Digital systems now underpin much of school life. Attendance registers, homework platforms, communication apps and parent messaging systems are all now based on apps or online platforms, and carried in our pockets.

And because this school admin is app-based, with fewer face-to-face communication opportunities with teachers for parents, what once happened within the physical and time boundaries of school can now continue long after the final bell, and can permeate into personal lives.

As one teacher in our research described:

“Parents can contact me 24/7. It gives me anxiety about what might come through.”
- Heather, 35, Cardiff

The message might be small. A quick question about homework. A concern about a friendship group. But the constant possibility of contact changes the shape of the job.

The classroom may end in the afternoon but the emotional role often doesn’t.

Watching digital life unfold

Teachers also see something parents often only glimpse occasionally: how phones shape everyday social behaviour throughout each day.

One teacher described the moment she noticed the shift most clearly:

“When I’m driving to work each morning, there’s four children at the bus stop going to the same school in the same uniform. None of them are talking. They’re all just looking at their screens.”
- Jenny, 39, Nottingham

Bus journeys, bike rides and walking to and from school have traditionally been spaces where friendships deepen, disagreements are resolved and social confidence develops. Increasingly, teachers worry those moments are changing from friendship times, to screen times.

As the same teacher reflected:

“It would make me sad to go into a school if, during playtime, all that pupils were doing was just looking at their phones.”
- Jenny, 39, Nottingham

These observations help explain why the conversation around phone bans in schools has grown louder.

For many teachers, reducing phone use during the school day feels like a practical way to protect attention and restore some of the social rhythms that used to happen naturally.

A main part of the reason parents are giving their kids phones is for safeguarding on the journey to and from school - but as ever it’s a double-edged sword: They may provide reassurance to the parents, but are they also damaging social relationships?

The contradiction inside modern classrooms

Because while teachers may worry about the presence of phones, technology itself is now embedded in how schools function.

Digital registers track attendance. Homework is submitted through online platforms. Research happens through search engines rather than textbooks.

Technology is no longer an optional extra in education, it’s an essential part of the education experience.

Students are expected to learn how to research online, collaborate digitally and navigate a world where information is constantly available. And on balance, we’d argue this is right - kids are growing up in a changing world and they need to be educated and prepared for that world, and use the nascent tools that are permeating and influencing the future of their careers.

At the same time, teachers see the challenges that come with that environment. Of tools being more digitally-based and of the impact that has on focus and attention.

One teacher in our research reflected on how the classroom atmosphere has shifted over the course of her career:

“Attitudes to learning have changed quite drastically… children used to be more focused and ready to learn.”
- Annie, 56, Bristol

Another teacher described how fragile attention can sometimes feel in a modern classroom:

“Sometimes you can see attention disappear in real time, one notification and half the room has mentally left the lesson.”
- Katherine, 36, Bournemouth

That observation is not necessarily a criticism of young people themselves.

It reflects the environment they are growing up within, one where attention is constantly pulled in multiple directions.

When online debates reach the classroom

For teachers, debates about phones or behaviour are real and visceral in their lives - both in school and at home.

They often show up in emails from parents, conversations at the school gate, or concerns raised during meetings.

Viral trends like the recent “red vs blue” posts illustrate how quickly online culture can spill into real school communities. Even when the threat is unclear, schools still have to respond — reassuring parents, monitoring behaviour and making sure students stay safe.

As one teacher reflected:

“Parents want us to keep phones out of school, but they also want instant updates about what’s happening.”
- Dylan, 41, Manchester

Another described the broader pressure teachers feel:

“There’s a feeling sometimes that schools are expected to solve every problem young people face.”
- Stephanie, 46, Cumbria

And sometimes the tension feels even more immediate.

“Sometimes it feels like you’re teaching the class while also managing a debate happening outside the school gates.”
- Claire, 43, Newcastle

Teachers are rarely the ones creating those debates.

But they are often the ones dealing with their consequences in their unique position in society.

Teachers are trying to teach inside a reality, in a world they’re learning too, and trying to set up the next generation with the tools they’ll likely need moving forward. They’re doing that all the while being a political puppet, and they’re never far from criticism.

In many ways, it’s a thankless task.

The shared challenge

Across this series we’ve heard three perspectives on life online.

Young people, who are growing up inside these platforms and navigating them every day.

Parents, who feel responsible for guiding their children through a digital world they didn’t experience themselves.

And teachers, who meet both of those realities in the classroom.

Each group sees the same landscape from a different vantage point. But one thing runs through all three perspectives.

Life online is not something happening to a single generation. It is something all of us are constantly learning to live with.

And perhaps the most useful conversations are not the ones that ask who should solve the problem but the ones that recognise we are all trying to navigate the same landscape, just from different places within it.

This series is built from our work across multiple projects over the past few years. Some were shorter, some longer. Some smaller, some bigger. But taken together, they’ve allowed us to build a view of how people of all ages experience being online and how that experience is often more thoughtful, conflicted and self-aware than the narrative in the press suggests.

“Save the children!”

In the current debate about social media, parents are more-often-than-not positioned as protectors - sometimes putting themselves into that position.

They are asked to monitor. To guide. To set boundaries. To decide what is safe and what is not.

Much of the focus is on what being online is doing to their children. Far less attention is paid to what it might be doing to them, as if they’re immune to the additive design of social media, platforms and technology.

Across our work, when social media comes up in conversations with parents, the starting point is usually concern about their children. They talk about cyberbullying and exposure, and their children not looking up from their screens. Of the outside being let inside via their kids’ devices. Of a sense that childhood now carries pressures they didn’t experience themselves - and that they’re ill-equipped to support.

One mum reflected that she:

“I can’t even imagine the pressure that is on kids these days.”
- Jenny, Bury, 39

For them trying to look after their kids, the world feels more public. More permanent. Or as one parent put it:

“If something goes wrong socially it doesn’t just stay in school anymore.”
- Helen, Nottingham, 37

Underneath much of this sits a question about responsibility: how do you protect your child in a space you didn’t grow up navigating yourself?

Parents are not only managing their own behaviour, they are trying to guide their children through a landscape that is still evolving. The rules of online interaction are not always clear, because they’re being written as every day passes.

For many parents, this creates a tension: They want their children to benefit from connection and opportunity, while also protecting them from harm.

But what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is subjective and shifts. As does the judgement of others.

Permanence and pressure

What feels different for many parents isn’t simply the amount of time spent online by their kids. It’s the sense that so much of what they do can stay there forever.

Messages can be screenshotted. Tone can be misinterpreted. Something written casually can travel further than intended. Several parents spoke about reminding their children that what they post may resurface years later.

There is a widespread awareness that communication online carries a different set of risks.

As we know from the work we do, in face-to-face conversations, awkward moments come and go and words can be clarified or reinforced by body language. In-person, misunderstandings can be repaired quickly and subtly.

Online, those same interactions can feel more wrongly interpreted and more permanent.

Parents often describe trying to help their children develop judgement in these situations. Knowing when to respond and when to ignore.

But this kind of judgement is difficult to teach when the environment itself is still relatively new for all involved, and language and interactions are evolving as the technology and platforms do.

Many parents feel they are navigating this alongside their children rather than ahead of them, trying to make sense of the consequences in real time. One adult participant captured that feeling:

“We’re like the guinea pigs for this whole thing…”
— Bernard, Bury, 43

The “we” in that statement is doing a lot of work… a union between children and adults.

The device as social infrastructure

At the same time, parents are pragmatic about what phones and messaging apps enable for themselves, their kids and the relationships between them and their kids.

Group chats organise football practice and birthday parties. WhatsApp carries school logistics and reminders about non-uniform days. Video calls connect families across distances.

The phone is not only a source of risk. It is essential infrastructure in modern times.

It holds together daily modern family life: the coordination, the updates, the reassurance that someone can be reached.

For separated families, it allows children to stay in touch with both parents more easily. For grandparents, it provides a window into everyday moments that might be missed.

Several parents spoke about the comfort of knowing their child could contact them quickly if something went wrong. As this parent put it:

“If they didn’t have a phone it would actually make life harder.”
- Ruth, Cardiff, 41

In this sense, the same device that provokes anxiety is also the thing that can make parents feel safer.

Like all tools - its uses are both positive and negative:
The phone is a tool that can connect, or bring hate.
The knife is a tool that can create, or kill.

Phones sit in the middle of daily life, supporting it and complicating it at the same time.

That tension between devices and platforms bringing positives and negatives permeate our conversations with nearly everyone we meet.

“Save the children!” - yes, but what about the adults?

Up to this point, we’ve focused on the impact of technology on the kids.

But what about adults? What about us reading this newsletter? How many of us could confidently say we don’t feel the urge to look at our phone more than is healthy? How many of us could say we’re immune to the algorithms?

Much like youths, adults talk about exposure, confidence, and the ways phones might shape their friendships or personal self-esteem.

Adults describe picking up their phone to check one thing and realising more time has passed than intended. They talk about scrolling in the evening when they meant to switch off, or replying to messages quickly between other tasks.

“You pick it up to check one thing and suddenly twenty minutes has gone.”
- Heather, 35, Cardiff

The time they get when their kids are finally in bed - after they’ve told their kids to put their phones down - is spent on their phones, more often than not doing exactly the same as their kids.

Adult couples, sat on the sofa, Netflix boxset playing in the background, with both adults glued to their phones… a common sight around Britain.

And for adults, the excuses can be reeled off naturally, as a defence mechanism that their addiction is different to that of their kids: “Oh I’m just replying to the School Parent’s group” or “I’m just reading about this actor on the TV now” or “I just need to check one thing”… all often said to try and convince ourselves we’re not addicted.

The quiet pressure of constant communication is a new phenomenon - the expectation or appearance that you’re always available and ready to respond: ever-present group chats that make you feel you need to reply instantly, notifications that arrive throughout the day, the sense that messages should be acknowledged quickly otherwise we - as adults - are in the grip of our own FOMO.

These experiences sound strikingly familiar, don’t they?

Yes, I’m sure we’d all recognise the pull of the platforms designed to hold attention, and even when we intend to use them differently, do we really?

Can we look ourselves in the mirror say we’re ‘better’ users of our phones compared to our kids?

Is our Linkedin behaviour any different to their TikTok behaviour? The behaviour of portraying ourselves in a particular way, then doom-scrolling, getting anxious when we see posts from particular people? Are adult behaviours really that different?

And yet the public conversation remains overwhelmingly focused on what social media is doing to young people.

We ask:

Whether it is harming their concentration?
Whether it is affecting their confidence?
Whether it is shaping their relationships?
Whether it affects their attention spans?
Whether it kills their in-person communication?
Whether it leads to them filling every moment with a screen?

… and as adults are we any different? Really?

Being more conscious with usage

We mentioned ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ usage of technology and social media in part one.

And if unconscious usage is part of the challenge of being online, then that pattern does not suddenly appear when someone turns thirteen. It exists across generations.

Perhaps the question is not only how adults help young people navigate online life.

Perhaps it is also how adults themselves are learning to live with it.

There’s a lot of finger-pointing in this cultural discussion, but an important lack of communion. A lack of a group of people coming together - who all use tech (and whose tech uses them) and saying ‘we are all learning this as we go along - let’s learn together’.

The battle lines have been drawn up in the press: ‘Youth v Social Media’ but we believe it’s a bigger challenge than that - we believe it is ‘Society v Tech’.

And let’s be clear: tech can bring huge positives in people’s lives, in society - but there’s no doubt the design of it is encouraging more unconscious usage that diminishes the value people get from it.

Which will be the first tech brand to proactively state: “We WANT you to use our tech, but we want you to use it in a way that is beneficial to YOU, not to US”?

The first step in solving a problem is admitting you have one.

And as adults, we need to stand up and admit: we have a problem as much as younger people.

In the final piece in this series, we’ll look at how teachers navigate this same landscape often standing between parental concern, adult usage and young people’s lived reality… and all the while being the focus of politicians, parents, guardians and the press…

This series is built from our work across multiple projects over the past year or so. Some were shorter, some longer. Some smaller, some bigger. But taken together, they’ve allowed us to build a view of how young people themselves experience being online and how that experience is often more thoughtful, conflicted and self-aware than the narrative in the press suggests.

The conversation is getting louder

There’s been a noticeable shift in the conversation about young people and social media in recent times - most noticeably with Australia banning social media for under 16s.

And in the UK the subject has been rising in cultural conversations, from proposals to restrict social media use for under-16s to the popularity of TV series like Adolescence last year, and there’s a growing sense that something about growing up online feeling like it’s a moving feast.

For this relatively new technology that we’re all growing with, there’s a sense that the balance between connection, pressure and protection hasn’t quite been worked out yet. In culture, in households, and within people themselves - adults and younger people alike.

What’s striking is how often these conversations happen about young people, rather than with them.

Being with them, not talking about them

Across multiple projects, and our own Youth Panel, we chat to teenagers often. Sometimes the subject matter is specific, sometimes it’s broader. But inevitably and often social media becomes a part of the discussion.

What is surprising us as we learn more isn’t how attached young people are to being online. It is how clearly they can describe what it feels like.

Not just of distraction in their lives, but the vivid descriptions they use of time slipping away. Of opening one app out of boredom, then moving to another without quite deciding to. Of realising, later, that they’d been online far longer than they meant to be. Of that time being invisible, until their Screen Time report reminds them how much they’ve been on their phones.

One young person described it like this:

“I spend lots of time on apps such as TikTok and Instagram. I often find myself getting bored scrolling through one app… then I switch and look onto another app.”
- Jade, 17 years old from Yorkshire

The mental load of always being connected

Many talk openly about the mental load of being constantly connected. About how notifications, messages and feeds make it harder to concentrate not just at school or college, but in everyday life. Several describe how online spaces blur into everything else, making it harder to sit with boredom, or to stay present with the people physically around them.

“Even if you’re doing something beneficial online, it’s still the phone.”
- Leah, 14, Kent

Online: The only real place to build and maintain relationships?

Whilst they live with this reality of unconscious use of their technology, there’s a tension from a social point of view: being online is where their friendships live.

For young people who are geographically spread out, living away from home, or simply trying to maintain busy social lives, online spaces are practical and necessary. They’re how relationships are sustained. How plans are made. How contact is kept during holidays, evenings, and moments when being together in person isn’t possible.

What sits underneath this is often labelled as FOMO - in a derogatory sense - but it doesn’t feel trivial to our youths.

For lots of them it’s not about missing content. It’s about the risk of slipping out of friendships altogether. Group chats move quickly. Plans are made informally. If you’re not there, you don’t just miss information, you miss moments. These are incredibly important moments in the formative years of these people.

With a lack of physical spaces for them to meet (something we touched on in the WPP Media ‘Shaping the Nation’ report), it’s left to the online world to not only support real-world relationships, but to forge them and lay foundations for them.

Adults have work, pubs, restaurants in which to forge and maintain friendship bonds. But youths? School and college is there - but for many of their hours there, they’re told to be silent and listen. So outside of their forced interaction via their education, where do they go, where they’re not being constantly told is not dangerous, or where they are being moved on by others?

Being online, then, isn’t always about wanting to engage endlessly. Sometimes it’s about staying connected enough not to be left behind.

“Over the summer break at Uni, I used stuff like Instagram and sent my friends things that I’d seen, discussed politics and stuff with them… just to maintain the relationship over the summer so that when I got back we were still connected.”
- Reece, Grimsby, 22

Trying to use social media on their terms

Young people don’t describe online life as wholly positive or negative. They talk about trade-offs. About usefulness tipping into excess. About knowing when scrolling stops feeling intentional and starts feeling like a default.

They recognise the software and algorithms are there to pull them in, and keep them mindlessly scrolling beyond the initial reason they opened the app.

Another young person reflected on how using social media helps her escape from the grim reality of the world at large:

“There’s so much distraction right now… you see all the horrible things going on, you feel powerless, you go and distract yourself.”
- Chloe, Dundee, 23

Several described actively trying to manage this by switching off certain features, limiting how long they spend on particular platforms, and avoiding content they know will make them feel worse or pull them in - and turn their conscious usage into unconscious usage.

“I only check social media for like 30 seconds at a time now… I avoid the reels at all costs.”
- Emily, Dundee, 22

Some talk about deliberately seeking out online spaces that feel more positive or productive: learning something new, keeping up with politics, staying connected to people they care about. All in the pursuit of creating a positive, conscious use of technology.

We’re feeling this growing sense of young people noticing the difference between when being online is a choice and when it’s simply become the default - pulled in by the tech companies’ algorithms.

Adults: Be careful before you judge

There is also a strong sense from them of frustration at how their online behaviour is often judged from the outside. Young people speak about feeling misunderstood as though being online constantly must mean wanting to be there, rather than it being shaped by habit that big tech has spent billions on building and perfecting.

In this sense, how many of us adults can say we are immune to this behaviour? And that we haven’t been pulled in too? And if so, who are we to judge?

The simple fact for youths - whether we like it or not - is that so much of their lives now happen in digital spaces.

This is down to multiple factors from the pandemic, to big tech, to the physical infrastructure of the UK not giving these people the places to meet, congregate and build their communities.

This is where the current debate about bans starts to feel slightly unfair to them.

After all, it’s adults that have thrust this technology into their lives, and used them as the guinea pigs while we all try and understand the social, mental and global implications of this highly addictive technology.

“We're like the guinea pigs for this whole thing and in 20 years time we might look back and think ‘Jesus’… I mean how do we allow these kids to be exposed to this kind of content?”
- Bernard, Bury, 43

And we now sit here, making decisions on their behalf, with the temerity to not even speak to them and try and understand their side of the argument.

Because the picture young people paint isn’t one of ignorance or helplessness - certainly not the ones we talk to.

It’s one of awareness, effort, and ongoing adjustment. They can articulate distraction. They can describe the benefits of stepping away. They can explain why certain platforms make them feel worse, and why others feel genuinely useful.

Two ears, one mouth

Listening to young people is an essential part of this discussion.

It’s something we do regularly, and something we’ll continue to do. Their voices need to be heard as much as everyone else’s in this discussion and others.

Coming next

In the second newsletter in this series, we’ll turn to parents and the anxiety, responsibility and desire for reassurance that often sit behind calls for stronger controls.

Some may label them extremists. Others may label them patriots.
We offer no judgement or labels. We offer only their voices.

We’ll share an unfiltered view of their worlds: how they see Britain today, the brands they buy, the frustrations they carry, and the moments that bring them joy.

If you’d like to learn more about the project, or discuss it with us, drop us a line here.

As we mentioned earlier in the week, we’re now providing clients with different ways to access our services. Yes we’re continuing to travel around the UK and spend depth time with a range of people, but we’re also starting to marry that up with remote ethnography, and some panels that we’re building.

This means we can access insight quickly, nimbly and more cost-effectively.

Yesterday, when Robert Jenrick was first sacked from the Conservatives, then defected to the Reform party, we asked a handful of our Behind The Flag participants what they thought of it.

Their speedy responses are below.

Robert Jenrick

Robert Jenrick had positioned himself as one of the Conservatives’ more visible, media-savvy figures. A recent leadership contender, he leaned heavily into the world of social media, presenting himself as a straight-talking reformer (small ‘r’ at that time!) inside a party many of its own voters feel has lost its way.

You could argue that to supporters, he looked like a bridge between establishment experience and harder-edged rhetoric.

Yesterday, that positioning collapsed. Jenrick was sacked by Kemi Badenoch amid claims he was plotting to defect. Within hours, he re-emerged alongside Nigel Farage, unveiled as Reform’s newest high-profile defection.

As the story broke, we ran a rapid Behind The Flag project - a quick dip with a handful of our participants. No long briefings. Just immediate reactions, captured while the news was still unfolding and emotions were still raw for some of them.

We’ve discussed Reform and politics with them before, and we know some are intending to vote Reform moving forward, some not.

What they think about it

What came back was split.

For some, Jenrick’s move simply confirmed what they already believed: that the Conservatives are finished, and Reform is the only credible vehicle for change.

For others, it felt less like momentum and more like further decay. Another chapter that chips away at trust in politics altogether, deepening a sense that the whole system needs reform (with a small ‘r’) and for some… Reform.

“ [The Conservatives] have gone from a great party to just hanging on by a fingernail, which for me, as a Conservative through and through is very, very sad… Whilst the party will not disappear, I think it would possibly take decades to recover from all of this, because the bottom line is they are just not listening to what the voter wants and they are not strong enough, and that’s that.”

 “I think it’s a good thing. I think him joining the Reform party only makes Reform stronger. Him defecting from the Tories shows a lot of instability in the Tories and it shows again, how popular Reform is becoming and how powerful reform are… their movement and their message is resonating with a lot more people and even people within the political space.”

“Absolute brilliant news… proof now what I’ve been saying for a longtime - the 2 main parties are deader than disco. The very destroyers of this country can’t repair it nor do they see the concerns of normal people who have common sense. …. Plus those people who thought the Reform party were a joke and didn’t have personnel with political experience… both Tories and Labour are haemorrhaging politicians, proof centre politics are wrong.
This is the right doing the right thing , with right wing values of make and work your own way and none of this free loading nonsense..
Hopefully this will be the start of things going back to the days when this country was a great place with its pride intact, where people work and earn a few quid and the sick, lame and lazy can’t sit and wait for handouts and hard work brings rewards and where we aren’t an embarrassment on the world stage.”

 “Another rat leaving a sinking ship. Yet more evidence as if we needed any more that most politicians, MPs, Ministers and Shadow Ministers are just in this for themselves, for their own job, for their own satisfaction…
[They] look after themselves and their mates… really don’t care about their constituents, or their party or their loyalty.”

It’s important to say this clearly: these participants are already deeply anti-Labour.

Against that backdrop, Labour’s response to Jenrick’s defection isn’t read as strength or authority, but as panic. It’s more proof, in their eyes, that Reform is becoming the pre-eminent party that needs to lead the country out of decline and back to its heyday.

Rather than diminishing Farage’s movement, Labour’s attacks are interpreted as validation: a signal that Reform matters enough to worry about, and that the political establishment feels under threat from outside its own ranks.

 “Without a shadow of a doubt [Kier Starmer’s response] proves that Reform are really getting under the skin of Labour and they just cannot handle it.”

 “We know Labour is not doing well. They’re in power now and they’re not doing well. So what Labour has to say is just fear-mongering… they’re really afraid of the opposition, which is Reform.”

 “The Labour response… is opportunistic, it’s point scoring, you know, reactive… I wouldn’t expect anything else really. Do you know they’ve done about 83 U-turns… They’re a shambles… no better than the last lot.”

Across the responses, Jenrick’s defection doesn’t look like a universal conversion moment.

For committed Reform supporters, it hardens belief and adds credibility: proof that senior figures see what they see. For disillusioned former Conservatives, it offers permission, a justification for leaving without feeling politically homeless.

But for others, it changes nothing at all.

“ My views have not changed in which party I support… I mean, obviously they have, because I would’ve been a Conservative through and through, but I have no choice. I feel in my heart that I have to go with Reform. I feel as though Nigel is building a very powerful army.”

 “Increasingly I’m getting fed up with a whole lot of them. I always study the manifestos when it’s coming up to election times and make decisions, and I have changed who I voted before and I will again in the future.
I will see which party best aligns to my beliefs and what I’m interested in. And those slightly change over time. There’s some constants… about social care and justice and NHS and things, but there’s nuances in terms of priorities in my mind… my family and my situation.”

“ I still feel like I’m more aligned with Reform. This reinforces that with him being at the Shadow Cabinet Ministry as well. He’s had a position of… importance. Him defecting from the Tories just shows how incompetent the Tories are…
I don’t believe the Tories are the way forward and I think him leaving suggests he agrees with the general consensus that Reform are the ones that are probably leaning towards winning the next election.”

Ultimately what will all this mean?

This moment looks less like a single turning point and more like another brick laid in a longer shift. Jenrick’s move won’t persuade everyone, and it may even reinforce cynicism among those already exhausted by political manoeuvring.

But for Reform, the hope is clear: their credibility compounds. That each defection makes the next one easier, and makes the Tories weaker and Reform stronger.

Ultimately leaving no place to go for ‘right’ voters to go other than Reform…

If you’d like to discuss any of these findings, drop us a line.

2025: A year of success and reflection

2025 was an interesting year for us here at Meet the 85%.

Commercially, it was our best yet. Three years we’ve been going, and in each of those three years our gross and net incomes have increased YoY.

And that matters to us, not as a boast, but because it gave us something important: choice.

Some space to stop, put our foot on the ball, and reflect on why more people were getting in touch, and what they were coming to us for.

We’ve always said - and we always say to our clients - we didn’t set the business up to rapidly scale or chase the money. We’ve had years of that aim in creative agencies, so we wanted to set something up that gives us something interesting to do, and earn a feasible and sustainable amount of money while we’re doing it. In essence - trying to live our IKIGAI!

And what became clear last year wasn’t just that our income was growing in volume, but it was growing in variety.

More conversations. More briefs. More types of questions landing in our inbox.

And that prompted a useful moment of reflection.

In the past we focused on one core way of delivering Reality Advantage™

Since we launched the business, Meet the 85% has been becoming known for one thing: On-Demand UK Tours.

Large-scale ethnographic studies where we travel the length and breadth of the UK for a range of clients - creative and media agencies and brands.

We spend real time with real people in their homes, pubs, cafes and in their communities and become a part of their daily lives. And we’d bring that rich, deep reality back to our clients.

It’s work we’re proud of. (That video is one of the rare ones we can share).

And thankfully our clients seem to love it. And it remains a powerful way to deliver what we believe in: Reality Advantage™.

But that focus - intentional at the time - also meant something else.

That specific methodology and size of project became the default way people understood they could work with us. Meeting many people, taking weeks or months to go deep, and costing tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds.

If your brief didn’t look like a UK tour, it wasn’t always obvious there was still a conversation to be had with us.

In reality, there often was.

The most important part of any brief isn’t the budget, it’s the question

So, if we go right back to our core, Meet the 85% exists to help answer interesting questions to help our clients achieve their objectives.

That’s always been true. It’s the reason we set the business up in the first place, and it sits at the heart of our Reality Advantage™ thinking.

We’re here to help brands and businesses understand the realities people are actually living, not the ones beautifully packaged up in trends reports that are scared to tell clients the (sometimes) undesirable truths they need to confront and plan for.

Last year reminded us of that.

Over the course of 2025, we worked on briefs that ranged from the low thousands to the hundreds of thousands of pounds. We worked on long-term studies and short, sharp ‘in-and-out’ projects for a range of clients.

And whilst there are many projects we can’t talk about publicly, we had projects that stretched across categories, audiences and different parts of everyday life that make up the realities of people all over the UK.

And when we stood back and reflected we realised: what united the best of the projects wasn’t scale.
It wasn’t budget.
It was the interestingness of the question or hypotheses that clients needed help with.

Some questions need deep, immersive ethnography. Some need faster, lighter-touch ways in. Some need space to think, challenge, connect dots and explore implications together. Some just need the right participants, and the right methodology to quickly get a handle on an interesting area.

The mistake would be to assume there’s only one ‘proper’ way to bring reality to those investigations.

But of course, there are many…

Being clearer about the different ways we can help deliver Reality Advantage^™️

But we realised when we were chatting to potential new clients, they still thought about us in a very specific way.

So starting today, we wanted to be more explicit about something that’s been true for a while: there are different ways to work with Meet the 85%, and that helps us help you answer really interesting questions.

Those ways are:

• On-Demand UK Tours

  Large-scale ethnographic studies, travelling the UK (and we’re starting to go beyond!) and spending time with people where life actually happens. Observing people as individuals, families and groups and going deep with them over the course of entire mornings, afternoons, their day, or several days. We’ve been to the pub with participants, been on the school run, observed mealtimes and everything in between. This gives us really rich outputs such as documentary films and immersive presentations and workshops.

• Glimpses of Reality

  Smaller, more agile, often remote ethnographic work - designed to get to the nub of reality faster, and into places that are more difficult with researchers following with cameras. Setting participants prompted tasks, weekly missions and jumping on quick calls with them. Sometimes this is with participants for a short amount of time, sometimes we work with them for weeks and months throughout a project timescale. Either way, we can get to interesting findings quickly and more cost-effectively.

• Conversations at Scale

  We can give access to bespoke qualitative panels we’re building where we are pooling realities, surfacing themes, and creating collaborative outputs when needed. This is us really just doing stuff we’re interested in - learning about what’s going on with Youths, the Heartland and those who are Behind the Flag. Looking into areas we’re interesting in, but also clients are starting to tap into those communities too for quick dips of insight, powerful quotes and to sense check thinking.

• Strategic Consultancy

  Access to our brains and experiences. As well as about 20 years in Brand Strategy, we now have the benefit of hundreds of visits, thousands of conversations and tens of thousands of miles travelling around the UK and understanding what’s going on in lots of different people’s lives. So whilst we can’t give away confidential insight clients have paid for, we can ground our thinking in everything we’ve seen, heard and learned. And some clients have been buying us for the odd day here or there for projects or pitches in that regard. A cost-efficient shortcut that quickly adds value to your thinking.

And of course we believe the best way to deliver Reality Advantage™ is often by combining some of these or ticking all the boxes.

But brilliant work doesn’t depend on ticking every box, every time. One of the above routes, used well, can still unlock something powerful if it’s right for the question at hand.

Some examples of projects using the above methodologies in 2025:

• “How can we evolve our F&B and Entertainment offer for holidaymakers?” - Holiday Brand

• “How can we have an always-on project where we can truly understand family life (beyond the data we have) over a year?” - Tech Brand

• “How can we bring our Audience Segments to life so the entire organisation can buy into them and understand them?” - Insurance Brand

• “How can you quickly help us understand what ‘value’ means for a supermarket pitch?” - Media Agency

• “We’re working on a pitch, can you work with the planning team to help build out their hypotheses and add texture to the audiences?” - Creative Agency

• “What does ‘premium’ mean in the furniture category?” - PR Agency

• “What do the middle classes, and the ‘far right’ think about the recent budget, so we can share with our FS client?” - Creative Agency

All worked on because we thought the questions were really interesting, and with budgets ranging from a few grand to hundreds of thousands…

Evolved products, evolved team.

Of course with different sized and shaped projects, comes a different need and different skillset. Because (some people don’t like to admit this and bullshit to all and sundry) we do our best work when we’re passionate about it, and we’re all passionate about different things!

So it’s worth stating very clearly: Meet the 85% is more than one person. It’s a business that always was, and is, a partnership.

Hannah has been leading online communities for the past couple of years, and helping run some of the Operations making sure everything ticks along smoothly for our clients.

She’s been behind the scenes for some clients, client-facing for others.

We’re trying to navigate bringing up two young children, whilst balancing owning and running a business and attempting to be good parents. (Again - you’ll get no bullshit here - we’re trying to do amazing work for our clients and also be around for our kids. Sometimes we get it right more than other times.)

As our kids grow, Hannah’s many roles in life change. (I’m sure there are many working mums and working parents who would recognise this situation…)

But 2026 is the year where Hannah’s role grows even more with Meet the 85%.

She’s an expert in working with participants and groups of participants remotely, and a master of building ‘relationships’ (of an ethical, research kind) with them over time. Her work has already built multiple strong client relationships and I’m sure more will benefit from her brain and time on their projects!

We also have a dedicated Business Director, Alice, who we work with ongoing helping us across the majority of our projects, too. Alice brings a range of skills from years of experience working on behaviour change clients in creative agencies.

Beyond Hannah and Alice we have a team of trusted specialists we build projects with: expert Film Makers, Editors, Researchers, Strategists, and Polymaths.

This means we can work on more, and different sized and shaped projects concurrently.

Same belief. More doors.

So there you go.

More ways to work with us, but I guess you could say nothing fundamental has changed.

We still believe brands and businesses make better decisions when they understand the realities people are living.

We still believe in a Reality First, Brand Second approach to research. And we still care far more about the question than the size of the budget attached to it.

What has changed is that we’re making the doors more visible.

So if you’ve got an interesting question - big or small - give us a knock. And if you’re not even sure whether your question is interesting yet, give us a shout anyway. We’re always up for that conversation.

We have our Behind the Flag panel (made up of those who support flag waving in the UK and/or attended the Unite the Kingdom marches), our Heartland panel (made up of a range of middle class homes across the UK) and our Youth panel (made up for 13 year-olds to those in their early 20s). They’re only handfuls of people, but they’re rich in texture and depth, they live the length and breadth of the UK, and deliver powerful truths from the realities of real people’s lives.

We’ve been working with them for our clients (to offer quick, cost-effective turnarounds and quick dips of reality into specific subjects). But we also work with them on things we find interesting ourselves - areas we self-fund for our own interest.

2026

For the final newsletter post of last year, we asked a range of people from our panels about Christmas.

Well, we also asked them some questions about 2026 too.

We asked them simply: “How does next year feel to you?”

A simple question, to a handful of ‘normal people’ around the UK. This post isn’t some super-collated ‘trends’ report, put together by out-of-touch brands, analysts with skin in the game, or AI-obsessed investors. It’s how real real people around the UK are feeling about 2026.

And given how 2025 was for lots of people, and what the news cycle and their social feeds focused on, we expected a bit of fear and doom and gloom. And we found it.

But, it’s not all negative.

Because while the first few paragraphs of this email might feel like you’re reading a doom scroll, if you keep reading you’ll find that once our participants stopped looking at the news and stuff around them, and started looking at their own lives and home, the mood changed.

It transformed from pessimism to optimism.

Yes, guarded optimism for some, but optimism nonetheless.

Part 1: The worries of 2026

When you ask real, everyday people to look at the macro picture of 2026, the mood for many around the country is dark. Sorry if you don’t want to read that. Sorry if it takes you out of your comfort bubble a little.

But it’s the truth. And that’s what we exist to deliver.

For some people - like our Behind the Flag participants, the frustration has hardened beyond negativity into something more volatile. Time is passing and their feelings and beliefs aren’t dissipating, they’re hardening. They don’t just feel ignored - they feel like the social contract has snapped, and something needs to happen in response to change the status quo.

One participant didn’t hold back on his dread for the year ahead. You can hear it in his voice. The exhaustion, the trepidation, the frustration:

 “2026 is just fear. Fear. Absolute fear. I’m 50 years old… seen it all… lived through the Thatcher years… lived through lunatic Blair coming in. Blair was the start of this fucking evil, EU driven, absolute quagmire of life. I think about our forefathers and the respect they had, and I used to think that they was hardworking. Well, they were, but I think if I brought my grandparents back here, they wouldn’t stand for it. And I think that’s why me as a white man, middle aged is being targeted because they know that’s the last bit of resistance.”

Another Behind the Flag participant went even further. For her, the tension in the country has reached a boiling point, and she feels something needs to change in 2026 for the pressure cooker valve to be released:

 “I know it sounds awful, but I’d like to see Civil War on the streets. I think people [like me] - we’re all at boiling point. We’re all teetering on the edge of something big, and it’s either gonna be doom, doom, doom, or something big and positive is gonna happen to make people like me feel happy again because right now… I don’t feel that at all.”

Both of those participants are in their 50s, and probably a little more discontented than a bunch of you reading this… so you may be inclined to think they are ‘extreme’ or ‘far right’ but as we’ve said, we try not to label people. However, we do feel it’s important to hear their voices.

But it’s not just the older generation - maybe slightly further ‘right’ than some - feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders in 2026.

Our Youth panel, usually the source of energy, is feeling the pressure too, but for very different reasons. For them, 2026 isn’t about politics; it’s about living with the pressure of a system they can’t control, and the creeping anxiety of technology. Whether it’s the scrutiny of social media or the threat of AI changing the careers they’re yet to build. One 14-year-old told us:

“ I’m always in school and I’m always working hard so that I can be my very best. And… I need to start thinking about what I want to do with the future and what I want to be doing years from now. Not just what’s happening right now in this year.
I also think everyday life for everybody’s gonna change because, I don’t know, I just feel like social media… every year social media gets more advanced and things with such as AI and… everything just gets harder as everybody, everything advances.
So I feel like for everybody it’s gonna be… it’s harder just to get going with your daily life because like everything’s becoming more expensive. And then you’ve gotta worry about AI… because now at school you’ve gotta write everything out to make sure that it’s not AI.
… it’s just not gonna be like good for society.”

She carries on, talking about the impact of exams and the preparation needed for them.

Over the next two years, there’ll be about 1.5 million teenagers sitting their GCSEs across the UK. That’s a lot of teenagers studying, worrying, feeling anxious. This is how it manifests for a typical teenager:

“My life is gonna be completely controlled by exams and revising. So it’s just gonna be scary. It’s scary knowing now that this is gonna be the last bits of like actual freedom that I’m gonna have for a while. Because then after my GCSEs, you’ve gotta go into A levels. So I just feel like… I’ll enjoy the first part of the year when I’m still in year 10 more than I will the second half of the year.”

And if we stopped the email there, this would be a very depressing email to open on your first week back…

BUT!

Part 2: The hopes and optimism around 2026

A strange thing happened when started chatting about different parts of their lives. Once they got the fears off their chests and started talking about their their hopes for 2026, the tone shifted completely. You could feel the energy shift.

We found optimism!

The Youth: Less cynical, more hopeful!

Whilst the news and the feeds of a lot of us scream about a broken Britain, our Youth panel sees something else entirely. They see the country from a more optimistic point of view - a country that is improving, healing, connecting.

Listen to our 14-year-old again. Moments after talking about the fear of exams, she switched to a genuine belief in human kindness - one that she feels is growing and getting better in the UK:

 “I feel like we’ve gotten a a lot better as a country at helping other people. I went into the Trafford Centre yesterday and - I know they do it in America - they have these angel trees and just thought it was really nice to see other people being generous and helping other people. And I just feel like it’s something that we do, we’re getting better at as a society and I feel like it’ll just keep getting better as we go into 2026. And the same with stuff like in our local community. Like we’ve done loads of work for food banks near us and it just feels like we’re getting a lot closer as a community, as Britain as like a country.”

This echoes what we hear from this cohort often: a hope, a belief, a feeling that the UK is a tolerant, caring and optimistic nation. We tend to see those feelings even out a little as our teenagers enter adulthood - as more adult reality enters their lives.

And of course we’re dealing with people’s beliefs here - not scientifically robust, nationally representative ‘truths’ - so who knows which side of the fence is ‘right’ or not? Does it matter? Is it a matter of opinion, or a matter of perception?

Whatever it is, this optimism around the UK becoming a more caring society is a stark, hopeful, optimistic contrast to the pessimistic rhetoric from some of the older generations we work with.

The Heartland: Fortress Optimism

For our Heartland panel - made up of different aged middle class participants from across the UK - optimism comes a bit closer to home, it’s about the home and the sanctuary it brings.

Our students look forward to the sanctuary of the family home over Christmas, our parents look forward to quality time with their children and their parents as multi-generational family time takes centre stage. And we see from some that this sense of sanctuary is set to grow in 2026.

We spoke to one of our participants - a SENCO teacher and mother. Her 2026 looks bright not because of government policy, it’s despite government policy which will squeeze her middle class finances even more.

This means her and her partner are working harder than ever in their home which is undergoing significant renovation, renovations they had to pause during the summer due to the financial squeeze.

Her optimism is built from the luck - sheer luck - that her mortgage is up for renewal and it’s looking likely that her and her partner will get a better deal than when they remortgaged during the Truss era. But this optimism is prefaced with the hope that how hard they are working will recede:

“ I would like [my partner] to slightly work a little bit less and enjoy some… I think he’s done nine days in a row, currently without a day off… but after taking the hit with the extension, our mortgage goes down next year. So that is a great thing to look forward to… so that’s going to make a significant impact for us… even if it’s just £300 a month. That’s brilliant, so I am really looking forward to [2026].”

A little bit of digging on ChatGPT tells us that about 1.8m fixed rate mortgages end in 2026 in the UK. So lots of people’s finances will change. Because remember that 1.8m mortgages doesn’t mean 1.8m people.

Those 1.8m mortgages mean - approximately - about 4.9m people. That’s about 3.6m adults and 1.3m children whose lives will be impacted by mortgage renewals in 2026.

And whilst it’s hard to predict whether those people are on 5-year fixes (which means they’ll likely be paying more when they remortgage) or on 2-year fixes (which likely means they’ll be paying less when they remortgage) - either way it means probably the biggest impact to their finances over the next year - positively or negatively - is down to their mortgage.

What impact will that have on your brand?
Will some of your buyers be trading down more?
Will some be splashing out more?
And how do you track the reality of that beyond your brand and category?

As we told a client recently: “Your biggest competitor isn’t your enemy in the category, it’s mortgage rates and inflation.”

This was because one of our participants had opted to buy a competitor instead of their brand, and we found out it was nothing to do with brand perception or the new campaign they’d just launched. It was because their mortgage rate had changed. And of course the brand had no way of knowing that other than to go and physically speak to people.

That’s because brands love to track the category and competitors, and compare to the Nth degree things like ‘brand love’ or ‘worth paying more for’ or media spend data.

But that myopic category-led research misses the reality of the above - the reality that someone might stop buying you because their mortgage has gone up.

Reality First, Brand Second

As we head into 2026, it’s easy to get swept up in the trends around you: the AI, the cool campaigns, the industry patting itself on the back, or indeed looking over its shoulder worryingly - all packaged up in beautifully designed PDFs.

But it’s imperative we still listen to people. Real people. Your customers and your prospects.

Understanding the realities they are living is essential to you achieving your business objectives and will give you the Reality Advantage™.

We often see businesses relying heavily on big data and macro trends to plan their year. But data often misses the nuances of people’s real lives. It captures the what, but it misses the human messiness of the why.

If you really want to understand the realities of people’s lives in 2026, you can’t just track them; you need to engage with them.

That’s what we do. We inject reality into your strategy by talking to the people behind the stats. We’re here to help you make sure your 2026 strategy is built on real lives, not just spreadsheets.

Happy New Year!

We have our Behind the Flag panel (made up of those who support flag waving in the UK and/or attended the Unite the Kingdom marches), our Heartland panel (made up of a range of middle class homes across the UK) and our Youth panel (made up for 13 year-olds to those in their early 20s). They’re only handfuls of people, but they’re rich in texture and depth, and powerful truths from the realities of people’s lives all over the UK.

We work with them for our clients (to offer quick, cost-effective turnarounds and quick dips into specific subjects) but we also work with them on things we find interesting ourselves - areas we self-fund for our own interest. (One of the bonuses of running your own company!)

So we thought we’d ask a handful of people from across all the panels, about Christmas, to close the year out.

Christmas 2025

We wanted to know how they were feeling about the festive season, what traditions they were looking forward to, and how they reacted to the barrage of festive advertising that accompanies each year.

What we found was a reminder that while the calendar date is the same for everyone, every year, the experience people have is radically different depending on who you are and what phase of life you’re in.

The magic of the past vs The reality of now

For brands, Christmas is often painted as a universal moment of connection. It’s the Christmas of the movies, of our memories. But when you listen to the voices on our panels, you hear variations on the theme.

For our Youth participants, the magic is still very much alive, even if the reality of adulthood is starting to creep in.

One participant told us about the sheer physical excitement that still lingers:

“I love the memories of that... waking up and being like, Oh my gosh. Santa’s been! And then running downstairs...”

But even for them, the “real world” is intruding. It’s not just about Santa anymore; it’s about the pressure of the school system:

“But this year it’s a bit different ‘cause I’m doing my mock exams, so it’s a bit more stressful this year... So it’s kind of taken the fun out of it.”

Contrast that with a retiree from our Heartland panel. Here, the feeling wasn’t about magic or stress, but a quiet sense of loss. A transition. The kids have grown up, the house is quieter, and the traditions are slipping away.

“We had a group of friends that we always, um, went around on Christmas Eve... but, um, now it’s, um, we, we, I say we’re not so much family around... A lot of these, uh, traditions are dying out.”

For him, the fight is to keep the flame alive for the next generation, even when things are changing:

“You’ve gotta keep the memories going just for the grandchildren’s sake.”

Other powers at play at Christmas?

Then we move to our Behind the Flag participants. And this is where the disconnect with the “joyful” marketing narrative is most obvious.

For some, Christmas isn’t just a holiday; it’s a reminder of financial struggle and what they perceive as cultural erasure happening in the country.

One participant didn’t mince his words about how the “elites” are ruining the season:

“The elites are obsessed with consumerism... They can’t take Christmas away but they can dilute it.”

There is a profound sense that the “traditional” Christmas is being stolen or diluted:

“Once upon a time, Christmas was real Christmas... they’re just trying to… take away the Christian element... [because] it’s not inclusive, you know. Well, unfortunately it’s a Christian country.”

As you could see by Tommy Robinson in London at the weekend...

Of course, it’s not all doom. One of our Behind the Flag participants still loves the party:

“Love Christmas. Always have done. I’m a big kid. Love the run up to it... Christmas markets… drinking, mulled wine.”

These traditions come through loud and clear - especially for those Heartlanders active in their community, and with kids:

 “Christmas Eve is a tradition. Our village do a walk to the pub and everybody gets together and kids just some crisps… and it’s a quick drink and a dog walk and… really lovely. And we always have a Chinese takeaway on Christmas Eve night. Fire on… films on… sprinkle all our reindeer dust.”

Christmas Advertising

We asked them to watch three ads that we picked at random (because we like them!): Tesco, EE, and John Lewis.

Overall, one of the views we hear a bit from people when we travel around - not just our Behind the Flag participants - is how ‘box ticky’ Christmas ads seem to be. How much people see and feel that seem to feel that the ads need to represent (or over-represent depending on what you believe) many ethnicities, ages, genders etc.

One of our Behind the Flag participants mentions it here, alluding to the fact that in his mind maybe we’ve gone past ‘peak woke’:

“ It’s gammon bait and I don’t sign up to it… it’s not as bad as it was at the start…”

Which brings us onto…

EE

The ad was liked by all participants, but one of the Youth panel missed the nuance around the ‘double’ element of the idea:

 “It felt really disjointed. It felt like there was one part that was about the sign language, and then there was another part that was about spending time with your family, and they didn’t really mesh together well enough.”

Tesco

Tesco resonated with all the participants too, the authenticity, the ‘not perfect’ elements of Christmas resonating with people:

“The Tesco advert is just so true. It is just so real. Is just so refreshing... I think adverts have been so culled over the last few years because of all this nonsense that goes in the world…”

John Lewis

Lastly, whilst some of the nuance of the John Lewis ad seemed a little lost on some of the Youth panel, it hit the Heartland and Behind the Flag participants right in their nostalgic hearts:

“John Lewis, I absolutely love because it’s me. That was my generation. I danced in those nightclubs to those tracks... It absolutely resonated with me. In fact, the first time watched it, it did bring me to tears.”

That’s your lot for 2025

This is our final newsletter of 2025, and we’d like to say a big thank you to the thousands of people who receive this email every time we send it out.

We get quite a few of you replying, sharing thoughts, sharing praise - and it’s always welcome.

2025 has been a hard one for lots of people and that’s not been lost on us.

For us it’s been another good year - another year of growth - but beyond that a really fulfilling year. We’ve worked with some brilliant clients on some really interesting briefs of different sizes and durations. From one-year studies that span the entire UK, to quick turnaround 1-week projects. To you all: Thank you.

We’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, and a peaceful break. 🎄

Keep your eyes peeled in the first week of January. We’ve asked a bunch of our panels what they think 2026 will bring… and it’s a bit different to the ‘trends’ you’ll all be drowning in…

Some may label them extremists. Others may label them patriots.
We offer no judgement or labels. We offer only their voices.

Over the coming months, we’ll share an unfiltered view of their worlds: how they see Britain today, the brands they buy, the frustrations they carry, and the moments that bring them joy.

If you’d like to learn more about the project, or discuss it with us, drop us a line here.

The BBC

Over the past few weeks, we asked a handful of our Behind the Flag participants to talk about one of Britain’s most argued-about institutions: the BBC.

As ever we asked for their feelings, their thoughts, their reality:

• How they see the BBC today

• What they would change if it were theirs to run

• How it compares to other pillars of British identity

• Who they believe would gain or lose if it disappeared.

What came back was raw, revealing, and often contradictory as these things tend to be.

A mix of nostalgia, frustration, affection… and a sense that the BBC isn’t just a broadcaster, but a symbol of where Britain feels it is right now.

Rather than write a long essay about it, we’ve pulled everything into a short PDF that you can download below.

The Bbc Behind The Flag Meet The 85%

1.65MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Some verbatim quotes that made up the content in the report above:

On impartiality:

“One of the best examples of this was during Brexit. They were obviously covering both sides of the debate and they went to a really clean state of the art factory. I think it was JCB, with young people there all talking about how important it’s to stay in the EU. And then the counter argument, they went to working men’s social club in deprived part of West Yorkshire. About nine o’clock in the morning with a handful of elderly, not the most intelligent people talking about Brexit. And I just thought it was… blatant, cruel…”

On who runs the BBC:

“I just think middle class socialists, the socialist elite, the metropolitan elite… they’re sitting there… with these virtue signalling ways that they have, and I just think it’s at Britain’s detriment. I really do. To sum up: the BBC was a great institution, yet it is [now] part of the establishment. It’s gone.”

On who really reports the truth:

“You only need to pick up the paper to know that GB News have really overtook BBC News for getting the truth out there.”

On what would happen if the BBC disappeared:

“I think it’ll be everyday people that benefit. Because obviously with the BBC it’s quite corrupt and people like… politicians… whoever funds it… foreign billionaires… all these [people] that push their narrative through the BBC. That’s our main source of News. [So]… not having a BBC means news will become less bias. We’ll have other news sources… like GB News for example, who… are less biased.”

If you’re interested in how our Diverse Discontents see one of Britain’s biggest institutions, you’ll want to read the PDF above.

If you’d like to discuss any of these findings, drop us a line.

We’ll be posting regularly in this series, and we’ll be touching on a bunch of different areas:

• The brands that our participants are passionate about and why

• Their groceries

• Why they fly flags and why they supported the marches

• Where they get their news from, who they trust and why

• Which political party - if any - represents them (and who would get their vote)

• … and more

Please do drop us a line if you’d like to chat about any of the findings.