The address is: Highgate Cemetery, Swain’s Lane, N6 6PJ.

It has tens of thousands of important dead people you’ll have no idea were important: writers, artists, politicians, film producers, oligarchs, and spies. Have you heard of Peter Shaffer? The famous author of Equus?

He was massive in the 70s and 80s. Won two Tony Awards with Equus and Amadeus, adapted them for the screen himself, and was nominated for an Academy Award for both. Amadeus won eight Oscars, including Best Picture. It was directed by Miloš Forman, a prominent director almost nobody remembers either. Shaffer wrote another play, Lettice and Lovage, for Maggie Smith (you know her), and she won a Tony for Best Actress.

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Near Shaffer, there’s Marx, who probably turns in his grave every time someone buys his made-in-China finger puppet at the entrance kiosk.

Cannes Lions is coming up, and the jury list feels a bit like Highgate Cemetery: I don’t recognise most of the names. There’s a Global Head of Brand and Client Experience, Regional Marketing Lead APAC, founding board member of the IAA’s APAC B2B Advisory Council, and two-time Effie winner. That’s all one person, by the way, who wrote all of it about themselves thinking you’d decipher the abbreviations and be impressed. They’re awarding Lions for Creative B2B.

I promise, this is not a “who are these people” hot take. Swap this year’s jury for a room of famous creative directors trading favours across their networks, and you’d get roughly the same quality of winners. I’m sure the founding board member of the IAA’s APAC B2B Advisory Council is perfectly qualified to press a number between one and nine and produce an opinion about why one case should beat another.

But every time I see a bio like that, I can’t help but wonder: what kind of childhood dream has this person given up to acquire all the letters in their title? Are they happy? Was it worth it?

What do I know, maybe they are and it was, maybe they have a meaningful and fulfilling job that improves the lives of millions, but it’s the two-time Effie at the end that gives me doubts.

Once you start counting your advertising awards, you know you’re screwed.

One formerly #1 Worldwide Creative Director who’s now in his late sixties and successfully retired with supposedly millions to his name, is still walking around counting his Cannes Lions. He says he won over 500 (presumably, a fair share as a creative, the rest – as the guy at the top who’s automatically credited for everyone’s work). If one person can win 500 of anything, they should probably ask themselves whether it’s worth winning in the first place. If someone could win 500 Nobel Prizes in their lifetime, it would become a science fair medal.

We all know it, but there’s no Nobel prize to win in advertising, so we excavate whatever meaning we can get: jury duties, titles, promotions. And nothing really hits the spot, so it’s like a drug that you take for the high the first time, and the rest – just to stop feeling miserable.

Have you ever been on those juries? If you haven’t, you’re not missing much. The judges are stuck in a cold, dark room for five days watching hundreds of boring, confusing and exaggerated case studies. If you think the shortlists are bad, be grateful you never saw the long-lists. By the time the jury gets to the metals, it’s all a blur. They’ll want nothing more than to leave the room and get blackout drunk on expensable rosé, but they’ll all feel very important. I bet Peter Shaffer never felt as important as an average Cannes Lions juror placed in the Carlton Hotel.

There’s something about that whole setup that fucks with your head. It’s probably the same social mechanism that makes random people in focus groups voice the most bizarre opinions in the most self-assured tone.

I’ll show you just one jury picture from an old D&AD annual, and you’ll get the vibe.

What is it about being on an advertising jury that does this to a human face? You can see exactly what they’re thinking: “This is it. I’ve arrived. I’m judging Art Direction at D&AD. Nobody can touch me. Look, Mum, no hands.”

The guy on the far left with his arms folded, looking at you like you just stole his sandwich, wrote this lovely message to the industry:

These are highly intelligent people with real creative skills. Most of them have proper artistic training. And they’ve decided to spend their lives on this:

Which is a great ad. Funny, memorable, beautifully shot. But is it good enough to be anyone’s lifetime creative achievement? Would we still care if it weren’t One of The Most Awarded Ads of All Time? Did everyone in the credits feel sufficiently important? Or did they need four hundred Lions more?

Feeling important is the primary currency of advertising, because the actual money goes to shareholders whose names we’ll never know. Cannes Lions makes roughly £130M gross every year. Advertising networks make billions. Brands make tens of billions. Most Cannes Lions judges and winners make just enough to get a mortgage, private health insurance, and put their kids in a private school.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not nothing, it’s the ultimate middle-class dream. But would we still choose this dream if housing, healthcare and education were universally decent and available to everyone?

The Soviet Union had many ugly flaws, but one thing it didn’t have was famous advertising creative directors. It just didn’t occur to anyone creatively inclined to make selling products their life’s ambition. Artists and writers still promoted consumer goods, but they never considered it their primary calling.

The writer and art director for these were Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Rodchenko, a poet and a constructivist artist. Mayakovsky’s poems are still loved by millions and you can see Rodchenko’s work at MoMA and Tate.

For his famous slogan: “Nigde krome kak v Mosselprome” / “Nowhere but in Mosselprom” Mayakovsky was paid 3 roubles (roughly $27 today). When a journalist chastised him for selling out, he said: “In America they pay hundreds and thousands of dollars for lines like that. Here everyone ought to be paid honestly for their labour.”

It’s interesting that “paid honestly” in this context means “paid for the effort it took to produce”, which everyone understood wasn’t very much compared to a good poem. For poems Mayakovsky was getting 2 roubles per line from his publishers. The popular story is that he invented his signature stepladder lines to get paid more per line.

It went like this (translated by Andrey Kneller):

Impossible, 1922

I can’t lift the grand piano
all on my own,
(the steel safe
is too heavy too)
But if not the safe
or the piano,
alone,
how could I carry my heart back from you?
Bankers know:
“In money, we bathe.
If the pockets are full, —
place it all in the safe.”
I’ve hid
all my love
into you
like riches in steel,
and walked on, like Croesus,
but wealthier still.
and,
if desire really demands it,
I’ll take out a smile,
or whatever
the cost,
and party all night
with all of my friends there
spending some fifteen lyrics, at most.

For these 26 lines he got 52 roubles, about $475 in today’s money, 18 times more than for the slogan. Dedicating his entire life to advertising would have made zero sense to him, both creatively and financially. Which, let’s agree, is the saner position in any society but the one obsessed with maximising shareholder profits.

For some reason, at this point in history, through a series of random choices made by nobody in particular, we arrived at a socio-economic arrangement where our time, energy, and resources are spent producing thousands of different detergent brands globally, making ads for all of them to compete with each other, and awarding a Grand Prix to the best one.

Even in the most hedonistic civilization of discerning detergent connoisseurs, we could probably manage with fifteen. We already have enough clothes for three generations. We have 1.7 billion cars, sitting idle 95% of the time – enough for every single human, if used through a car-sharing app. Plenty of food, if we stop throwing it away.

We could have spent all this time, effort, and resources on having fun, making art, and building useful things that last. Instead, we chose to prioritise profits, giving each other hundreds of awards every year to feel important, as a cheap anaesthetic for the lack of meaning.

Eventually, we all end up dead and forgotten. The only difference is whether you’ll be forgotten for writing a play that won a Tony, or forgotten for a case study that won a B2B Lion.

If you’re not going to Cannes this year, maybe visit Highgate Cemetery that week. You’ll feel more alive.

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First off: if you want to sue anyone in Britain, prepare to be bored for a very long time. I knew it would be slow, I had no idea it would be this slow.

I resigned in April 2024 and filed the claim around the same time. It took nearly a year to assemble a legal team and get funding. The Financial Times broke the story in March 2025. The first case management hearing was in April 2025. Then the final hearing was listed for May 2028.

Twenty-twenty-eight. I’m not convinced law will still be a thing by then. Will we all get nuked in the third world war? Will cases be judged by an AI-powered microwave? Will barristers be wearing hazmat suits under their wigs? Who knows.

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It’s not hard to see how this basically gives a carte blanche to employers. “Sure, sue us. It’ll cost you £90K+VAT just to take it to trial, we’ll see you in five years, and good luck winning more than you’ve spent on lawyers. Also, our legal fees are tax-deductible and yours aren’t. Have fun.”

Every HR department in Britain bets on employees going away without a fuss, so it’s worth subverting that expectation every so often. There’s a quote attributed to Irish judge Sir James Matthew: “In England, justice is open to all – like the Ritz Hotel.” I think the rest of us need to start paying regular visits to the Ritz to upset the cosy vibe.

If a right exists on paper but takes four years and £100k to enforce, it effectively doesn’t exist for the average person. People went on months-long strikes and died for employment rights — letting them vanish through a lack of imagination would be an embarrassing way to lose them.

So: we asked to move the case to a less backlogged tribunal. The ET refused, essentially telling me that unless I’m dying, I can wait until 2028 (“terminal illness or reduced life expectancy” as the illustrative bar for transfers). We appealed on the grounds that this violates Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights — the right to a fair trial within a reasonable time. The appeal has been classified as Category P, meaning the case raises a point of law of national importance. The hearing for the appeal is supposed to happen in 2026. The final hearing is still set for 2028.

Apart from that, absolutely nothing has happened in a year.

Which brings me to this very important update:

I’ve decided to just live my life.

Litigation sickness is real. I’ve seen it happen to people much smarter than me who, after a few years, can only talk about Their Case. It’s a soul-sucking void and I refuse to fall into it. I haven’t settled. I haven’t signed an NDA. I’m just not letting some employment tribunal shape my entire personality. You won’t hear me talking about My Case beyond what’s absolutely necessary — I do what needs doing, and the rest of the time I’m working on more interesting stuff.

To that end, I’ve set up a creative company that does three things:

Commercial work. The usual – campaigns, film and photoshoots, creative strategy. I don’t see myself as a founder in the traditional sense, which is to say I don’t take a cut from other people’s labour. Every creative involved gets the full amount billed for their work. I won’t become a millionaire this way, but I’ll live. If you’re a brand that prefers paying the people doing the work instead of some random shareholders you’ll never see, send me an email (pzabrodskaya@gmail.com).

Activist groups. Press releases, fundraising videos, merch. I mostly work with people targeting structural causes: climate, exploitation, state repression of political protest. If you get fired or arrested for causing good trouble and need public support, I’ll help make your campaign fun and effective. Reach out via Signal if you've got my number. If not, ask a mutual.

Greenwashing research. I write reports for law firms suing fossil fuel companies for environmental damage. If you’re building a case, please get in touch (pzabrodskaya@protonmail.com). I likely already have the advertising materials that prove these companies knew they were misleading the public (“We made a campaign about solar energy and it raised our petrol sales by 35%”) or can help you find them. I can also explain, inside and outside a courtroom, how these campaigns get made, who’s responsible for what, and which internal documents to request in discovery/disclosure.

Is doing both commercial and activist work a problem? Idk, I need to pay my bills somehow, and at least these briefs aren’t pretending to be anything they’re not. Personally, I’d rather do photoshoots for toothpaste than join the philanthropic industrial complex.

It’s all a bit of a mad combo, but it does the job.

I’d link a website, but I’ve been too busy to make a website, so maybe in 2028. If the tribunal gets there first, I’ll be amazed.

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“We know our industry is funding hate, legitimising environmentally destructive companies, and working at the frontline of a US-led rollback on diversity, equity and inclusion,” while “paying little more than lip service to solving critical issues” that include “spreading hateful content” and “helping polluting industries such as oil and gas rebuff public scrutiny.”

What do they want? An “honest conversation with industry’s power holders,” who they say are “failing to make a material stand on any of the issues that would give our industry a moral justification for existing alongside a commercial one.”

You can read the memo here.

I’ve sat on it for a week, waiting to see if my initial reaction would change. It didn’t.

I’m mostly confused. I don’t understand who is supposed to stop the holding companies from funding hate and legitimising environmental destruction.

Inside Track says, “The memo was written by at least 15 executives from some of the world’s most significant ad agencies, some of whom have over 20 years experience”.

So you are fifteen executives from some of the world’s “most significant” agencies who came together and did what? Wrote a memo that doesn’t name a single decision-maker, doesn’t commit to any action, and you did it anonymously – because putting your face next to something as tame as “let’s not fund hate groups” is too much of a professional risk?

When you say you want the industry’s “power holders” to “make a material stand,” who exactly are you talking about? Global chief executives?

John Wren’s busy. He’s cutting 10,000 jobs following the IPG merger. Richard Edelman is back to back in meetings with Shell. Who’s next on your list? Sir Martin Sorrell? Yannick Bolloré?

They’ve already made their material stand. You’re looking at it. Now what?

Who are the supposed saviours? And what exactly are you asking them to do? Bring back the DEI initiatives that made everyone feel better about advertising products manufactured in sweatshops? Drop the fossil-fuel accounts they’ve been servicing for decades?

What are your demands, and what happens if they say no? Another memo?

The industry is funding hate groups and greenwashing fossil fuels not because of a “vacuum of leadership.” The leadership is right there, making money for shareholders, as always. They funded DEI and pretended to prioritise the environment when it was good for business, then abandoned those strategies the second it was not.

The “socially just and environmentally regenerative future” you say you want is incompatible with advertising in its current form. A Super Bowl ad only makes sense if you’re selling high-margin products at enormous scale. Look at those briefs: ultra-processed foods, cars, alcohol, fashion, pharma, phones. For you to even have a job, cocoa, sugar, palm oil, and cobalt need to be pushed through the supply chain at the lowest possible cost.

A brand of sustainably produced chocolate, owned by cocoa farmers, can’t afford a global campaign made by a London agency. The margins aren’t there. For a client to be able to pay $500K for an ad, $2M for media, and $1M for an agency retainer, someone somewhere needs to work for a dollar a day in a warehouse that’s about to collapse on their head.

The “power holders” to whom you’re appealing manage an industry that can only service exploitative capital. All of this is completely beyond the frame of your memo.

“As professionals whose livelihoods depend on the thriving of our industry, we want it to succeed.”

Okay. How?

How do you expect advertising to succeed during a global economic downturn without enabling environmental destruction, hate, and exploitation? Where does the money come from? Agencies can’t support six-figure salaries without global brands that make billions through hardcore extraction. The power holders have done the maths and made their choices.

You want both a thriving ad industry and for nobody to touch the fossil fuel budgets. Choose one.

Our problem isn’t a lack of “forward-thinking leadership” at some ad agencies. Our problem is a capitalist crisis that’s degrading into fascism.

“I continue to believe that advertising can be a positive force within the world,”
said one member of the group, who declined to be named for fear of professional repercussions. “But increasingly it feels like the checks and balances that can make that true are being undermined by leaders I cannot trust to respond effectively and responsibly.”

The leader who is supposed to respond effectively and responsibly is you, my friend.

You haven’t said anything remotely dangerous or controversial in that memo. You said you’re “deeply worried about some aspects,” then wrapped it in caveats to reassure everyone you’re not trying to “discredit the many people working hard to resolve industry challenges.”

If you won’t attach your name to the safest possible statement twenty years into your career what change are you expecting to see, and from whom?

What are you so afraid of? Not getting promoted from Board Account Director to Global Account Director on a burning planet? Being laid off just before the new exciting pitch for ICE?

Just go and do what you already know needs doing. Read a book. Get real politics. Organise at your agency. Go on strike. Nobody’s coming to lead you out of this crisis.

Andrés Olarte Peña, a Colombian environmental advisor, leaked thousands of documents suggesting that Ecopetrol could be engaged in severe pollution, spying on activists, and collaborating with national security forces. He was forced to flee Colombia and seek asylum in Germany, with the help of lawyers and NGOs. Then he found another job and rebuilt his life.

Meanwhile, you’re talking anonymously about professional repercussions while refusing to say anything of substance at all. The planet is on the brink of ecological collapse. Politicians are going full fash. Ad agencies are making campaigns that normalise it all. But sure, let’s wait for “forward-thinking leadership from our agency executives.”

You could say: “You know what, leave me alone. I have a well-paid job. The world might be on fire, but my life is comfortable and I’m just some guy. I’m not taking any risks. Please fuck off.” And I’d respect that. There’s a kind of integrity to it.

Or you could say: “We’re fifteen anonymous advertising executives who’ve been documenting industry greenwashing and hate group funding for years, and we’ve handed the evidence to regulators and journalists. Here’s our lawyer’s WhatsApp.” And I’d respect that too, because it’s useful.

But when you’re doing the former while pretending to do the latter, you end up with all of the “fear of repercussions” and none of the “material stand.”

Harriet Kingaby, co-chair of the industry group Conscious Advertising Network, called the memo “a warning shot to both the C-Suite and investors in the advertising industry as well as the brands that use them.”

“People [in the industry] are not happy and they will not roll over on the issues that matter to them,” she said.

Yeah, they will.

They’ll write a safe memo, see it published on two and a half websites, post it on LinkedIn (did you? Or was that too much of a risk?), and say they’ve done everything they could.

Someone might say that this memo is a starting point, but to me it looks more like a dead end. It avoids naming the core problem, so it can’t seriously grapple with any solutions. All it offers is more waiting, for leaders who don’t exist. If the goal is real change, we’re going to need a different strategy.

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How long before major ad agencies start taking briefs from the far-right? And what will that work look like?

The British government has recently shortlisted 23 agencies to cover its “creative strategy and development” work. The lots are worth £1.97 billion. What happens if (when?) the government is run by the far-right Reform UK? The gap between exaggerated case studies and full on propaganda isn’t as wide as we all like to think. And £1.97 billion is a lot of money.

I hope I’m wrong. But having lived through an authoritarian shift in Russia, this transformation is usually way less dramatic than you’d expect. I’m not suggesting history is repeating itself, but equally we don’t seem too far away from making PR stunts for migrant deportation centres.

These briefs don’t announce themselves as propaganda. They arrive as normal work: PSAs, community messaging, recruitment campaigns. Something-something positive social impact. They feel mostly harmless.

The function of these campaigns is not to convince people of anything openly fascist. They exist to prepare the ground for administrative work: first come the billboards celebrating large families, then the abortion bans.

You think you personally won’t take those briefs. But most of the time you won’t even know there’s something wrong with them, because no single brief seems consequential enough on its own. A bit more respect for the military. A bit more pride in the glorious past. A bit more comfort with the idea that some clearly bad people need to be deported or imprisoned – for the greater national good.

And the rent is due, so why risk your job over something so minor.

Big agencies will fight for these accounts because they’ll be worth millions. Talented creatives will write the copy. The work will be beautifully executed. It might even win awards.

I wish this were all hypothetical, but we’ve seen it happen before.

In 2020, a Russian state-propaganda campaign was shortlisted at Cannes Lions. The work was produced by Russia Today Creative Lab, a government propaganda unit. Cannes Lions seem to have deleted RT’s account from its archive but the cases are still there.

For context: the Soviet WWII victory has long been weaponised by the state as a moral justification for Russian militarism and nationalism. In 2021, Russia Today’s campaign was shortlisted at Cannes Lions again, in Use of Social Platforms and Music / Sound Design. Nothing like good sound design to maximise the effect of nationalist propaganda.

Between 2018 and 2021, RT Creative Lab received nine shortlists across multiple juries that saw nothing wrong with the work. RT also won at D&AD, got two One Show pencils, and was nominated for an Emmy, all for campaigns valorising the Soviet victory in WWII.

In The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz writes that intellectuals don’t usually sell out for money. They do it for visibility and professional validation: everyone’s a dissident until they get offered a slot on prime-time TV. It worked on Polish socialists. It worked on Russian liberals. It will work on well-meaning Western creatives. Not on you, of course. But on someone very much like you.

To be clear, I’m not drawing any false equivalences. Every authoritarian government is different. But in the absence of a literal “report your immigrant neighbour” billboard, it’s useful to understand how these things get made.

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Here’s a recent campaign many advertising people on LinkedIn seemed to love.

What is this pseudo-religious moral condemnation? Since when has dodging a fare become a sin so grave, it justifies the use of “disgrace” on the target audience – in a campaign paid for with public money?

St. Luke’s, the agency that produced these outdoors, once worked with Greenpeace. Now it makes campaigns that sound like they were written by the increasignly far-right MP Robert Jenrick, who’s “sick to death of people fare dodging” and wants to “shame them into action.” The same Robert Jenrick who has called for asylum seekers to be detained in camps.

This political overlap is not a strange coincidence. The disdain for illegal migrants and evil fare-dodgers comes from the same box.

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An important thing to know about fascism is that it’s not some random ideological drift. Fascism is a specific way to manage a specific crisis: who gets what when resources become tight.

The SWR campaign shows how the state manages politically produced scarcity as neoliberalism starts to fray.

The next two paragraphs will be a bit dry, but bear with me, without the background, it’s impossible to understand what this campaign is actually doing.

British Rail was privatised in the 1990s under the classic promise that competition would lower costs and improve service. None of that materialised. Services were cut, fares grew at double the rate of average wages, and by 2017 British commuters were handing over 14% of their median income to private train companies and murky lease schemes, designed to extract profit before a single passenger even buys a ticket. All for unreliable, overcrowded rides. In France and Germany, it’s 2%, and the service actually works.

When the government finally renationalised SWR in May 2025, they inherited a total mess: driver shortages, exorbitant ticket prices, and 84 brand-new trains sitting unused because the staff were untrained. Lord Strathcarron complained in Parliament about paying £49 for a one-hour journey from Winchester to Waterloo, standing the entire way (he’s 76). Surely, if a Lord is struggling to pay, it’s understandable why someone on a median wage would have no choice but to dodge the fares.

So what did the government do? Did it lower these clearly unhinged ticket prices?

No. They went to St Luke’s and said something like: “Tovarischi, the Motherland needs fare dissenters brought to heel. The traitors refusing to pay as a form of protest must be made to understand that they are a disgrace.”

I’m not exaggerating. They’ve published the brief:

“Following research conducted by Transport Focus, three Fare Dodging audiences are identified for this campaign... For Regret, the creative speaks to Ambivalent Evaders... For Shame, the messaging targets Strategic Evaders... And finally, Career Evaders, who routinely don’t pay their fares as a form of protest, are given the Disgrace message.”

St Luke’s didn’t refuse to blame the public for resisting economic extortion. They didn’t make a campaign questioning fare-setting instead of fare-dodging. They took the money and reframed a systemic socio-economic issue – the exorbitant cost of vital transport – as a personal moral failure of those who can’t or won’t pay the price.

In the Soviet Union, when the shops were empty, the government made propaganda blaming saboteurs and greedy grain hoarders. In Britain, when the rail system crumbles, liberal ad agencies make campaigns shaming “Career Evaders” and “Strategic Dodgers.”

There is exactly one way to reduce the fare dodging figure to zero: remove fares altogether and make public transport free at the point of use. Given the climate emergency, it’s the most rational solution. Multiple countries are already doing this. But that would require reallocating billions that currently keep 35M+ cars on British roads (a record high) towards public transport. And the government isn’t about to upset the fossil fuel industry or the car manufacturers.

So instead, it uses much cheaper communication tactics to teach the public which type of person to label a disgrace.

And it works.

People know £49 for a 1 hour trip to Waterloo is insane, but they comply because any alternative is seen as shameful or unserious. An honest reasonable person wouldn’t refuse to pay. Wouldn’t organise a protest over extortionate ticket prices. Wouldn’t suggest public transport should be free – everyone knows that’s not realistic.

The state doesn’t need to break your legs if it can break your imagination.

In the coming years, advertising creatives are likely to face some difficult choices. These briefs will land on our desks. And we’ll have to decide what to do with them.

Where is the line?
Am I overreacting?
Will refusing to work on it even matter?

None of this is new. People have been wrestling with these questions long before us, and they came up with some decent strategies and wrote some useful books.

• Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind — especially the chapter on Ketman, the art of professional hypocrisy under authoritarianism. Milosz was a defector from Stalinist Poland and the book was weaponised by the CIA during the Cold War. That doesn’t make his work less insightful. If anything, it shows how propaganda works on both sides.

• Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man – a necessary counterweight to Milosz. Just because Stalinist authoritarianism is to be avoided doesn’t mean capitalist authoritarianism is to be embraced.

• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism – for understanding why it’s easier to imagine a re-education camp for fare dodgers than a free train to Waterloo. Useful for whenever “there’s no alternative” argument shows up.

• Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism – this book helped me overcome the idea that fascism is about bad people having bad opinions. Toscano unpacks fascism as a practical method of crisis management.

• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch – explains how shame, punishment, and moral discipline, particularly directed at women, are used as capitalist tools for extracting labour and resources.

Dealing with Suspicious Briefs

1. The Farage Test: Does your messaging sound like something Nigel Farage (insert your local far-right guy) could retweet? Even if the issue seems neutral, check if politicians are using the same talking points.

2. Function vs Framing: Understand what these briefs actually do, not how they’re framed. Campaigns built around personal shame, collective duty, and national pride will never be neutral PSAs. The stories of glorious military past are highly unlikely to be used for pacifist purposes.

3. Watch the Sorting: If a campaign starts sorting people into “contributors” vs “parasites” or “patriots” vs “traitors” – even implicitely – you’re one step away from advertising a concentration camp. Once the division is in place, the ground is prepared for extreme measures.

4. Boredom: If you can’t get off the project, make it boring. Propaganda relies on affect. Strip it of all emotion. Refuse to provide the good sound design RT was so proud of.

5. Collective Refusal: Individual refusal is fragile and usually achieves little. If you’re going to challenge a brief, do it collectively, in writing, with a lawyer and a trade union representative. For that reason alone, join a union. You never know when you might need it.

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The industry, bunch of masochists that we are, loved it. Tell us we suck and need to work harder, and we’ll applaud you. There’s nothing we enjoy more than having the worst parts of our internal monologue validated by some sloppy manifesto.

For the normal people out here: D&AD is a prestigious industry award. Uncommon is a high-profile ad agency founded by Nils Leonard, who seems to have made the campaign all by himself (at least, he’s the one giving all the interviews about it and there’s no mention of other creatives).

The core sentiment of the campaign isn’t wrong: most of us did get into this industry hoping to make culturally relevant things. We could probably also do with less scrolling.

But there is a massive, multi-million-pound difference between why Nils Leonard needs to scroll less and “make more” and why he tells other creatives to do the same.

Nils (and two other founders) sold Uncommon to Havas in 2023 for £30M, and that could rise to £120M if the agency hits its targets by 2029.

But will it hit those targets in an industry rapidly losing profitability and relevance?

That’s the £90M question — and the answer depends entirely on whether Nils manages to extract enough surplus value from the exhausted creatives doing the actual work.

For the record, I have absolutely nothing against Nils Leonard the person. I respect his work, he’s a talented designer, and from what I’ve heard, he’s fun at parties. But he also happens to be the guy running a multimillion structure of extraction that controls the labour power of hundreds, so three people can hit a £120M earn-out. Let’s put it this way: that manifesto might have benefited from a bit more self-awareness.

Who’s we? Nils is a wealthy founder. His creatives are moving from Crystal Palace to Epping Forest because they can’t afford London rents anymore. Whose problems are getting solved here? Who’s stuck doing mock-ups on a Sunday? Who’s out there giving all the speeches? So many questions.

Nils wants creatives to “shut up and make” — because if you don’t, he stands to lose his share of the £90M, and where’s the fun in that. He alone can’t personally produce a hundred boring ads a year that make up the bulk of Uncommon’s work. He needs your labour, and he needs you to care more than he does. So, you get an average salary, the client pays higher-than-average fees, Havas takes the surplus, Nils gets his cash. That’s the business model.

No passengers.

Except, of course, when it comes to distributing the profits, then we should be absolutely clear who’s the real visionary here and who’s been just along for the ride.

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But wait, what about the fame? You’ll be broke, burnt-out, but famous! Not really. The fame mostly goes to Uncommon Creative Studio (aka Nils), because nobody gets credited for the work made within the agency.

The one cool thing Uncommon made this year was a rigged claw machine with a vintage Birkin for NYFW. It’s impossible to find the credits. I really tried.

Who are the creatives behind the idea? Who designed the stunning machine? Who decided to call it ‘Pain’? Who programmed it? For all we know, it was all Nils. Other creatives remain invisible, and therefore, culturally disposable. Again, “no passengers” when it comes to the making, but one visionary when it comes to the credit.

Your ex won’t be pissed off. They’ll never find out you made anything.

Now, to be fair, I can see the counterargument. Nils isn’t asking you to grind harder for him, but for yourself. He cares deeply about your unfulfilled creative potential.

The industry is shifting beneath your feet, the planet is burning, and a dozen eggs somehow costs fifty pounds, but have you tried making a ‘Ratboot’ that gets 135+ million views? No? Then don’t be surprised all your problems aren’t solved.

His sudden beef with think pieces (of which Nils himself has written hundreds) also makes sense. A critical creative is a pain in the founder’s arse. If you stop and actually think about the whole setup, you’re likely to realise that grinding yourself to the bone for a British Airways commercial is insane. It promotes a highly destructive product, your ex doesn’t care, and nobody outside the industry will ever remember it.

Sure, it might get you some awards and a pay rise of £10K. Those awards will become irrelevant in two years and you’ll spend all the money on takeaway.

We haven’t mistaken shit adverts for the death of creativity. We’ve mistaken good ones for creative fulfillment.

Creativity needs play. Play needs rest. When was the last time you did nothing for 48 hours? People who are tired and scared rarely make good art. They numb themselves with whatever’s available to them, and scrolling might be our most benign option.

George R. R. Martin worked two days a week as a chess tournament director and the job paid enough to write for the other five days. Louise Bourgeois had wealthy parents and could travel around the world learning from the best artists. Countless British bands lived on the dole that required nothing of them but to keep making music.

If Nils’s creative potential is best expressed by a ratboot stunt — more power to him. Yours might require spending three years writing an experimental play that will be enjoyed by fifty people. Fame is not an adequate measure of creative value. Otherwise, the Tate Modern would be full of TikTok dances.

For creativity to flourish, we all might want to start leaving our day jobs early and stop working weekends. But that idea would be catastrophic to Nils’s earn-out, so we won’t see any manifestos making that point.

Nils isn’t wrong when he says your mum won’t frame your LinkedIn comment. She also won’t frame your British Airways advert. She doesn’t care about either. She loves you for who you are and wants you to find joy, meaning and a sense of community. And you’re unlikely to get any of that by making ads for a boss who wants you to blame yourself for systemic industry problems.

And yes, I know: someone will inevitably say I’m bitter, jealous, lazy, or refusing to “care enough.” Fine. But loving creativity shouldn’t stop you from noticing that when some guy starts wielding your ex and your mum in an attempt to make you deliver more ads, he probably doesn’t have your best interests at heart.

Telling people to “shut up and make” in an industry that has been bleeding its workforce dry for decades is a shit take that should have stayed a LinkedIn post.

I’d spent months managing paperwork, furniture, art, books. The only property I forgot to care for was my body. As I write this, my left knee still hurts. My palm is bruised.

What is this newsletter? A Tumblr blog from 2005? I’m supposed to be writing about corporate wrongdoings. This is not on brand. What’s the use of this? Where’s the content?

I don’t know. I’m tired. I don’t want to be useful.

For most of the day, we treat each other as consumers and providers of services, when we’re just a bunch of squishy animals in need of food, shelter, and connection.

Have you noticed there are few things more disappointing than a bad meal? Not by a friend - I’ll eat an undercooked potato at a friend’s house - but by a professional. The friend’s potato belongs to a gift economy: hey, I did my best, I’m sorry, I love you. An undercooked potato in a restaurant is a violation of a market contract - you paid for a simulation of care, and they couldn’t even give you that.

I want to know when my lawyer last cried. I want to ask my client whether she had a happy childhood.

I’d hate to turn this Substack into a market hustle (‘upgrade to paid to learn ten ways to reinvent your career’). You don’t want to read that, and I don’t want to write it.

There must be a better way.

My palm is bruised. Your lower back hurts. The world’s a mess, everyone is tired, and nobody knows what to do anymore.

That’s the content.

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Most of us don’t admit to ourselves that our work is destructive. We just feel a little bit more dead inside every day. A bit more depressed and hopeless. Like we are lost and stuck but can’t even start imagining what it looks like to become unstuck. Everything gets covered in a mental fog.

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When this happens, we’re taught to think there’s something wrong with us – as if we are personally failing to thrive for some unique, mysterious reason that requires two years of therapy at £110 an hour.

Denial

What a good therapist might tell you for free is that denial is costly. It’s a powerful self-preservation tool, but it requires a lot of energy. It’s devastating to know your work causes harm, so we suppress that knowledge. We build elaborate mechanisms to avoid knowing. And these mechanisms protect us in the short term but destroy us in the long run.

There’s a great book by Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness, based on 70 hours of interviews with Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. It’s a fascinating study of how denial works. Please stay with me, I’m not saying people in advertising are Nazis. My point is that Nazis were people.

Sereny avoids adjectives and sticks to nouns and verbs. The reader’s vision isn’t clouded by someone’s prefabricated moral judgment. So you discover, all by yourself, that Franz Stangl was a normal human. A loving husband, a pleasant neighbour, a gentle, caring father. He wasn’t a deranged sadist, he was an overworked bureaucrat.

Which means that if faced with the problems he faced: fear of losing a job, worry for his family’s future, the desire to impress his superiors – nobody is beyond causing unthinkable harm. Climate destruction will kill more people than World War II, and we’re weirdly calm about it. It’s not some extraordinary evil, just an everyday trick our mind performs to help us cope, for the small, small price of making us numb.

A colleague once wrote to me during a discussion about greenwashing child labour in a client’s supply chain: “It might not be the ideal way round, but I hope that by starting to talk externally about sustainability, it will force them... to self-scrutinise and do better in the future.”

I recognised the logic. I’ve seen it used many times in Russia. It’s the sound of a good, kind person trying to find a tolerable reality within an intolerable one. The mind bends itself into a pretzel. Hey, it’s not greenwashing, we’re inspiring gradual change in a complex system. And then you wake up one day and realise you’re drained of all will to live.

What can we do?

I’ve come to accept that there’s no perfectly ethical job in a fundamentally destructive setup. We all exist within interlocking systems of oppression, and judging each other for marginally better employment choices is a dead end. It pits us against each other for a moral high ground that just doesn’t exist.

We can’t all quit our jobs and go work for the Red Cross. Someone still needs to work for the bank that processes the donations. Someone needs to make the donations, presumably from far less ethical sources. There’s no clean corner in the system we’re in. Becoming an employment saint is, unfortunately, not an option.

But we can always refuse to be useful idiots.

Billionaires who profit from destruction won’t be ‘forced to self-scrutinise’ by their own ads. They only respond to being forced, full stop. Exploitation will end when we change the social relations that produce it. A single person can’t possibly do that.

Where’s The Power?

We need to find realistic levers of collective power and start using them.

Historically, the main tool for workers has always been withholding labour. But the professional class is famously not very good at it. It’s hard to imagine advertising/PR people going on an indefinite strike over fossil fuels. If Edelman London walks out tomorrow, those briefs will be reallocated to Edelman Toronto or Mumbai within 24 hours. For creative, knowledge-based work, a key lever seems to be the disruption of the project’s legitimacy.

If you are a senior strategist working on campaigns for electric SUVs, your ad agency needs you to believe those ads are ethical and useful. Trouble is, you have a functioning brain. You know it’s a bait and switch: bait consumers with a green-coded EV, then, once they’re hooked on the idea of a massive car, switch them to the much cheaper petrol/hybrid version. Car manufacturers admit it in their annual reports. The record profits don’t come from EVs.

If you quit and go work for Greenpeace, your former employer will replace you in a week. But if you stay and convince 70% of your colleagues to refuse to see these briefs as anything but the con they are – suddenly the agency has a massive problem. They can’t order you all to stop discussing their clients’ annual reports, it’s part of the job. They can’t tell you to shut up and go take more antidepressants. They can’t fire 70% of their core workforce. It’s a crisis.

Every company needs a veneer of legitimacy to operate. If your own employees start withholding that legitimacy, your entire operations are disrupted in multiple, unpredictable ways. The cost of doing business as usual suddenly skyrockets, and the margins suffer.

Cool. How Do We Not Get Fired?

That’s a good question.

Unions might be our most underused tool, as dusty and unglamorous as they sometimes are. Legally, they turn disorganised protest (for which you can be easily dismissed) into a protected collective action. Suddenly it’s not a bunch of creatives bitching about briefs, it’s a formal trade dispute.

A union can argue that being forced to work on projects that accelerate climate breakdown is a health and safety issue – that the work itself is creating an unsafe workplace and causes moral injury and mental distress. Through a union, we could make green clauses a formal part of our contracts (no fossil fuels, no fast fashion brands). We could demand a formal right to refuse to work on harmful briefs.

And we wouldn’t even be the first, architects have already shown it’s possible. They’ve organised into the Section of Architectural Workers (SAW) and started a collective climate pledge. We already have Clean Creatives. We have a UVW branch of designers and cultural workers. There’s so much more we can do.

It’s no grand revolution, but it’s a starting point, and hopefully one that can disrupt the propaganda pipeline. It raises the cost of greenwashing for the most harmful companies, punctures their social licence, and makes space for larger political action to succeed.

We have been trained to forget that we have power. Corporations aren’t just paying for our skills, they are paying for our buy-in. They are counting on our mortgages, our isolation, our exhaustion and fear. Their entire operation runs on a single, fragile resource: our consent.

We can withdraw it.

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Here’s what happened. Grey Singapore made an app that promised to “crowdsource the search for migrants and refugees lost at sea.” You could download the thing, get assigned a tiny square of the Mediterranean from a supposed continuous satellite feed, and start saving migrants. Just tag a boat in distress, alert the rescue services, and go back to your brunch.

Setting aside the silliness of the premise (sure, let’s solve a global humanitarian crisis by gamifying life and death, and notify the border patrol while we’re at it), technologically, it was beautiful. Or it would have been, had it not been fake.

The journalists fell for it, everyone from Wired to Reuters wrote it up. The campaign won a Cannes Lion. Then tech experts looked into the mechanics and found there was no live feed. The app was just pulling old static images from Google Maps, sometimes from completely irrelevant regions.

“The only element of the app that worked was the donate button. It correctly opened,” Mac developer Rosyna Keller said. “Nothing else worked at all.”

Instead of apologising gracefully, the poor fuckers doubled down. They denied any wrongdoing, appealed to their own authority, and attacked the tech experts, dismissing them as “unnamed bloggers” launching “unrelenting attacks.” They returned their Cannes Lion, but did it so passive-aggressively that it only pissed off everyone further.

“Grey is one of the most creatively awarded agencies in the world with the highest ethical standards. We won over 90 Cannes Lions this year alone so there is no need for scam projects.”

You could hear the collective outrage over the pops of champagne on the Carlton terrace. How could they? Suddenly everyone who called themselves an expat became a migrant, as if they were the ones the fake app had failed to rescue. The industry press smelled blood and competed to drag the ECD. Thank God, we’d found the source of all evil in global advertising. It was Grey Singapore.

Sure, the agency had it coming. There were thirty four people in the credits. They must have known. It was early 2016 and they were claiming a continuous stream of images, sharp enough to spot a black rubber boat from space. In 2025, that miracle technology still doesn’t exist, it’s financially unfeasible. Even with sub-metre SAR, blanket small-boat detection in real time just isn’t a thing.

The case study used footage of Hillary Clinton, Angela Merkel and David Cameron, implying they were all big fans. It also featured a quote from Candace Johnson, co-founder of SES, making it look as if the satellite operator supported the project. SES is a telecoms operator, their satellites don’t carry any radars or cameras. They could connect the ships and drones and backhaul data, but not spot rubber boats themselves.

Long story short, you don’t link old static Google Maps images, build a case study claiming it’s a continuous live-feed, and highlight quotes that can be conveniently misinterpreted, by accident. They fucked up. But why was our industry, with its otherwise dubious moral standards, so eager to burn them at the stake for it?

Every single agency in the world massages its case studies. Dying children, abused women, road accidents, plastic pollution, opioid addiction — no grim subject is off-limits for a fake solution that could win awards. What Grey Singapore did was obnoxious. But nobody there was without sin: not the agencies, not the media, definitely not the people on the Carlton terrace.

What was going on?

René Girard described a theory of scapegoating: a way for human collectives to resolve unresolvable moral tension.

For anyone who works in advertising, your whole professional life is a mindfuck. Your function is to generate profit, but you’re told that unless you cure cancer with a 15-second preroll, you’re just bad at your job. You’re pulled apart by two impossible demands: the capitalist one: win at all costs, make the agency famous, be successful. And the moral one: use creativity for good, change the world, have a purpose.

A scam charity campaign saving lives lets you pretend you can do both, while being paid over £100K a year.

Did it matter that the app didn’t work? Of course not. Its job wasn’t to save anyone in the Mediterranean. It was to save us from feeling like shit about ourselves: the agencies, the clients, the media, the juries. Even if it had worked, it would have been helpless against the structural forces causing migrants to drown at sea. We all knew it. We just chose to pretend otherwise.

So, why did I dig out an ancient scandal from 2016?

Because absolutely nothing’s changed since then. Since ‘I SEA’ we’ve seen dozens of other crucifixions, year after year after year. Grey Singapore wasn’t particularly bad. The ‘I SEA’ app wasn’t some glitch in an otherwise ethical industry. It is the industry.

The public witch-burning is our pressure-release valve: when the collective lie gets too big, we load all our deceptions, all our exaggerated results, all our fake promises on a scapegoat, and make them the sole carrier of our sins. People who collectively cosplay as righteous crusaders are pretending that the system can be fixed by punishing one uniquely bad actor for one uniquely bad deed. Then the collective feels cleansed and everything returns back to normal.

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These moral industry dramas have one purpose: to help us live with ourselves under late capitalism, so we can avoid the difficult work that’s required to change it.

The app was a lie. But what if our industry’s primary function is to produce lies? We prioritise exchange value (what an idea is worth in awards, prestige, and profit) over use value (what an idea actually does in the world). It’s true for most of our ‘do good’ projects – even those that aren’t explicitly fake. Even if your client is a reputable NGO and the project does work as described, the real audience is the jury, the real product is the awards, and the real goal of those awards is profit for everyone involved.

Grey Singapore, DM9, Talented or any other Big Bad Agency of the Year are just the symptoms. Our disease is a system that requires a permanent global underclass: the child slaves, the migrants, the workers in unsafe factories. The exploitation of humans and the degradation of the environment.

There’s nothing wrong with our desire to use creativity for good. It’s a fundamental human drive. Our tragedy is letting that drive get perverted and wasted on a delusion. We don’t need a functioning app that saves refugees. We need a functioning system of global social relations that doesn’t create them.

Can creativity change the world for the better? No doubt. But do we really believe that kind of work can be done in six months for an awards season and neatly packed into a 2-minute case study? And if we don’t, maybe let’s admit that our industry was never supposed to produce anything but a spectacle – so we can do something better with our time.

Have you ever stood before a cryptic work in a top-end gallery, read the lengthy description, and realised it had nothing of substance to say? I’m not here to suggest that all art needs to be deep and meaningful. If the point is, “I wanted to make this giant weird thing and here it is,” I respect that. But can we be honest about it? Don’t make your audience struggle through some confused explanation of how this piece of beautifully burnt plastic represents your favourite flavour of identity politics.

I think good art makes you see things you can’t unsee. Martha Rosler’s Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967–72) feels horribly contemporary. It could be about Gaza today. We’ve seen that visual device many times since, but for that decade, in that context, it was pure visual disruption, of the best conceptual kind.

Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003) hits home for me too: she filmed herself having sex with a collector who paid nearly $20,000 to ‘make an artwork.’ This piece shows how invisible social systems control artists and their art.

These works reveal something true about power. And about us, watching it unfold.

Compare their work to this next fascinating thing. The director of a project ‘celebrating migration’ recently got in touch to ask if I would be a subject.

I don’t think I’m in any danger of disclosing his identity because there have been about a thousand projects celebrating migration by some wealthy directors who are tired of making beer ads and want to dabble in edgy political art.

Trouble is, they have shit politics and what they end up shooting is right-wing propaganda. You know the type. Aesthetically interesting individuals from marginalised communities look directly into the camera with a sense of resilience. The lighting is soft and flattering, and the whole piece is designed to look nice in a bank lobby. The show is titled something like ‘All of us’ and the description says the project celebrates diversity and gives voice to the voiceless (while giving money to the author).

The subjects are: an NHS nurse, a rubbish collector, a builder, a Russian creative TBC.

I’m sharing these DMs not to be petty (that’s a bonus), but because they give a rare, first-hand insight into the artist’s mindset. After deciding I was a sufficiently inspiring migrant (tick), this British director asked if I would be his 'first Russian.' The request was delivered with a complete lack of awareness for the dynamic he was creating.

What his art doesn’t do is help us understand migration. What it does do is reinforce a ‘dignified useful migrant’ stereotype. Look, they work hard and all deserve to be here. They will collect your rubbish, help your ailing relative, and pay a ton of taxes in their corporate job. Trouble is, the concept of a good, hardworking migrant implies that there are bad and lazy migrants, the undesirables who need to be expelled.

Welcome to fascism, here’s your little badge.

How about you photograph the most unsympathetic migrants? The ones Reform UK teaches everyone to fear and despise? Why not interrogate the concept of the national border and explore what it does to us all?

Give me a portrait of a Libyan drug dealer selling fenty to pretty English kids. Place it next to a dividend statement from BP. Say that Libya went from having the highest standard of living in Africa to slave markets, thanks to Britain’s help in destroying Gaddafi’s regime to protect BP’s access to those high-quality oil reserves. Here’s a return on your investment. Enjoy your dividends.

But of course, he won’t take that kind of portrait. Because it would require some actual attempt to engage with the subject of migration beyond ‘what can this photogenic migrant do for my creative portfolio.’

If you want to see photography as a tool for genuine social analysis, look at Dmitry Markov. His work is raw because there was no distance between him and his subjects. He was a social worker, journalist, and recovering addict who lived among the people he photographed and died of an overdose. In his photos, there is no judgement and no glorification, just a real human connection born from shared experience. He wasn't giving a voice to anyone, he was part of the same conversation.

Now, Pussy Riot.

I will defend them against any Putin supporter all day every day. But. I think they’ve long been co-opted by the Western establishment. In what sense are they anarchists if they are constantly used as props for Western capitalist propaganda? They’ve endorsed Hillary Clinton, taken the Lennon Ono Grant for Peace, and appeared in House of Cards. Maybe there are some deep levels of irony I’m failing to grasp, or maybe they just love hanging out with Bill Clinton.

They live in the West now. Where is their critique of the US police state? Of the megachurches? Anything that can disrupt the neoliberal consensus they claim to oppose?

They’re aesthetically interesting, commercially profitable and completely harmless to their Western capitalist hosts. Where’s the riot?

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Now I have no newsletter for you and no plan B. And the worst part is that my mind won’t let the subject go. I keep thinking that there must be a way to make it work because the alternative would be absurd. But apparently there isn’t one, not unless you both-sides it. And I don’t want to both-sides it.

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In such moments, I miss Russia. My motherland is fucked, but at least you don’t need specialist legal advice to understand how fucked it is. You write the wrong thing, you go to prison or fall out of a window. Here in Britain, the state whispers in your ear about sinister consequences and then pretends it didn’t say a thing.

I think the best way to go about it would be to turn this week’s post into a Q&A.

Please ask me anything. What do you want to talk about? What’s on your mind?

I’ll give you three essays instead of one.

Thank you.

Okay, everyone’s pissed off because Shell’s PR agency, Edelman, got the media contract for COP30. There are articles, petitions, and concerned op-eds from sustainability experts. This reaction makes perfect sense – if you believe that COP is a neutral, good-faith event for solving the climate crisis.

Which it is not.

Honestly, if we think Edelman is too compromised for COP, we’re just failing to see how fundamentally compromised COP is itself. Edelman is a perfect match: a fossil PR firm for a fossil PR summit.

The purpose of COP was never to solve climate change. It was to manage it. More precisely, to manage the public perception of inaction while making sure fossil fuel profits remain untouched. That’s the main function: broker deals between states and capital. Expecting COP delegations to find climate solutions is like expecting an arsonist to lead the fire brigade. The whole premise is absurd.

Ask any random person on the street who’s better on climate, Democrats or Republicans, and they’ll tell you that Obama was the good guy and Trump is the bad guy, when in reality, they are the same guy. Both ramped up U.S. oil and gas extraction. Both sabotaged binding international agreements. Same with Labour and the Tories, Liberals and Conservatives in Canada, PT and Lula’s centrist allies in Brazil. They all protect the same interests: fossil capital.

At COP28 in Dubai, there were 2,456 fossil fuel lobbyists. They outnumbered Indigenous delegates seven to one. In that sense, COP is no different from Cannes Lions. It’s a glamorous trade show where deals get made.

Sure, let’s set the net-zero target for 2050. Why 2050? Because it allows for another quarter-century of profitable extraction. After that, the people who made this deal will have retired or died, and a new set of targets will be introduced. We all know it. Can we stop pretending we don’t?

The enemy is not CO₂. CO₂ doesn’t have a will of its own. The enemy is the power structure that holds humanity hostage for the sake of protecting itself. You can’t change what you don’t control. The only real obstacle to preventing climate catastrophe is the undemocratic ownership of our energy and financial systems.

Here’s a quote from a former executive of Shell, explaining why they scrapped its wind and solar projects:

“In the oil market, the prices are going up and down in cycles. The solar price is just going one way – it’s going down.”

That’s it. That’s the number one reason why we still haven’t transitioned to wind and solar.

To see just how far COP is from a real solution, let’s imagine what it would do if it weren’t bullshit.

COP could agree to:

• Ban new fossil fuel investments globally. Make any new fossil fuel project legally uninsurable and unfundable. Nothing more to gain, nothing more to lobby for.

• Bring all energy systems under coordinated public ownership. No more private or national monopolies. One planet, one grid.

• Shut down all carbon-emitting infrastructure. Start with the oldest and least efficient, and work forward. Planned demolition.

• Initiate a wartime-scale effort to mass-produce wind turbines, solar panels, and heat pumps.

• Ban the production of high-emissions luxury goods like private jets, fast fashion, and SUVs. Repurpose all those factories for the green transition.

• Launch a global build-out of free and fast public transport to make private cars obsolete and planes less necessary.

• Invalidate all patents related to climate. All green technology becomes a transparent, open-source global library.

• Initiate global demilitarisation. Cut military spending worldwide and redirect soldiers, engineers, and resources towards climate adaptation and disaster relief efforts.

• Fund a global transition with seized fossil fuel wealth to guarantee every displaced person a new home and job.

I know what you’re thinking: “Calm down, Lenin. We don’t want a global war. Seize private oil companies, and there will be chaos. National delegations can’t cooperate on this scale.”

I hear you. But chaos is already here. Look around. It’s bad now, and it’s getting worse. National delegations are excellent at cooperating. They are just currently cooperating to protect the interests of billionaires, corporations, and politicians against the rest of us.

The global body that could make effective climate decisions already exists. It’s called COP. It could achieve all that. But it won’t.

Because it protects fossil fuel interests.

And for that job, Edelman is the perfect PR agency.

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This ready-made system of incentives is both extremely convincing and very flimsy. It sustains itself by teaching you what to desire, whom to respect, and when to shut up.

But what happens when you stop taking it seriously?

You're left with a simple and scary question: “What do I actually want?”

This question is terrifying because we understand next to nothing about desire. We're constantly misleading ourselves (and others) about what we really want. We buy broccoli that turns into brown slime in the fridge, chase the validation of people we claim not to care about, and constantly do dumb shit that clearly goes against our interests.

But why?

Reason 1: Mimetic Desire (René Girard)

Social philosopher René Girard theorised that most of our desires aren’t truly our own. We rarely start wanting things spontaneously, we copy desires from others. It looks like this:

Subject (You) ⟷ Mediator/Model (The Other) ⟶ Object of Desire

You see someone else wanting something, and suddenly you want it too, because their desire signals value. Girard identified two forms of this influence: external mediation (distant models, like Billie Eilish) and internal mediation (close rivals, like siblings or colleagues).

To illustrate, I have a theory about the writer-director Martin McDonagh. I suspect his entire career was driven by some blend of external and internal mediation. When Martin was growing up, being an Irish playwright was like being a Brazilian footballer: they were famous, edgy, politically influential, and just very cool – a powerful external model.

But what probably made Martin’s desire even more intense was that his elder brother, John Michael McDonagh, wanted the exact same thing – and initially, he was better at it. It wasn’t just about writing good plays. Martin probably wanted to be the better McDonagh.

The story goes that when John Michael left for a prestigious US film school, a resentful (one imagines) Martin stayed home and furiously wrote a bunch of plays so good they made him one of the best playwrights of his generation. These plays later provided material for several Oscar-winning films. After that, once the competition had run its course and it was clear who had won, Martin became a lot less prolific.

Most aspirational careers probably go like that. External mediation was definitely a factor in my early career choices. If you look at the people who succeed at prestigious jobs, there’s almost always someone who put that desire in their head.

But why is other people's desire so contagious? What makes us drop everything and start chasing what other people chase, with often very dubious results?

Reason 2: The Hunger for Status and Recognition (Lacan & Bourdieu)

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan argued we don’t genuinely want objects themselves; we want others to see us as desirable. “Desire is the desire of the Other.” It boils down to wanting to be wanted: “Am I worthy? Am I the one worth desiring?” Every external achievement just leads to the next. “I got a Tony, now I need an Oscar. I have an Oscar, now I need five more.” We gravitate towards whatever promises recognition.

But again, why?

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu had a theory: society is a massive status game played across different fields. We use money (economic capital), networks (social capital), taste (cultural capital), and honour (symbolic capital) – to achieve distinction. You can accumulate money to buy into exclusive networks, develop fancy opinions and tastes, which in turn gets you a respectable sheen of prestige. Or you could skip all that, kill the CEO of an insurance company, and become an instant icon. You can choose your status game, but you can’t choose not to play at all – not unless you decide to go live by yourself in a cave, which would also be a flex.

Perhaps, the best we can hope for is developing more awareness of the urges that drive us. Existentialists suggest that the antidote to status-seeking is meaning. The two seem mutually exclusive.

Status is what separates you from others. Meaning is what connects you to them. This connection is at the heart of everything we consider worthwhile – duty, faith, science, political struggle, love. It’s the simple, fundamental question we ask each other: do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel?

Strip away that shared experience, and any goal becomes either a meaningless private game or just another tool for status. (Hence the eternal silly question about what's worth doing if you're the last human alive in the universe. The answer is: it doesn’t matter, do what you want, no one cares, including you, unless you imagine someone will find your post-apocalyptic diaries someday.)

You can’t chase status without losing sight of meaning, and you can’t focus on meaning without eventually giving up on status. This explains why people often feel empty after climbing their preferred status ladders.

The catch is, it can be really hard to separate one from the other.

I like Eckhart Tolle. Of all the gurus, he seems least likely to be exposed twenty years later for running a sex cult. He talks about how, in a traffic jam full of Ferraris and BMWs, there’s always one spiritual person on a bike, thinking themselves superior to everyone else because they are enlightened and have risen above cheap status symbols.

Idealism often traps us by masking our true motives. Any pursuit of noble principles can easily become just another status game, hiding the urge for superiority and domination.

Is it even that bad? Surely, it’s better to establish moral dominance by riding a bike spiritually than by driving a Ferrari – less CO2 and so on? Yeah, no, it’s not great. That sneaky motive substitution is where cults come from. If you’re playing a game without admitting you’re playing a game, the game plays you.

So, to keep myself from establishing a lucrative cult, I’ve come up with the following framework. I use it for journaling and for evaluating difficult life choices.

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And I thought: I wish capitalist bullshit came in blue. Because it looks like we’ve ingested too much of it and it’s making us sick.

If you need any evidence, look at these endless articles talking about rising depression levels in the creative industries. Everyone knows it’s happening, but we seem to be struggling to identify the cause. People talk of shrinking budgets, of AI-threat, of the work no longer being ‘fun.’ And it’s all true. But there’s clearly something else going on.

Any therapist would say that depression is often anger turned inward. But anger about what? We’re among the most privileged people on the planet. The average salary in advertising is three to four times the national median. What exactly are we so angry about?

I have a theory. It gets pretty bleak, and if you’re still convinced an ECD title or Cannes Lions Grand Prix will deliver lasting happiness, you might want to stop reading here. Those who have already tried that route and realised it doesn’t work, please do leave a comment.

Personally, I think we might be fucked on three different levels, simultaneously.

1. Our Creativity Is Being Used Against Us

Creativity is a fundamental human drive. Rollo May called it a daimonic force — the need to impose our will onto chaos to feel whole. We are meaning-making animals, we need to be creative to stay emotionally healthy.

Creative industries systematically short-circuit this life-force and institutionalise it. They divide people into ‘creatives’ and ‘non-creatives.’ For the majority — the account managers, strategists, and producers — their creative impulse is dismissed as irrelevant in the name of corporate efficiency.

For designated ‘creatives,’ the offer seems more generous: a high salary to do what you love. But it’s a sinister deal. Your creative life-force, the most personal part of you, is exploited to sell commodities, often at horrific social and ecological cost. You are paid to betray the deepest parts of yourself. And, to add insult to injury, you’re often told to call that work ‘purposeful’ when everyone understands full well that the only real purpose is to make the shareholders richer.

Of course, we create justifications. We keep showing each other occasional campaigns that are meaningful, funny, or beautifully crafted. But the daily compromise wears you down. There’s only so long you can lie to yourself and others before it starts corroding the deepest parts of who you are. Depression is the most logical consequence of this bargain.

2. We Are Structurally Torn

People in creative industries occupy what Erik Olin Wright calls a ‘contradictory class location’. On one hand, we sell our labour, are subject to dismissal, and don't own the companies we work for. On the other, we directly benefit from and enable exploitation. Our work’s single purpose is to protect and increase profits. Our high salaries are, in effect, our share of the surplus value appropriated from other workers — the Ghanaian cocoa farmer, the factory worker in Shenzhen, the delivery driver in Slough.

For decades, this contradiction was manageable. Pre-2008, the neoliberal fantasy of a rising tide lifting all boats seemed plausible. But now the meritocracy dream has collapsed. Sure, among millions of child workers there’s bound to be one who assembles an exceptional creative portfolio and girl-bosses her way to Cannes. And her example will be used to justify the structural forces and violent borders that keep the remaining 99.9% where capitalism needs them to be: providing extremely cheap labour.

What does it mean to be paid a £200K salary for making shiny decks while knowing this money is downstream from exploitation and suffering? How do you ignore it? The delusion has run its course, and now we’re left with the consequences.

The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer, and we are the creative force that supplies sophisticated propaganda that props up inequality and environmental destruction. We know it, and it’s damaging to our souls.

3. We Are Confronting Our Own Mortality

This brings us to the third, and perhaps deepest, level: the existential. Why have the previous two factors become so unbearable now?

In the past several years, we’ve experienced enormous loss: a global pandemic, wars, live-streamed genocide, and an accelerating climate collapse. Existential therapists call this a boundary experience. We’ve been forced into a mass confrontation with our own mortality. The comforting illusion of limitless time is gone.

In the absence of that illusion, we are left with freedom and its terrible partner, responsibility. We are forced to ask, “With my one, brief, precious life, why am I choosing this?” The thought that our lives are being wasted is crushing.

We’ve entered a multi-level crisis that has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the pain of a co-opted creative drive, layered on top of a contradictory class position, all of it fuelled by a confrontation with death.

This isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be transformative.

The trouble is, this collective crisis may not have an individual solution. A creative director in London won't realise her full creative potential until a child worker in Ghana is free to realise hers. We can try to find comforting workarounds, but they’ll never be enough.

We can no longer pretend the £30 red prawn risotto isn’t laced with rubbish; there are blue bits clearly visible in our food. Our collective loss of existential appetite is a healthy response to a profoundly unhealthy situation. So the choice, fundamentally, is either to keep eating the blue bits or to put down the fork and figure out together what comes next, while there’s still time.

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Leave a well-paid but morally dubious job → take a huge pay cut for ‘meaningful’ work at a green startup, a sustainability-focused agency, or an NGO → find yourself working twice as hard for half the pay, all justified by the noble cause of saving the world → discover that you’re not, in fact, saving the world.

Here are a few examples — all based on true stories, modified to protect privacy:

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Hyundai decided to rescue the world from imminent environmental collapse by wiring trees with sensors to generate AI-written articles about climate change. For this, they won two golds and one silver at Cannes Lions and were, hilariously, shortlisted in the Sustainable Development Goals category.

Here’s the problem they chose to solve with the full might of Hyundai’s precision engineering:

“30% of all CO₂ emissions come from deforestation. But only 5% of all global warming press coverage mentions deforestation.”

This statistic sounds shocking, until you realise that the 30% figure refers to cumulative emissions since the Industrial Revolution. Today, deforestation accounts for something closer to 10%.

Which invites an obvious question: where does the other 90% of CO₂ come from, you dickheads? That’s right, fossil fuels. The very core of Hyundai’s business.

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According to their own 2024 sustainability report, Hyundai’s Scope 3 emissions (which include their supply chain and customers) totalled 141.9 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, up from 133.1 million the year before (p. 98). For scale, Britannia, another friend of trees, reported just 4.25 million tonnes. The vast majority of Hyundai’s impact, 114 million tonnes, came from a single category: “use of sold products”. In other words, people driving their cars.

But wait, electric vehicles! The campaign supposedly targets an “EV-considering audience disillusioned by greenwashing.” Surely that counts for something?

Even if we ignore for a moment that millions of private EVs aren't a sustainable solution either (massive resource extraction, manufacturing, and energy demands), the entire premise falls apart with their own data.

Let’s look at the numbers. In 2023, Hyundai sold 4,216,898 cars globally (p.6). Only around 268,785 were fully electric (p.10). Hyundai champions its 28% year-on-year growth in EV sales (p.3), but this increase is a drop in the ocean, completely swamped by the sheer volume of its fossil-fuel business: roughly 94% of their sales. For every one EV Hyundai sold, they sold fifteen fossil-fuel cars.

Are they at least scaling that back in response to the climate crisis? No. While posting record profits of over $12B, Hyundai sold around 220,000 more combustion-engine cars in 2023 than in 2022. Their report celebrates a drop in 'emissions intensity' per vehicle, but any efficiency gains are meaningless when the flood of total pollution is rising.

To make things worse, they are actively pushing the most damaging products. Their global bestseller is the Tucson SUV. SUVs are the second-biggest contributor to the rise in global CO₂ emissions. It’s not an unfortunate byproduct of their business, it is their business.

So, to recap: a company posting record profits from selling an ever-increasing number of fossil-fuel-burning cars made trees write articles to explain how deforestation contributes to 30% of all CO₂ emissions, and then submitted the case to a Sustainable Development Goals category.

We’re so fucked.

But what’s truly disturbing is that this campaign was likely conceived in good faith. How does a project so misguided get approved on multiple levels, produced and entered for awards?

I think the people behind this campaign are probably decent humans, caught in a classic professional bind: “My heart says I should be fighting climate change, my mortgage says I need to sell more cars.” The ‘Tree Correspondents’ campaign solved that conflict perfectly. It let everyone use their skills on something that felt ethical and useful, without sacrificing their income or job security.

I don’t believe anyone actually sat in a room and said: “Fuck the planet. Hyundai’s Scope 3 emissions are rising, shareholders want more profit, consumers love SUVs, we love our salaries, let’s make a greenwashing campaign. I don’t know, maybe let’s make trees write articles about how a lot of CO₂ comes from deforestation, actually.”

I bet no one even checked whether Hyundai’s total CO₂ emissions were rising or falling. That kind of scrutiny might have killed the idea. And everyone needed this idea to stay afloat, to maintain the illusion that their jobs were useful, ethical, and creative. Something-something sustainability. “It’s better than nothing.” “More trees can’t be bad.”

So instead of asking the one simple question that could’ve brought the whole house of cards down – “What’s actually going on with Hyundai’s own CO₂ emissions?” – they obsessed over the ethics of AI, to the point of creating a proprietary language model just for the project. A perfect case of diligent, ethical work meticulously applied to the wrong problem.

Somewhere, a tree is still talking. It’s telling a beautiful story about sustainability – to an 'EV-considering audience disillusioned by greenwashing.' Meanwhile, Hyundai’s emissions keep rising, and so do their profits.

The people who made the campaign probably didn’t see any bonuses, but they got a chocolate medal from Cannes for their troubles.

“As an organization, we are at the nascent stage of our sustainability journey. Our intent with this campaign was to share with our consumers that we are taking deliberate, albeit small steps toward a more sustainable future. While we understand that we are far from being a benchmark in sustainability, our goal is to be transparent about our progress and inspire collective action.”

“The report evaluated in the mentioned post is the statutory document of Britannia - Annual Report. We would like to bring your attention to our Sustainability Report, published last year, which provides a detailed explanation for the observed increase in the numbers. This increase correlates with the expansion of our scale of operations and an extension of our reporting boundary. Over FY 23-24, we added three facilities to our reporting scope, including our plants in Barabanki, Tirunelveli, and our dairy plant in Ranjangaon which got completely commercialised.”

“Importantly, if we compare the resources used against FY22-23 operations alone, the data on water intensity, plastic and emissions remains consistent, reflecting our ongoing efforts to optimize resource efficiency. Any observed variations arise due to a shift in the production mix, which is a natural outcome of dynamic operations.”

“We remain committed to continuous improvement. Each year, as our operations scale, we strive to be more mindful of the resources we use and the impact we create. Sustainability is not a destination but a journey, and we are dedicated to making meaningful strides along the way.”

This is a classic piece of corporate deflection, designed to sound reasonable while avoiding the core of the criticism. Let me break it down.

1. “We’re Just Getting Started”

Britannia claims it’s at the “nascent stage” of a sustainability journey, taking “deliberate, albeit small steps.” They are reframing any criticism as premature. We’re just getting started, you guys. Be patient.

Let’s be clear: a multi-billion-dollar company founded in 1892 is not at a “nascent stage” of anything. They are a market leader and should be held to a market leader’s standards.

In its Cannes Lions submission, Britannia positioned itself as a “responsible corporate giant” with “sustainability at the core of its operations.” It also claimed to “invite future advertisers into its community” and “build a blueprint for better business.”

So which is it? A responsible giant with sustainability at the core of its operations, building a blueprint for others? Or a humble beginner who can’t be judged too harshly? You don’t get to be both.

2. “You Read the Wrong Document”

This one’s rich. They suggest I reviewed the wrong document, the Annual Report, and should have consulted their separate Sustainability Report from the previous year.

Where did I get the Annual Report? From their own “Nature Shapes Britannia” campaign website. It’s the file linked directly beneath the line: “Here’s how we give back to nature.”

That’s the document they held up as proof of their campaign claims. Now that the numbers contradict the narrative, they’re trying to claim it was all a big misunderstanding and I’ve missed some “detailed explanation for the observed increase in the numbers.”

So what’s the detailed explanation?

3. "We're Growing"

That’s it. The oldest trick in the corporate handbook: blame the spike in environmental impact on business expansion, then switch to discussing intensity metrics. Sure, emissions are up, plastic waste is up, water use is up, but per unit, they say, they ‘remain consistent’. As if expansion on a burning planet were a sacred capitalist right.

Your campaign slogan is literally “Nature Shapes Britannia.” Nature doesn’t care about your emissions per ton of processed cheese. It absorbs total tonnes of CO2, plastic, and wasted water.

We are in a rapidly worsening global environmental crisis, and Britannia tells us to be patient with their ‘nascent’ sustainability transformation while they are expanding their operations to deplete our shared natural resources for profit — all while lecturing consumers about switching off unused lights and ‘using water as if it were money’.

Just be honest. Say it with your chest: Profits Shape Britannia. Put it on a normal billboard next to your quarterly earnings. Stop wasting everyone’s time.

This year’s Cannes Lions entries are a wild ride, and 'Nature Shapes Britannia' is a prime example. The agency Talented entered it 18 times across seven categories — from Outdoor to Sustainable Development Goals. The effort is paying off: it’s already won a Silver Lion in Outdoor and made the shortlist in Media and Industry Craft. Other juries seemed to know better.

Here’s the pitch:

“This groundbreaking campaign used nature as its canvas, partnering with billboards obstructed by trees, allowing nature to ‘design’ each one… This adaptive mindset has propelled their 2024 sustainability achievements, including being plastic neutral for three years and recycling 50% of withdrawn water.”

They claim the idea could save 20,000 trees “killed” in India for obstructing billboards. Britannia saved six, one for every three of their Cannes submissions. But someone else can save the other 19,994 – they’ve provided an ‘open-source design manual’ because, you know, only scalable solutions will rescue us from this deepening environmental crisis.

For context: Britannia is a $2B processed food giant selling biscuits, cakes, and tubs of cheese with a laughing cow.

“Each tree bent or curved the brand name differently, highlighting a different milestone in Britannia’s sustainability report.”

Love a good sustainability report. So I did what most agencies don’t: I read it. It’s 302 pages long, which makes finding the key numbers an insane challenge. I studied it anyway – out of morbid curiosity.

Water Stewardship: The campaign talks about “recycling 50% of withdrawn water.” Recycling water is good, right? Let’s go to page 121 of the Annual Report, and it turns out Britannia’s absolute water withdrawal almost doubled in a year – from 564,843 kL (FY23) to 1,012,259 kL (FY24). India is one of the most water-stressed countries. It has recently lost six million mature trees on agricultural lands. Saving six trees while consuming an extra half-million kilolitres of water in a water-stressed region – and making a Sustainable Development Goals case study out of it – is so cynical, it’s breathtaking.

Energy Consumption: One of the billboards celebrates the use of renewable electricity. Let’s go to page 120. Britannia’s energy consumption from non-renewables jumped from 1,324,122 GJ (FY23) to 1,775,846 GJ (FY24). The share of renewables went down by 6% (page 36). Direct CO₂ (Scope 1) soared from 75,814 t to 93,583 t; purchased power emissions (Scope 2) from 50,257 t to 66,405 t (page 122). Supply-chain emissions (Scope 3) skyrocketed from 2.5 million t to 4.25 million t (page 125).

In 2024, Britannia expanded, not contracted, its climate impact. So much for “adapting to nature’s needs.”

Plastic Neutrality: My personal favourite. Britannia claims “Plastic neutrality” through Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) — an offsetting scheme — meaning that for the amount of plastic it introduces into the market, an equivalent amount of plastic waste has been collected and ‘responsibly processed’ (page 36). Nobody really knows what’s behind the mysterious phrase ‘responsibly processed’. Could be like-for-like recycling, could be incineration.

But here’s the best part: Britannia’s own plastic waste generation increased from 3,398 MT in FY23 to 4,858 MT in FY24 (page 122).

So, in 2024, while Britannia saved six trees from being trimmed to celebrate ‘different milestones’ in its sustainability report, that same report shows a nearly doubled absolute water withdrawal, significantly increased energy consumption from non-renewables, a decreased share of renewable electricity, expanding CO2 emissions, and increased plastic waste generation.

In 2024, Britannia allocated just 0.5% of its total capital expenditure to environmental/social impact projects, down from 0.8% the year before (page 105).

Results (quoting from the submission):

• Britannia + Sustainability saw a spike of 65% in mentions and 1500% in reach

• Positive brand sentiment rose by 68%

• 8.3 million impressions within 2 weeks of launch

• Featured in 200+ publications across 11 languages

• 149x return on campaign investment

• YouTube engagement up 2386%

• Instagram engagement up 1169%

• Twitter audience engagement up 650%

• LinkedIn engagement surged 143%

Well done to everyone involved. Heroes.

P.S. Britannia and their agency replied. Lol.

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Over the past few months, I’ve been getting a lot of messages. Some from people I know, some from complete strangers. They all ask the same question, in one way or another: ‘So, what are you doing now?’

What they’re really asking is, ‘Are you still earning, and if so, can you please disclose the precise state of your bank account, so I can gauge whether I too can start saying out loud what I think about my job and not end up homeless?’

I have good news and I have bad news. I’ll tell you the good news first and the bad news will be behind the paywall. Hopefully that will discourage the sort of nosy onlookers who slow down to stare at car crashes. Get into the car with me or fuck off.

The Good News:

Yes, I’m still working. I took a few meetings with agencies that were exactly the same as my last one. ‘We’re doing incredible things for Coca-Cola, their sustainability program is a game-changer, you’ll win so many awards.’ Predictably, those interviews didn’t go well.

So, I started working with clients directly. I’ve pulled together a collective of collaborators – designers, art directors, photographers, stylists, coders. We’re operating like a co-op: everyone gets paid full commercial rates billed directly to clients, no shareholders take a cut, and there’s no overpaid CEO giving pointless Monday morning speeches about attending the office to preserve ‘company culture’ – whatever that means.

Could I start a proper agency? Probably. But I have no interest in doing so. For one, I don’t like the idea of appropriating the surplus value of other people’s labour. For another, building an agency just to sell it to another agency sounds like a spectacular waste of precious life.

So, for now I’m running this little experiment, learning from mistakes as I go.

The Bad News Is This:

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