A Christmas surprise I didn't see coming.

If you’d have told me that the thing to stop me in my tracks right now would be a 5 and a half minute car ad by Chevrolet, I’d think you were mad.

But, in many ways, that’s kind of the point isn’t it?

Have a watch of this:

Beautiful.

I’ll absolutely admit I was fighting off dust particles in the room towards the end there.

There’s many things I love about this. The casting, the performances, the cinematography, the slow build, the small details, the unrestrained narrative, the genuinely natural inclusion of brand and product, but what I love most is the fact that it exists.

Because if you’ve sat in any meeting with anyone from the media world, traditional or digital, and adhered to what they currently have to say about ‘what people want to watch’ - it wouldn’t.

Media strategy used to be incredibly important at helping find the right solution to a problem, but for some reason now every discussion or deck is built around inventing a problem to fit a ready-made solution.

This Chevrolet spot ticks very few boxes on the ‘best practices’ list, it’s long, it has no brand or logo up front, it has a slow build, slow pacing, it doesn’t use a warm colour grade, it doesn’t use tight framing, it isn’t shot 9:16, it doesn’t ‘work in 6 seconds’, which all in all is, perhaps poetically, why it’s so damn good. Because it doesn’t feel like every other piece of wallpaper out there.

I don’t mean to sound like a broken record, as I know I harp on about this quite a lot, but I genuinely feel it’s an important conversation to ensure the future relevance of our business. The continued ironclad definition of what is and isn’t creatively allowed will be the literal death of us all.

We are problem solvers. We are lateral thinkers. We are rule breakers.

Everyone in this business, client, agency, media alike, needs to take a breath and stop writing the solution before we’ve outlined the problem.

Start with the problem, and let the solution be what it may.

Then, you might actually make a tear well. A hair raise. A heart flutter.

You might actually make something worth sharing.