Be refreshing.

It’s hard to know what to write at the moment. I don’t really plan these things out, thoughts or insights will often naturally surface and I just go and unravel them onto the page. Or screen. Keyboard? Whatever. But with a few personal things going on, and well, *broadly gestures at the state of the world*, it can sometimes feel trivial to sit down and talk about advertising with the required gusto it deserves to be worthy of someone else devoting their time to reading it.

As we rapidly approach the end of another year (a frightening prospect, increasing in terrifying propensity with each lap of the sun now that I’m in my 40s), I have been doing some pondering and reflecting on our business, and our collective business at large, and a word has kind of bubbled to the surface.

‘Refreshing’.

It’s probably the one word we’ve heard the most to describe us as not just an agency, but as people, in a challenging, and frankly insane, 2025 that has somehow been incredibly fruitful for us. (And something that I don’t for a second take for granted.)

More and more, I feel like I’m starting to understand why. I’ve always held the belief that you always require a clear reason to exist. That pandering will eventually lead to your remit being in-housed or pitched out. That ‘fitting in’ and ‘trend following’ will, ironically, pave a runway to irrelevance. That blunting your opinions will sow the seeds for a loss of identity that ultimately shrivels into a loss of respect. Views that, in the past, ruffled the feathers of complacency. But views that, now, have helped weather a hell of a storm. In the interim, perhaps, momentarily, at the least.

The gears of not only capitalism, but society, our minds, everything, feel tired and rusted. I’m not sure we’ve all really recovered from the COVID-era. Deep down I think people are still worn down, after the nub that was left to re-enter the world was simply thrown back on to the grindstone. So much so that seeing ‘humour in ads again’ was a huge talking point not that long ago. As if the world of business and marketing, and then ultimately, commercial creativity, was allowed to go outside and play again after a long detention.

Simply put, I think we’re all just really fucking tired. On all sides. Tired of an infinite list of systems and templates and ‘best practices’. Tired of old, slow, monolothic ways of working (that, ironically, keep getting bigger and slower via consolidation - delivering us a lot of new business in the process). Tired of justifying the existence of the right brain to those who only think with the left. Tired of being told what all the answers are by people who don’t even know what questions to ask in the first place. And the end result is a planet full of people who are so tired of what we produce that they pay money to not have to look at it.

We’ve removed the magic and made ourselves inherently wrong in doing so. We’ve become predictable. Expected. Tired.

It’s for this reason I’ve always enjoyed this excerpt from Paul Arden’s book, Whatever you think think the opposite.

It is better to live in ignorance than with knowledge.

Solving the problem is the exciting part, not knowing the answer.

Once a conjuring trick is explained it loses its magic.

The excitement of a game of football is not knowing who is going to be the winner.

Some people have success and rest on their laurels.

The lucky ones continue to live in ignorance.

Or, even more simply put in Thomas Merton’s summarisation of the teachings of Chuang Tzu, “No one is so wrong as the man who knows all the answers.”

Despite all of this, I still feel incredibly privileged to do this for a living. It gets harder every year, but coming up with ideas for a job still beats a ‘job’. I definitely feel the tiredness around me, but not in me.

Which, I imagine, is probably why we keep being called ‘refreshing’. Because we reject the dreary monotony of modern marketing. Because we have no ‘special patented made up creative process™’. We have no copy and paste one and done pitch deck. We have no single-category approach. We have no VP, Global Interdimensional Borderless Chief Creative Officer, APAC that swans in for one meeting and then vanishes. Perhaps, concisely put, we have no BULLSHIT.

“Because in the end it’s always just your best 3 people vs theirs.” - Nils Leonard

We just have some of the nicest, hungriest, most curious, most talented, most industrious, people we know. People who aren’t just punching clocks and warming seats. People that are still energised by the possibility of a blank page. People that still really care, maybe too much at times. And a whole shitload of belief in what we do.

None of this is new, it’s what we’ve always done, but somehow, because of how the industry has evolved around us - it’s now ‘refreshing’.

It’s refreshing to want to solve problems and to want the responsibility. It’s refreshing to put the people in the room that are actually going to work on the business. It’s refreshing to care about how a brand looks and feels and sounds wherever it shows up. It’s refreshing to have a strong opinion and not be afraid to voice it in the room. It’s refreshing to talk something through, in plain language, without pretence or preciousness, like regular human beings. It’s refreshing to care, like to really care, to really give a shit. It’s refreshing to want to do work that people in the real world actually give a shit about too. Even though it’s ‘just ads’.

It shouldn’t be, but apparently, it is.

So, maybe that’s what I’ve got for you at the moment. A single word.

In a world of understandably tired, worn down nubs of human beings - be refreshing.

Have refreshing conversations. Present refreshing opinions. Make refreshing work.

Toss the playbook. Burn the template. Yeet the answers.

Be yourself.

Be refreshing.

(Skynet will be here soon anyway, so what have you got to lose?)

Marketing ideas for marketers who hate boring

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

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