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No, it’s not the title of a 13 minute doom metal track. But I do think it’s part of the reason why it feels like the advertising business is traipsing through wet concrete while the world around us hurtles at breakneck speed.

Advertising is a collaborative pursuit. To make a piece of work, it has to pass through suits, strategists, creatives, creative directors, marketing managers, CMOs, CEOs, market research, media, producers, directors, and that’s only the beginning. The below is a truncated version of a series of slides from an old Copy School presentation on how hard it is just to get an idea up - and why most of them die before they even see the light of day.

Despite surrounding ourselves with more obstacles than figuring out how to unsubscribe from the e-mail list of that gym you haven’t been to in three years, there was always one thing that kept things moving. Bullheaded decision makers. On both sides.

People will always find a reason not to do something, but eventually something does have to be done - and a call has to be made. But, increasingly, over the years, it’s become harder to find those willing to shoulder the responsibility. It’s fairly common to present to a room of 6 or 7 people, who after viewing the work, all sit around waiting for someone else to say something first. And then, if and when a decision does get made, the next involves hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries abdicating to a room of people being paid $100 and a can of coke to decide on what happens next.

But it’s not just client-side, it’s a universal problem. At a multinational agency, during a large pitch, I once sat in a meeting with 3 head/senior/chief strategists, 4 or 5 CD/ECDs, and multiple director-level suits for three hours and left the meeting no clearer on the direction than I entered. As a freelancer from the outside, it was completely unclear as to what the hierarchy was and who the end decision maker was, further confirmed by no decision actually being made by the end of the meeting. We lost the pitch.

“Search the parks of all your cities. You’ll find no statues of committees.” - David Ogilvy

For over a decade now, technology and expectations have been ramping and ramping and ramping at speed, while decision making processes simultaneously get slower and slower and increasingly bogged down in layers of bureaucracy and buck-passing. It’s fairly clear that this is a bottleneck approaching breaking point - and we can see it all around us. (One of the positives of AI may be that it forcefully knocks the struts out from these unnecessarily cumbersome processes.)

Decision fatigue is everywhere. There’s a reason why everyone feels so burnt out. Clients are being asked to do more than ever before. So are agencies. Choice paralysis is a very real thing. But the truth is that failure is always guaranteed by doing nothing, so eventually someone has to back themselves in. And that’s where I think independents have a real advantage.

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision." - Maimonides

This is the most difficult environment that I can remember in this business. Agencies folding/merging/collapsing, redundancies left, right and centre, shrinking budgets, yet somehow in 2025 we managed to have a record year. And I believe a genuine reason for that is that there is absolutely zero fat in our building. We rarely even have ‘meetings’. The directors all work on the business and we sit with the rest of our team. Clients have a direct line in to the actual people responsible for solving the problem. Problems that are communicated and solved in minutes, not days. And every decision is made by people with skin in the game. This is the only way forward from here. (I recently saw a piece of work being PR’d by a network with four creatives, two creative directors, and seven GCD/ECD/CCOs in the credits. This is comically unsustainable.)

There are no competing agendas. The decisions are not made to build folios, or load award shelves, or to maximise profit to some other overseas entity, but to grow the fame of the brand and the bottom line of the client’s business. Because that’s the only way we achieve the same. So we have very little to argue about.

The word ‘taste’ is being thrown around a lot at the moment around the notion that as AI takes over everything, it will be ‘taste’ that separates the wheat from the chaff. And while I agree that’s true, there’s another equally as important attribute - maybe even more important.

Conviction.

Because without the ability, the experience, and even the gall, to act on that ‘taste’, it really isn’t worth anything.

So, hopefully, we see a return of the bullheaded decision maker. On both sides. And with a lens of positivity and a gut lined with ambition. Because, as a slightly ridiculous close to a piece on advertising, someone far more wise than any of us once said:

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.” - Nelson Mandela