New Year, new you. It’s that time again, for making - and then breaking - New Year’s resolutions. At the start of every January, we all start committing ourselves to ambitious targets - walking 20,000 steps a day, going to the gym, losing weight, giving up alcohol, sugar and/or junk food. Great plan, the only problem is, about 80% of our resolutions have petered out come the end of February.

The advertising industry loves to talk about bad habits, especially at the start of a new year.

Too many meetings. Too little time. Too much speed. Not enough thinking.

Every January, we nod solemnly about what we’ll stop doing differently this time. We promise ourselves fewer decks, fewer late nights, fewer reactive decisions. And then February arrives. Heads go down. Slack and Teams start buzzing again. Decks fly out the door. The same patterns quietly reassert themselves.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we’re bad at breaking habits. Maybe it’s that we’re far worse at forming new ones.

Having spent time both inside marketing teams and on the agency side, I’ve watched the same behaviours repeat themselves from both sides of the table, often with identical consequences. Pressure creates default modes, and those defaults end up shaping not just the work, but the relationships around it.

As we head into 2026, my resolution isn’t to ditch another behaviour. It’s to deliberately build a small number of better disciplines - habits that make the work stronger, teams healthier, and outcomes more meaningful for clients. Because the habits we fall back on under pressure are the ones that ultimately define our creative output.

Finishing the work properly

Advertising is obsessed with beginnings. The brief. The pitch. The big idea. The launch. Endings, by comparison, get very little attention.

Too often, a project is considered “done” the moment it ships, not when it’s fully understood. On the client side, that means lessons disappear as teams rotate, budgets reset and priorities shift. On the agency side, it means hard-won experience walks out the door without ever being properly captured. This isn’t an argument for indulgent post-mortems or lengthy retrospectives that no one ever rereads. It’s about building reflection into the rhythm of the work, rather than treating it as a luxury.

Research consistently shows that structured reflection improves learning transfer and future performance. In creative terms, that translates into better ideas, faster decision-making and fewer repeated mistakes. Yet reflection is usually the first thing sacrificed in the name of speed.

A better habit is simple. Every meaningful piece of work should end with three things:

A short internal debrief while the work is still fresh

• A client conversation that goes beyond “thanks everyone” and into what this means for the next brief
• A captured narrative — not just a case study, but a clear point of view

Not everything needs to become award bait. But everything should leave behind some residue of learning. Otherwise, we’re not accumulating experience — we’re just burning it.

Treating speed as a design constraint, not an excuse

Speed has become advertising’s favourite alibi.

We use it to justify skipping strategy, compressing collaboration and defaulting to the first idea that feels ‘good enough.’ When timelines shrink, process is often the first casualty. But speed doesn’t have to mean superficiality.

The most effective creative teams don’t abandon process under pressure — they redesign it. They understand where thinking genuinely adds value and where it doesn’t. They know which steps can be simplified and which ones are non-negotiable.

The habit worth building here is intentionality. If something is being cut, we should be able to explain why. Otherwise, speed stops being a constraint and starts becoming an excuse.

For CMOs, this matters deeply. Rushed work doesn’t just risk creative quality; it risks commercial clarity. Having sat inside brand teams where creative ideas must survive procurement, stakeholder scrutiny and board-level questioning, half-formed thinking becomes a liability very quickly.

Speed should sharpen thinking, not replace it.

Breaking silos when it gets uncomfortable, not when it’s easy

Everyone agrees that silos are bad. Everyone talks about collaboration. And then the pressure hits. That’s usually the moment when disciplines retreat into familiar territory. Strategy goes quiet. Design pushes ahead. Production gets briefed late. The result is friction downstream and compromises that get dressed up as efficiencies.

The habit to build is counterintuitive: collaborate more when things get messy, not less. From a client perspective, this is often where confidence in agency partnerships begins to wobble — not because ambition is lacking, but because alignment arrives too late to be useful.

Cross-disciplinary working isn’t just a structural choice; it’s a behavioural one. It requires leaders to model curiosity over control, and teams to tolerate ambiguity together rather than in isolation. From a business standpoint, this is where value compounds. Integrated teams don’t just move faster. They make better trade-offs earlier, spot risks sooner and align creative ambition with real-world constraints before those constraints turn into problems.

Turning experience into intellectual property

Agencies talk a lot about thought leadership. In reality, much of it is simply opinion at scale. The stronger habit is synthesis. Every agency is sitting on a vast amount of lived experience - launches, failures, pivots, platform experiments, cultural misreads and quiet wins. Very little of this gets turned into usable intellectual property for clients or the wider industry.

This isn’t about hot takes or performative visibility. It’s about noticing patterns across projects and articulating them clearly enough to be useful. For CMOs navigating uncertainty, grounded insight is far more valuable than trend reports that age overnight. Practical learning drawn from real work is what enables marketing leaders to make braver, more confident decisions.

The habit here is simple, but demanding: don’t just do the work. Translate it. Share it.

The resolution that matters

Breaking bad habits makes for a neat headline. Building better ones is harder, slower and far more impactful.

If advertising wants to earn its place as a true strategic partner - not just a delivery engine - we need to be as disciplined about how we work as we are passionate about what we make.

My resolution for 2026 isn’t to work less hard or move more slowly. It’s shaped by years spent on both sides of the relationship, watching where good intentions fall down and where better habits quietly change outcomes. Finish better. Think deeper. Collaborate earlier. And treat learning as part of the job. Because the habits we practise when no one’s watching are  the ones that ultimately shape the work everyone sees - and the value it creates.