Nothing worthwhile comes easy, so here’s some good news: making breakthrough work in 2026 won’t be easy either. And not because of shrinking budgets or scheming algorithms. The real obstacle is us. Advertisers, marketers and the robots and ‘tools’ we’ve fetishised. Together, we’re smothering the instincts that make this industry such an exhilarating, creative ride. But this isn’t doom and gloom. It’s an encouraging kick up the collective botty.

If you read nothing else, here’s the point: we need to loosen up. Stop overthinking. Stop overexplaining. Stop worshipping at the altar of jargon, decks, and data dashboards. Only by reclaiming our wit, impulses, and confidence can we beat the current blizzard of bland.

Society doesn’t help. We’ve become alarmingly cautious, fearful, and obsessed with the consequences of even the mildest decision. Everyone’s looking over their shoulder, worried about what others will think. The risk is you timid yourself out of the equation entirely. In Velocity, Ahmed and Olander claim ‘a Smith & Wesson beats four aces’. Although they mean digital innovation as the gun, the sentiment holds for advertising. If your four aces are brand guidelines, research, and stakeholder approval, the Smith & Wesson is the single-minded leap that only instinct can deliver.

The industry loves over-intellectualising. Often, the thicker the deck, the thicker the people. I learned that at school when I handed in a monstrously long essay expecting praise but instead earned a sneer and a “I suppose you think this is good?” from Mr Bonnington. It was five sides of A4 proving I understood nothing about Wordsworth or the French Revolution. A more relevant example: Impero’s first Nike pitch win, where the client insisted on an eight-slide limit. A brilliant rule that basically said: ‘get to the fucking point.’ More clients should try it.

Too many afternoons are wasted obsessing over ‘best-practice’, smoothing, hedging, tweaking and mitigating until any idea with bite or humanity has been sanded into perfect neutrality. Have we forgotten what it’s like to be human? Why do we think anyone in the real world would be interested in this guff? A few years ago, some research came back on a campaign. It performed brilliantly. But one participant said they’d stop supporting the charity if they ever saw it in the world. One person. Their squeamishness overrode a whole new tranche of potential supporters. Another loss for common sense and effectiveness.

What we need instead is respect for the broader public, not that one ranty person. Most people consume great music, outrageous comedy and gripping books. They have brains. And yet ideas are killed with the patronising, ‘our audience won’t get it’. Wrong. They will get it, just like they get the top-class entertainment they inhale daily. Our job is to match that entertainment, not serve up unsophisticated slop.

Then there’s the fear of thinking at all. Commenting on the diversity mix on a slide has become an easy way to score points in a meeting, a slam dunk of respectful agreement. It’s so much easier than offering an opinion on the strength (or weakness) of the idea. This is a kind of intellectual avoidance: discussing issues around the issue, rather than the issue itself. Chronic lack of directness kills ideas. Jargon makes it worse. Strategy becomes a warm blanket, easy to buy and a convenient way to avoid committing to the tangible.

And at the root of all this? Fear. Fear of getting it wrong, even though nothing truly terrible happens when a brand gets it wrong. What harms brands is timidity. Nervous marketing erodes meaning faster than bold work that occasionally misfires. Nike’s ‘Believe in something’ with Kaepernick sparked boycotts and public burning of trainers, alongside a 31% increase in online sales.

Yet although we’ve clouded our instincts with rules and frameworks, restrictions can be freeing. Impero recently enjoyed working under HFSS constraints. It was a gift, much like any tight brief, and famously true for CDP’s Benson & Hedges work in the 1970s.

Meanwhile, over in the People’s Republic of LinkedIn, the Emperor’s new clothes show is in full swing. Every day brings another carousel of earnest ‘wisdom’, odd in its lack of self-awareness. It suffocates the natural British love of piss-take and understatement, one of our creative engines. The best ideas carry a bit of madness. They rarely come from consensus. They come from an unfiltered, unbridled thought. Mark Denton puts it well: “Ideas are funny ol' things, they just turn up mostly when you least expect them… generally fully formed.”

Yet the industry keeps trying to manufacture creativity through process: weighty brand books, workshops, formulae. If ideas came from committee alone, the best work would emerge from brainstorms. It doesn’t. When I was at Google, the Machine Sprint model enforced solo ideation first, to avoid the destructive homogenisation of groupthink.

So, to make healthily disruptive and entertaining work (rather than that awful Ultra Processed junk), we must harness individuality and instinct. Speak plain English. Resist the urge to say everything. Take risks. Take leaps. Respect our audience so we earn relevance in their lives. And when we do that, in a little magical twist, we’ll have much more fun. That’s a promise.