Why Marketers Love the Word ‘Ecosystem’ (And What They’re Hiding Behind It)

Why Marketers Love the Word ‘Ecosystem’ (And What They’re Hiding Behind It)

At some point in the last decade, marketing professionals collectively decided that the word “strategy” was no longer sufficient. Strategy implied a plan, and a plan implied accountability — a direction chosen, a goal committed to, a future moment when someone would check whether you had arrived. “Ecosystem,” by contrast, implies something living. Something organic. Something that grows and adapts and cannot be fairly evaluated by any single metric because its value emerges from the interactions between components, which are complex and multidimensional and require a certain patience to appreciate. The word “ecosystem” is the greatest accountability shield in the history of marketing vocabulary, and it is absolutely everywhere.

You no longer have a social media presence. You have a “social ecosystem.” You no longer have a group of agency partners. You have a “partner ecosystem.” You no longer have a collection of tools that don’t quite integrate. You have a “technology ecosystem,” and yes, it is a little fragmented, but that’s the nature of ecosystems — they’re complex, and complexity is a feature, not a bug, and please stop asking about the attribution model.

The Ecology of the Word “Ecosystem”

The word entered business vocabulary via the technology industry, where it was used with some precision to describe the relationship between a platform and the developers, businesses, and users who build on top of it. Apple’s ecosystem, in this sense, was a real thing: a set of interdependent actors whose collective behavior created value that none of them could have generated independently. The word was earned, because the phenomenon it described was real and the relationships it implied were specific and measurable.

Then marketing got hold of it, and the word underwent the same transformation that marketing inflicts on every useful concept: it was separated from its precise meaning and redeployed as an atmospheric term. An “ecosystem” now means, approximately, “several things that are related to each other in some way.” Your content ecosystem is your blog, your social accounts, your email list, and possibly a podcast that went on hiatus after eleven episodes. Your media ecosystem is the channels you buy, plus some earned media, plus a YouTube channel that hasn’t been updated since 2022. Your influencer ecosystem is three macro influencers and a spreadsheet of micro-influencers that someone researched last spring.

None of these things are ecosystems in the biological sense. They are collections. They are portfolios. They are, sometimes, just lists. But “list” doesn’t sound like something worth putting on a strategy slide, and “collection” sounds like stamps, and “portfolio” is already overused, and so “ecosystem” has filled the vocabulary gap for everything that is more than one thing but less than a system.

What the Ecosystem Hides

The most important function of “ecosystem” language is what it conceals. A real ecosystem, by definition, has interdependence — the components affect each other, and removing one component changes the behavior of the others. When you call your marketing operations an ecosystem, you imply that this is true of your channels, your tools, your agencies, your content. Often it is not. Often the social team and the CRM team operate in parallel without meaningful connection. Often the content produced for one channel is repurposed for another with no strategy governing the repurposing. Often the agencies are coordinated by a series of email chains rather than by any shared framework. This is not an ecosystem. This is a coordination challenge with a nice name.

Calling it an ecosystem also makes it harder to change. You don’t restructure an ecosystem — you nurture it. You don’t cut parts of an ecosystem — you let them evolve. The vocabulary of living systems imports a set of values (patience, observation, stewardship) that are poorly suited to environments where budget decisions are made quarterly and strategies are revised annually. It is, again, a beautiful accountability shield. The campaign didn’t underperform. The ecosystem is still developing. Give it time. These things are complex.

The Ecosystem That Isn’t Connected

The test of an ecosystem is interdependence: does changing one element affect the others? Run this test on your marketing ecosystem. If you stopped the email newsletter, would it affect performance on paid social? If you paused the content program, would it change the SEO results? If you changed the influencer strategy, would it affect the brand survey numbers? In a genuine ecosystem, yes — all of these things would ripple through the system. In most marketing operations, the honest answer is “probably not very much,” because the channels were built separately, are measured separately, and are managed by teams whose incentives are aligned to their channel rather than to the system as a whole.

That’s not a failure. It’s a reality. Most marketing organizations are not ecosystems; they are departments with overlapping remits and varying degrees of coordination. That’s fine. That’s manageable. What it isn’t is a strategic framework, and calling it one doesn’t make it one. The vocabulary of ecosystems is borrowed from a discipline — ecology — that takes decades to study and centuries to understand. Marketing’s relationship with the term is more like naming your houseplants a “biome.” It sounds grander than it is. The plants don’t care.

Alternatives, If You’re Willing

There is a version of marketing coordination that is genuinely systemic — where channels inform each other, where customer data flows between touchpoints, where the whole is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts. Building that takes time, shared infrastructure, organizational change, and the willingness to measure success in ways that cross channel boundaries. It is harder than drawing an ecosystem diagram. It is also actually useful.

The first step is usually the most uncomfortable: being specific about what you have versus what you aspire to. You have a CRM, a social presence, two agencies, a content program, and a media budget. You aspire to integrate them more effectively so that each reinforces the others. That’s a clear goal. It produces clear questions: what would integration look like? What data needs to be shared? What organizational changes are required? These questions are answerable. “How do we nurture our ecosystem?” is not.

Words matter more in marketing than in most industries, because marketing is made of words, and the words you use internally shape the conversations you have and the decisions you make. If your internal language allows you to call a collection of loosely related activities an “ecosystem,” it is giving you permission to not ask hard questions about whether those activities are actually working together. The NoBriefs shop has no ecosystem. It has products we believe in, people we want to talk to, and the shared conviction that good work is better than impressive-sounding work. The Fuck The Brief line exists specifically for the moment when the language stops describing reality and starts replacing it. That’s not an ecosystem. That’s just marketing. And marketing, at its best, should be honest enough to say so.

The Annual Brand Survey: A Beautiful Ritual of Quantified Irrelevance

The Annual Brand Survey: A Beautiful Ritual of Quantified Irrelevance

Once a year, with the seasonal reliability of a migratory bird, the annual brand tracker arrives. It comes in the form of a research presentation, usually delivered by a research firm that has been running this study since before some of the attendees were in secondary school. The deck is thick. The methodology is sound. The sample size is robust. The findings are, depending on your charitable disposition, either reassuring confirmation of existing intuitions or an expensive restatement of things that were already known, formatted as discoveries.

Brand awareness: 67%. Up two points year-on-year. Brand consideration: 34%. Flat. Net Promoter Score: 41. Slightly down but “within margin of error.” Top-of-mind awareness among the 25-34 demographic: “we’ll look at the cross-tabs.” The room nods. Someone asks about the competitor data. The competitor data is shown. Everyone notes that Competitor A has gained three points of consideration and spends forty minutes discussing whether this is methodological noise or a real signal. The meeting ends. The deck is shared. The findings are cited in the annual report. Nothing changes, and next year, the same research firm will return with a new wave of data showing movement within margin of error in every direction.

The Value of Knowing What You Already Thought

Brand tracking studies were designed to answer a legitimate question: is our brand getting stronger or weaker in the minds of the people we want to reach, and how does this compare to competitors over time? This is a real question with real business implications. Brand health does predict future revenue in ways that are sometimes invisible in short-term performance data. The investment in longitudinal tracking is, in principle, sensible.

The problem is what happens to the data. Tracking data is, by design, slow-moving. Brand metrics change over months and years, not weeks. They are resistant to short-term campaign activity in ways that quarterly reporting cycles cannot accommodate. This creates a structural mismatch: the data exists on a timeline that the organization doesn’t have the patience for, and the organization exists on a timeline (quarterly, annual) that the data doesn’t have the resolution to illuminate.

The result is a peculiar use of research: the brand tracker is consulted not to make decisions but to defend them. If awareness went up, the campaign worked. If awareness went down, it was “external factors” or “the competitive environment” or “a methodology note in appendix C.” The data is treated as confirmation when it confirms, and as noise when it doesn’t. The tracker is not a decision-making tool so much as a document of record — a regularly updated archive of things that happened to brand sentiment, filed under “things we measured.”

The Action That Never Follows the Insight

Brand tracking studies have a section, usually near the end of the presentation, called “Implications” or “Recommendations.” This section suggests what the brand should do differently based on the findings. The suggestions are typically: “strengthen emotional connection with the 35-44 segment,” “increase salience in the premium consideration set,” “address the perception gap on quality attributes.” These recommendations have appeared in brand tracking presentations for as long as brand tracking has existed. They are structurally incapable of being specific, because the data cannot be specific — it can tell you that emotional connection is lower than it should be, but not what creative execution would raise it, by how much, by when, or at what cost.

The implications slide is therefore a bridge to nowhere: it generates the appearance of actionability without the content of it. The next steps are to “develop a plan to address these findings,” which generates a workstream, which generates a workshop (see: the discovery phase), which generates a strategy deck (see: the insight that isn’t), which circles back, eventually, to the next annual brand tracker that will measure whether any of this had any effect. It’s a beautiful system if you appreciate circularity.

The Competitor You Can’t Stop Looking At

The most emotionally intense section of any brand tracker presentation is the competitive data. Your own brand numbers are processed with professional equanimity. Competitor numbers are treated with the scrutiny of a forensic accountant reviewing a suspicious receipt. If a competitor’s awareness is up, there is a twenty-minute discussion of why, which methodological factors might explain it, whether the sample was properly weighted, and whether the shift represents a genuine change or a statistical artifact. The possibility that the competitor ran a better campaign and more people now know about them is considered, then reframed as “an opportunity for differentiation.”

The competitive obsession in brand tracking is revealing. It suggests that the primary use of the data is not “are we building the brand we want?” but “are we ahead of the people we’re afraid of?” These are related but different questions. The first question is strategic. The second is anxious. Most brand tracking presentations answer the second question while pretending to answer the first.

The Use It Could Have

Good brand research is genuinely useful when it’s designed to answer specific questions, when the methodology is matched to the decision being made, and when the findings can actually change what happens next. Tracking studies, done well, can reveal shifts in brand health before they show up in revenue — a form of early warning that is worth the investment if the organization is actually willing to act on warnings.

The prerequisite is an organization willing to be told uncomfortable things and do something about them. Not willing to note them in the appendix, or explain them away with margin-of-error arguments, or add them to the list of things that will be addressed in Phase Two. Actually willing to change course. That organization is rarer than the research investment it would justify, but it exists, and when it does, the brand tracker earns its budget many times over.

For everyone else: the tracker arrives, the deck is presented, the findings are filed, and next year the same firm returns. It’s not fraudulent. It’s just expensive ritual. The NoBriefs shop runs its own kind of brand research: watching what resonates with people who are fed up, making more of that, and not commissioning a tracker to tell us what we already know from talking to our community. The KPI Shark has seen the competitive data. He is not impressed. He suggests you stop watching the competitor’s numbers and start making something worth watching.

Omnichannel: The Word That Means Everything and Requires Nothing

Omnichannel: The Word That Means Everything and Requires Nothing

In the beginning was the channel. Then there were channels, plural, and they were managed separately, by separate teams, with separate KPIs, and they didn’t talk to each other, and that was called “multichannel,” and it was fine, more or less, in the way that most things that are somewhat disorganized are fine. And then came the consultants, and they looked upon the channels, and they said: “What if the channels were not separate? What if the customer experience were seamless across all touchpoints? What if we called it ‘omnichannel’ and charged accordingly?” And lo, the omnichannel age began.

That was approximately fifteen years ago. In the interim, the word “omnichannel” has been used to describe approximately every possible combination of marketing activities, from genuinely integrated customer experiences to a company that has a website, an Instagram, and a newsletter they send out on alternating Thursdays when someone remembers to log into Mailchimp. The word has traveled so far from its original meaning that it now functions primarily as a signal of seriousness rather than a description of capability. Saying you have an omnichannel strategy is like saying you have a strategic approach to breathing. It sounds important. It is impossible to disagree with. It commits you to absolutely nothing specific.

What Omnichannel Was Supposed to Mean

The genuine version of omnichannel is straightforward and genuinely hard: a customer’s experience of your brand should be coherent and continuous regardless of which channel they use, and the channels should share information so that the experience improves with each interaction rather than resetting to zero every time the customer moves from your app to your store to your customer service line. If you called your bank last week and explained a problem, you shouldn’t have to explain it again when you open the app. If you put something in your online cart and then walk into the physical store, the store associate should know, or at least the system should.

This is technically achievable and organizationally catastrophic. It requires shared data infrastructure across systems that were built at different times by different teams and frequently don’t communicate. It requires breaking down the organizational silos where the digital team, the retail team, the CRM team, and the customer service team each own their piece of the customer and protect it from the others. It requires someone with enough authority and enough persistence to force these teams to coordinate, and that person either doesn’t exist or is currently stuck in a steering committee meeting about the omnichannel strategy deck.

The Omnichannel Strategy Deck

Most companies’ omnichannel journey begins with a strategy deck. The deck outlines the vision: a seamless customer experience, unified data, integrated communications, consistent brand presence across all touchpoints. The deck is beautiful. The vision is compelling. The roadmap at the back of the deck has sixteen workstreams and a three-year timeline and a budget that gets cut in half during the next planning cycle.

What actually gets implemented, typically, is the visible layer: the same visual identity applied consistently across channels, a content calendar that tries to coordinate messaging across platforms, a CRM system that is technically integrated with the website though the integration works less well than the vendor implied. This is not nothing. Consistency of appearance and message is genuinely valuable. It is also not what the omnichannel strategy deck promised, which was a fundamentally different customer experience powered by unified data and seamless transitions between touchpoints.

The gap between the deck and the reality is explained, in subsequent decks, as “Phase Two.” Phase Two will address the data infrastructure. Phase Two will break down the silos. Phase Two is always eighteen months away and has been eighteen months away for four years. In the interim, the company publishes case studies about its omnichannel approach that describe Phase One as if Phase Two had already happened.

The Omnichannel Meeting

The organizational reality of omnichannel is a meeting. Usually a recurring meeting. The Digital team presents their metrics. The Retail team presents their metrics. The CRM team presents their metrics. Everyone’s metrics look reasonable in isolation. Nobody can explain the customer who appears in the Digital data, the Retail data, and the CRM data as three different people with three different histories. The meeting ends with an action item to “align on attribution,” which produces a sub-meeting, which produces a shared document, which is last edited eighteen months ago.

The meeting exists because the organizational structure hasn’t changed to match the strategy. You can declare yourself omnichannel all you like, but if the incentives still reward each channel team for their channel’s performance in isolation, the coordination will be perfunctory. The channel managers are not being obstinate — they’re being rational. They are optimizing for the thing they’re measured on, which is not “contribution to a seamless customer journey” but “channel revenue” or “channel engagement.” The omnichannel strategy sits above the incentive structure without changing it, like a banner hung over a building that is structurally exactly the same as before the banner went up.

The Honest Version

Here is what honest omnichannel communication would look like: “We are consistent in our visual identity and messaging across channels. Our website and app share data reasonably well. Our retail and digital teams meet monthly and have a good working relationship. Our customer service team has access to purchase history. We do not yet have fully unified customer profiles or seamless cross-channel handoffs, and that infrastructure project is in the roadmap for 2026.” That’s a real description of a real capability. It’s also never what appears in the brand presentation, because it sounds like an admission rather than a strategy.

The word “omnichannel” will continue to mean everything until it means nothing, and then a new word will arrive — probably something involving “unified” or “integrated” or “total customer experience” — and the cycle will begin again with fresh slides and the same underlying coordination problems. It’s not cynicism. It’s just how language works in marketing: the vocabulary evolves faster than the reality, and the gap between them is where most of the budget lives.

For those keeping score at home, the NoBriefs shop is itself available across multiple channels. Not because we have an omnichannel strategy — we just have a website and some social accounts and a desire to sell good things to people who are tired of bad words. The KPI Shark does not care which channel you use to find him. He is, you might say, channel-agnostic.

The Strategic Insight That Isn’t: On Charging a Premium to State the Obvious

The Strategic Insight That Isn’t: On Charging a Premium to State the Obvious

Page 23 of the strategy deck. You’ve been in this room for two and a half hours. There have been a lot of charts. There has been a framework with four quadrants. There was a section called “The Evolving Consumer Landscape” that described the internet. And now, on page 23, after all of that, the consultant pauses, looks around the room with the gravity of someone about to reveal something that will change how you understand your business forever, and says: “Fundamentally, your customers want to feel understood.” The room stills. A director writes it down. Someone nods slowly, as if hearing a truth they’ve always felt but never had the words for. You have just paid €85,000 for someone to tell you that your customers want to feel understood.

The strategic insight that isn’t is one of the consulting industry’s most durable products. It is an observation disguised as a discovery, a platitude dressed in the vocabulary of proprietary methodology, a thing everyone in the room already knew, elevated to strategic clarity by being said with confidence in a deck that cost a lot of money to make look expensive. It is almost impressive, as a feat of professional performance. It is also, if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of it, genuinely maddening.

What Makes an Observation Sound Like an Insight

The gap between an observation and an insight is supposed to be evidence: data that reveals something non-obvious, a causal relationship that changes how you act, a finding that would not have emerged without deliberate inquiry. A real insight has consequences — it should change what you do. “Your customers want to feel understood” has no consequences because it applies to every customer of every brand in every category, which is the marketing equivalent of saying “people prefer to be treated well.”

The consulting industry has developed an extensive toolkit for transforming observations into insights without adding actual content. The most reliable method is proprietary framework nomenclature. “Your customers don’t just want a product — they want a ‘Value Realization Journey’™” sounds like an insight because it has a name. The name implies a model. The model implies research. The research implies specificity. None of that chain is necessarily true, but the vocabulary creates the impression of it.

Another method is the counter-intuitive setup. “You might expect that lower prices drive conversion. But our research shows — ” and then what follows is either actually counter-intuitive (rare) or a restatement of the original premise with a slight reframe (common). “Our research shows that customers prioritize value perception over price” means “people don’t only care about cheapness,” which means the original premise was a straw man set up specifically to be knocked down, creating the sensation of revelation without the content of it.

The Confidence Premium

Here is the mechanism that makes the non-insight viable as a business proposition: the people delivering it are very confident, and confidence is genuinely valuable in contexts where the audience is uncertain. When a company brings in external strategy consultants, they are usually doing so because something is unclear, some direction needs to be chosen, some argument needs to be settled. Into that uncertainty arrives someone with a deck, a methodology, and the manner of someone who has seen this situation many times before and knows exactly what to do about it.

The confidence is not fraudulent. Most consultants genuinely believe what they’re presenting. The issue is that genuine belief and genuine insight are not the same thing. It’s entirely possible to be completely convinced of an observation that is completely obvious. And it’s entirely possible for a room full of intelligent people to hear that observation delivered with conviction and experience it as new information, simply because the delivery elevated it above the threshold where they would normally filter it out.

This is the confidence premium: paying for certainty in a moment of uncertainty, regardless of whether the certainty is earned. Companies pay it because the alternative — sitting with the ambiguity, making decisions without external validation, trusting the knowledge that already exists inside the organization — is uncomfortable in ways that a €85,000 invoice temporarily resolves.

The Insight You Already Have

Most companies contain the insights they’re paying consultants to discover. They exist in the customer service team, which has been listening to customer complaints for years and has detailed, specific knowledge of what goes wrong and why. They exist in the sales team, which knows exactly how competitors are perceived and what objections come up in every conversation. They exist in the product team, which knows which features get used and which ones were built for a persona that turned out to be fictional (see: Jennifer).

This knowledge doesn’t get elevated to “strategic insight” because it comes from inside the organization, because it’s messy and specific and sometimes contradicts the official narrative, because it requires listening to people who are not senior enough to have opinions that count. The external consultant’s version of the same knowledge, repackaged in a framework and delivered on slide 23, becomes the strategic direction for the next three years.

There is a version of external strategy work that is genuinely valuable: bringing a perspective that the organization can’t generate internally due to proximity, ego, or politics; structuring a decision-making process that moves faster than internal dynamics allow; providing the political cover that sometimes allows good ideas that already existed to finally be acted upon. That version exists. It is surrounded, in the market, by a much larger volume of expensive restatements of the obvious.

The Test Worth Running

Before commissioning the next strategy project, try this: ask your customer-facing teams to write down what they know about why customers buy, why they leave, and what they wish the product or service did better. Read it carefully. Compare it to what the strategy deck will cost. Ask whether the gap in understanding justifies the investment, or whether the investment is mostly buying confidence and a good-looking deck to show the board.

Sometimes the answer will be: yes, we genuinely need external perspective here. Often the answer will be: we need to listen to our own people better. Neither answer requires slide 23. The NoBriefs shop sells, among other things, the reminder that the most important things in marketing are usually obvious — what’s rare is the courage to act on what you already know. The Spreadsheet Sloth has sat through that deck. It did not change his life. It did not need to.

When the Creative Director Discovers TikTok (Six Months After Everyone Else)

When the Creative Director Discovers TikTok (Six Months After Everyone Else)

There is a particular kind of meeting that happens in creative agencies and marketing departments every few years, and it is always the same meeting with a different platform name substituted in. You’re in the conference room. Someone senior — usually someone whose media diet skews heavily toward industry trade press and LinkedIn articles about industry trade press — arrives with the expression of someone who has just discovered fire. “We need to be on TikTok,” they say. The room nods. In the back row, the 26-year-old social media manager who has been lobbying for a TikTok budget for eighteen months closes their eyes briefly and counts to three.

The creative director who discovers TikTok in the fourth year of TikTok’s relevance is one of marketing’s most reliable characters. They are well-intentioned, genuinely excited, and arriving at the party at precisely the moment the hosts are starting to clean up. Their enthusiasm is real. Their timing is catastrophically off. And their conviction that the brand’s TikTok presence will be different from all the other brand TikTok presences — more authentic, more native, more genuinely connected to the culture — will survive approximately three content planning meetings before collapsing under the weight of legal approval processes and the Communications Director’s concern about tone.

The Platform Adoption Curve, Explained Through Pain

Every platform has a lifecycle that follows a depressingly predictable curve. First, the early adopters arrive — young, creative, indifferent to brands, building culture organically. Then the culture becomes visible to people slightly outside it, and the clever brands show up: small teams, fast decision-making, willing to be genuinely weird. Then the platform “proves itself” with a case study that gets written up in Marketing Week. Then the budget gets allocated. Then the committee gets involved. Then the brand guidelines get applied. Then legal signs off on the content calendar. By this point, the people who made the platform interesting are doing something else, and the brands are talking to each other in an empty room.

TikTok followed this arc with particular speed, because TikTok’s culture moved faster than any platform before it. What worked in 2020 was irrelevant by 2021. The audio trends, the format conventions, the relationship between creators and audiences — all of it evolved faster than any brand approval process could track. The brands that succeeded on TikTok did so by giving small teams real autonomy and real speed. The brands that failed did so by treating TikTok like television with vertical video: produced, polished, and addressed to nobody in particular.

The Brief for the TikTok That Nobody Wanted

When the Creative Director’s TikTok enthusiasm reaches the briefing stage, something fascinating happens. The brief asks for content that is “authentic and native to the platform” while also being “on-brand,” “legally cleared,” “approved by Communications,” “suitable for all audiences,” “aligned with the current campaign,” and “avoiding anything that could be perceived as controversial.” These requirements are not compatible with each other. TikTok authenticity requires speed, rawness, and the willingness to fail publicly. Brand approval processes require the opposite of all three.

The result is content that looks like TikTok and feels like a brochure. It uses the right aspect ratio. It has text overlays in the right font. It might even use a trending audio — though the trend will be three weeks old by the time legal approved the audio license. It is technically a TikTok in the same way that a theme park ride is technically travel. It has the form without the substance, the format without the culture, the presence without the point.

This content gets 200 views. Of those, 150 are employees and agency staff. The remaining 50 are people who landed on it by accident and scrolled away in under two seconds. The analytics are reported in the monthly dashboard with creative framing: “We’re building presence,” says the report. “Organic growth takes time.” It does take time. It also takes content that people actually want to watch, which is the part the brief forgot to address.

The Platform Graveyard

Behind every marketing department with an active TikTok account there is usually a row of abandoned platforms: a Snapchat account that posted six times in 2017, a Pinterest presence that was updated until someone left and nobody learned the password, a Google+ page that outlasted Google+ itself because someone forgot to delete it. Each of these represents a moment when a senior person discovered a platform and got excited, a junior person was assigned to “own” it without resources or strategic direction, and the whole thing quietly expired when the excitement moved on.

The platforms change. The pattern doesn’t. The discovery, the enthusiasm, the underfunded execution, the measured disappointment, the quiet abandonment — it’s as regular as seasons. The question worth asking, before the next platform discovery meeting, is not “how do we do TikTok?” but “do we have the organizational capability to do any platform well, and if not, why are we adding another one?”

The Way Out of the Cycle

Some brands have found an exit from this loop: be genuinely excellent on one or two platforms rather than adequately present on six. Give the people closest to the content — usually the youngest people on the team, the ones who actually use the platforms — real authority and real resources. Accept that being native to a platform means making content the platform’s audience actually enjoys, not content that fits the brand guidelines and happens to be vertical.

It requires trusting people who don’t sit in senior leadership, which is the hardest thing for most organizations to do. It requires accepting that some of the best content will make someone in Legal briefly uncomfortable. It requires admitting that the Creative Director discovering TikTok is not the same thing as the brand understanding TikTok.

If you’re the junior person in the back of that meeting, counting to three while senior leadership catches up to 2020, the NoBriefs community sees you. The Fuck The Brief collection was made for people who know exactly what needs to happen but are waiting for permission from someone who just downloaded the app. You know where to find us.

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