por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | Uncategorized
There was a time when “storytelling” was a useful word. It described something specific: the craft of constructing a narrative that moves people, changes minds, and makes abstract ideas concrete through character and consequence. Then marketing discovered it. Then every brand deck began with “we tell stories.” Then every conference keynote began with “humans are wired for stories.” Then every junior strategist opened their presentation with “before I share the data, let me tell you a story.” And the word, worn to a nub by overuse, stopped meaning anything at all.
The Taxonomy of the Abuse
The word “storytelling” in a marketing context can now mean virtually anything: a thirty-second ad, a brand manifesto, a customer testimonial, a social media caption, a CEO’s LinkedIn post about a difficult lesson they learned on a hiking trail, or a product description that uses the phrase “born from a passion for quality.” None of these are stories. They are content wearing a story’s vocabulary without understanding its structure.
A story requires tension. Something must be at stake, and the outcome must be uncertain. A story requires a character who changes — who is different at the end than they were at the beginning. A story requires that the audience care about what happens next. Most brand “storytelling” lacks all three elements. It is a brand explaining how good it is, in chronological order, with a voiceover and a track from Epidemic Sound.
When a brand says “we tell stories,” what they usually mean is “we make content that is not purely transactional.” That is a low bar. It is also a different activity. Conflating the two produces communication that is neither good content nor actual storytelling — it occupies the unhappy middle ground between information and emotion, fully committing to neither.
How It Happened: The Conference Industrial Complex
The meteoric rise of “storytelling” as a marketing buzzword can be traced to a specific moment: the collision of neuroscience pop-science and brand strategy, circa 2012. A researcher named Paul Zak published work suggesting that stories trigger oxytocin release in the brain, making audiences more trusting and empathetic. This was immediately extracted from its academic context, stripped of its nuance, and inserted into every brand strategy deck between San Francisco and Amsterdam.
“Stories release oxytocin,” said the speaker at the conference. “That’s why your brand needs to tell stories,” he continued, with the logical leap of someone who has just discovered that aspirin relieves headaches and is now prescribing it for broken legs. By the time the slide had been shared on LinkedIn four hundred times, the causal chain had been fully severed from the evidence.
What followed was a decade of brands attempting to engineer emotional responses through narrative structure, most of them producing work that was transparently manipulative in exactly the way a good story never is. The audience could feel the machinery. The oxytocin did not arrive. The conversion rates were unaffected.
The Paradox at the Heart of Brand Storytelling
Here is the structural problem: a genuine story requires the storyteller to care about the truth of what they are describing, not the outcome they want to produce. The moment you design a story to make someone feel a specific thing about your brand, you have introduced a fundamental corruption into the narrative act. Great storytelling is generous. Brand storytelling is extractive. These are not the same practice wearing different clothes — they are philosophically opposed.
This is not an argument against emotion in advertising. It is an argument for precision in language. Advertising that moves people is real and valuable. Campaigns that build genuine affinity over time are not accidents. But the mechanism is usually not “we constructed a hero’s journey.” It is more often: we said something true about the human experience in a way that was surprising, specific, and not designed by committee.
The most effective brand communication tends to be the most honest — which is to say, the kind that would survive being read back to the people who made it without producing embarrassment. That is a different standard than “does this feel like a story?”
What to Say Instead
If you are a creative or strategist who has been asked to “bring more storytelling” to a project, it is worth asking the client what they mean by the word. Not confrontationally — diagnostically. Do they mean: narrative arc? Character development? Emotional resonance? Concrete specificity over abstraction? Long-form content? Each of these is a real and useful brief. “More storytelling” is a noise that sounds like direction.
If you are the one writing the brief, try replacing “storytelling approach” with the specific effect you want to achieve: “we want the audience to feel understood,” or “we want to demonstrate expertise without lecturing,” or “we want people to remember this product for an emotional reason, not a functional one.” These are briefs that can be acted upon. “Tell a story” is an invitation to produce something that looks like a story and functions as neither fish nor fowl.
The Fuck The Brief collection was designed for exactly this kind of professional situation — the one where the language in the room is sufficiently detached from meaning that working against it becomes its own creative act. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is that the emperor’s narrative arc has no clothes. Get the mug. Put it on the table during the next briefing. See what happens.
Language matters — especially in an industry that claims to live by it. Visit nobriefsclub.com for tools that say what most marketing decks are afraid to.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | Uncategorized
Somewhere in your company’s Google Drive, there is a document. It was created during a two-day offsite retreat that cost more than a mid-range car, facilitated by a consultant who charged €4,000 a day to ask questions like “what does success look like to you?” The document contains three sections: Mission, Vision, and Values. It was approved by the entire leadership team. It was formatted by design. It was printed, laminated, and placed on the wall of the meeting room. Nobody has read it since the approval meeting. You are not alone.
The Three Sacred Texts of Corporate Ritual
The Mission statement tells you what the company does. In theory. In practice, it is a sentence that has been rewritten seventeen times until it sounds profound and means nothing. “We empower people to connect with what matters most” could belong to a telecom company, a therapy app, a furniture brand, or a cult. The Mission statement is corporate poetry — technically language, but not actually communication.
The Vision statement tells you where the company is going. It typically involves being “the world’s leading” something, “transforming” an industry, or “creating a future where” something vague happens. It is written in the present perfect tense of aspiration, describing a reality that will arrive at an unspecified point after the current management team has retired.
The Values are the most dangerous of the three. They are a list of nouns — Integrity, Innovation, Collaboration, Excellence, Respect — that every company has, in some combination, regardless of whether those values bear any relationship to how the company actually operates. A company can list Integrity as a core value and still make you work weekends without overtime. Values are aspirational fiction written by people who will never be held to them.
How the Triptych Gets Made
The creation of a Mission-Vision-Values document follows a remarkably consistent process across industries, geographies, and company sizes. It begins with a trigger event — usually a new CEO, a rebrand, or a difficult year that someone decides to solve with language rather than action.
A consulting firm is hired. Workshops are conducted. Employees are invited to participate in sessions that feel like participation but are ultimately exercises in confirming conclusions that management has already reached. The facilitator asks questions. Post-it notes are produced. Themes are identified. Everything gets synthesized into a framework that the consultant has used, with minor variations, for every client they have ever had.
The resulting document is then subject to three months of internal review, during which every executive removes the words they dislike and adds the words they prefer. “Agile” is added by someone in technology. “Human” is added by someone in HR. “Bold” is removed because Legal is uncomfortable with it. The final version is a compromise between twelve competing personal brand statements disguised as organizational strategy.
The design team produces a beautiful version. It is shared at the all-hands meeting. Everyone claps. The lamination machine is booked. Three weeks later, a new strategic priority arrives from the board and the Vision is immediately obsolete. The laminated version stays on the wall because removing it would require acknowledging that it no longer applies.
Why Nobody Actually Reads It
The triptych is not meant to be read. It is meant to exist. Its function is not communication but legitimacy — proof that the organization has thought about itself, that it has a direction and a conscience and a set of principles. The document is the organizational equivalent of a mission statement tattooed somewhere nobody can see: it’s there, it means something to someone, but it is not guiding daily decisions.
Real company culture is transmitted through behavior, not documents. People learn what their organization actually values by watching what happens when someone misses a deadline versus what happens when someone violates an ethical standard. They learn what “collaboration” means by observing whether information is hoarded or shared. No amount of laminated Values will override those lessons.
This is why the Spreadsheet Sloth exists as a product: because the gap between what organizations say they value and how they actually operate is so consistent, so universal, and so darkly funny that it deserves acknowledgment. Sometimes the most professional response to corporate theater is a product that wears the contradiction openly.
What Would Actually Work
If you are, by some circumstance, responsible for producing one of these documents, here is what the research actually suggests: fewer words, concrete behaviors, and someone accountable for the values being violated. A value is only real if breaking it has consequences. “Integrity” as a laminated noun means nothing. “We do not take credit for other people’s work, and this is a fireable offense” means something.
Short values, written in plain language, describing actual behaviors, that are referenced in performance reviews and hiring decisions — these have measurable impact on culture. The two-day retreat format, the facilitator with the post-it notes, the seventeen-round approval process — these produce documents. They do not produce culture.
The best mission statements are the ones that function as actual filters: this is who we are, this is what we refuse to do, this is why people who don’t share these beliefs should work somewhere else. Not inspiring. Useful. There is a significant difference, and most organizations have spent significant money confusing the two.
If your company’s values include “authenticity” but you’re still pretending the brief is useful, visit the NoBriefs Club shop. Wear the contradiction with dignity.
por Ber | Mar 29, 2026 | Uncategorized
There is a particular kind of professional anguish that no marketing school prepares you for. You have spent three days on a proposal. You researched their competitors, crafted a strategy, color-coded the budget, and included a timeline that suggests you are a fully functioning adult. You send it. You get a read receipt. You wait. You follow up politely. You wait again. And then, like a CMO who just received an acquisition offer, they vanish. Welcome to the ghost client — the creative industry’s most passive-aggressive rite of passage, and the single greatest threat to your faith in human communication.
The Anatomy of a Professional Ghost
The ghost client doesn’t disappear randomly. There’s a ritual to it. First, they contact you with the urgency of someone whose brand is literally on fire. “We need a proposal by Friday,” they say on Tuesday, as if your calendar is a decorative object with no function. You cancel plans. You rearrange three other projects. You produce something genuinely good — something that took real thinking, not just template-filling.
Then Friday arrives. You send the proposal. You get a polite “thank you, we’ll review this over the weekend.” This is, as it turns out, the last communication you will ever receive from this organization. Not because they disliked your work. Not because they went with a cheaper competitor. But because they have moved on to the next crisis in their 52-item priority list, and your proposal is now archived in a folder called “Agencies Q3” alongside invoices from 2021 and a PDF that has never been opened by anyone alive.
The ghost client is not malicious. They are simply, structurally incapable of saying no. In their world, silence is a form of closure.
The Economics of the Unread Proposal
Here is what nobody in the industry says out loud: the proposal you spent 18 hours on cost you real money. The time you invested understanding their brand, their audience, their competitive landscape, their vague aspirations — all of that is labor. Invisible, uncompensated, unacknowledged labor, performed on the implied promise of a project that may never materialize.
The industry’s dirty open secret is that proposals are treated as free consulting. The client learns what their problems actually are, what solutions exist, roughly how much those solutions should cost, and then takes that intelligence to an in-house team, a cheaper freelancer, or into a strategy meeting where someone in senior management presents your ideas as their own stroke of genius.
This is precisely why experienced creatives charge for proposals. Not because they are difficult people, but because their time has demonstrable value. The moment you begin treating your own work as something worth protecting is the moment clients start treating it the same way. Keep a KPI Shark on your desk as a reminder: your time is not a free resource, and every unread proposal is a metric you should be tracking.
Why They Ghost and What It Reveals
Ghost clients fall into three recognizable archetypes. The first is the Overthinker — someone who genuinely intended to move forward but has been paralyzed by internal approval chains, budget cycles, and stakeholder alignment processes that make Byzantine bureaucracy look agile. They want to call you. They cannot call you until the Head of Brand approves the budget, and that person is in Singapore until November.
The second is the Comparison Shopper. They have requested proposals from you and four other agencies simultaneously, using your work to benchmark competitive pricing. You are not being evaluated for the project. You are being used as a calibration instrument. This is the professional equivalent of asking someone on a date just to confirm you still have it.
The third, and most statistically common, is the Priority Shifter. Seventy-two hours after contacting you, the company launched a new product line, hired a new Marketing Director, or had a board meeting that redefined the entire strategy. Your proposal now solves a problem they no longer have. They will not tell you this because telling you requires a conversation, and conversations require emotional energy they are not willing to spend on a vendor relationship that never began.
How to Survive the Ghost Without Becoming One Yourself
One follow-up email is professional. Two is persistent. Three begins to resemble desperation, and desperation is the single most effective way to confirm that you were the right person to ghost. After two follow-ups with no response, close the loop internally and move forward. Not bitterly. Strategically.
Use the experience to refine your intake process. Ghost clients announce themselves during the briefing phase — they are vague about budget (“we’re flexible”), they’ve “already spoken with a few agencies,” and they need everything “by end of week.” These are not deadlines. They are early warning signs. Treat them accordingly.
Implement a discovery fee for proposals above a certain scope. If a potential client objects to paying €300 for a detailed brief that will take you two days to produce, that tells you precisely how they will behave when invoices are due. The Fuck The Brief collection was created for exactly this kind of professional self-defense — sometimes the healthiest response to corporate communication theater is to name it accurately and keep moving.
The ghost client is not your failure. They are a structural feature of an industry that has normalized free intellectual labor. The solution is not to stop proposing — it is to propose better, faster, and on terms that protect your time. Because your time, unlike a proposal PDF, does not have a storage limit.
Ready to stop working for free? Browse the NoBriefs Club shop — wearable reminders that your creative work has value, even when clients forget to notice.
por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
The most honest thing anyone can say about artificial intelligence and creative work in 2025 is also the least satisfying: it depends. It depends on what kind of creative work you do, what value you bring to it, how your clients understand and compensate that value, and how quickly the technology continues to develop in directions nobody can fully predict. If you were hoping for a confident narrative — “AI will free creatives to do their best work!” or “AI will replace most creative jobs within five years!” — this piece will disappoint you. Both of those narratives are being sold by people with financial interests in one conclusion or the other, and both are probably wrong in the ways that matter most.
What is not in doubt is that AI has already changed creative work, is changing it further as you read this, and will continue to change it in ways that require the creative industry to think carefully — more carefully than it has so far — about what it is actually selling. Because the answer to the collaboration-versus-displacement question depends entirely on what you believe the value of creative work actually consists of. And that’s a conversation the industry has been avoiding for decades.
What AI Is Actually Good At (So Far)
Current AI systems — language models, image generators, video tools — are exceptionally good at producing competent, fluent, contextually appropriate creative output at high speed and very low cost. This is not a small capability. “Competent, fluent, and contextually appropriate” describes a significant portion of what the creative industry produces every day: the social media caption, the product description, the email newsletter, the banner adaptation, the stock-photography-style brand image, the first draft of the press release.
This work has always existed at the lower-value end of the creative spectrum — it was competent rather than distinctive, efficient rather than resonant, correct rather than surprising. AI performs it well precisely because “correct” and “contextually appropriate” are things that can be learned from enormous amounts of training data. The pattern recognition that underlies most language and image generation is a genuine form of intelligence. It is not, so far, the form of intelligence that produces work that surprises you, that makes you see something you hadn’t seen before, that changes how you think about a problem. But it is very useful for everything below that threshold.
What AI Is Actually Bad At (So Far)
AI systems are poor at genuine novelty — at producing ideas that aren’t recombinations of patterns in their training data. This is sometimes masked by the fact that humans also produce mostly recombinations of existing patterns, but humans can draw on lived experience, embodied knowledge, cultural context, and emotional intelligence in ways that current AI systems do not. The experienced creative director who has worked in a specific category for fifteen years brings knowledge that can’t be extracted from text and image corpora. That knowledge is worth something. The question is whether it’s worth enough.
AI is also poor at the relational and judgment dimensions of creative work — at understanding what a specific client in a specific organizational context actually needs, at navigating the human dynamics of a creative process, at knowing which battle to fight and which to let go, at building the trust that allows genuinely risky creative work to be commissioned and approved. As we’ve explored throughout this journal, from the stakeholder syndrome to the art of saying no, creative work is not only a technical act. It’s a relational and political one. And that dimension is not something current AI systems can replicate.
The Value Conversation the Industry Isn’t Having
The arrival of AI has exposed something the creative industry should have been examining more honestly for years: a significant portion of what it charges for is commodity, not craft. The brief adaptation, the format resize, the copy variation, the stock-library-adjacent visual — these have been priced and positioned as creative services when they are, in many cases, administrative tasks that require creative skill but not creative judgment. AI can do them. And clients know it, even when agencies and freelancers haven’t yet fully updated their pricing conversations accordingly.
The creatives who are navigating AI most successfully are the ones who have been honest with themselves — and their clients — about which parts of their work are commodity and which parts are genuinely differentiated. The commodity parts can be augmented with AI to increase efficiency and reduce cost. The differentiated parts — the strategic insight, the original concept, the cultural knowledge, the relational skill, the judgment that comes from experience — remain human, for now, and remain valuable precisely because AI’s ability to replicate them is limited.
As we’ve argued in the context of what makes creative work actually effective, the value of creative work has never been primarily in its production — it’s been in the thinking that precedes production. AI can accelerate the production. It cannot yet replicate the thinking. Which means the most important thing any creative professional can do right now is invest in the thinking: in the strategic, cultural, and relational skills that make production worth doing.
The Displacement That’s Already Happening
Let’s be honest: displacement is happening. Not in the dramatic way the most alarming headlines suggested — mass creative unemployment, agencies collapsing, the end of the profession — but in the quieter, more structural way that matters more over time. Entry-level creative work is being reduced in some organizations because tasks that used to require a junior are now being done by a senior with an AI tool. The hiring pipeline at the bottom of the creative industry is narrowing in ways that will affect the development of the next generation of senior talent — because seniors come from juniors, and junior creative work is where foundational skills are built.
This is a real problem and it doesn’t have an easy solution. The industry that fails to invest in developing new creative talent because AI can handle the entry-level work will find itself, in ten years, without the experienced senior talent it needs — because that talent wasn’t developed at the junior level when it should have been. It’s the same logic as the burnout problem: systemic short-term decisions with long-term costs that aren’t visible until they’re very expensive.
The Collaboration That’s Actually Worth Building
The most useful version of the AI-creativity relationship isn’t the one where AI generates and humans approve. It’s the one where humans do the thinking and AI handles the execution of decisions that have already been made through genuinely human judgment. The creative director who uses AI to rapidly visualize five different directions from a strategy they’ve already worked out is using the tool well. The creative director who uses AI to generate the directions and then picks the one they like is outsourcing the part of their job that was worth doing.
The distinction matters because what we’re building, in how we use these tools, is a set of habits and capabilities that will define what creative professionals are and are not able to do in the next decade. Build the habit of using AI to execute human thinking, and you end up with faster, more capable human thinkers. Build the habit of using AI to replace human thinking, and you end up with a generation of curators rather than creators. Both can survive in the short term. Only one produces work worth caring about in the long term.
Still figuring out where AI fits in your creative practice? Our shop is for people who care about making things worth making — with or without the machines. Probably both. Definitely on your own terms.
por Ber | Mar 28, 2026 | The rebelion
Every generation that enters the workforce gets misread by the one that preceded it. Millennials were called entitled when they were, in many cases, simply the first generation to articulate out loud what all workers had always wanted but been conditioned not to ask for. Gen X was called slackers when they were often being pragmatic about a labor market that had broken the implicit contract that had operated for their parents. Now Gen Z is entering creative industries at scale, and the discourse around them is remarkably consistent with what came before: they’re lazy, they’re fragile, they can’t take feedback, they don’t understand how the industry works, they want everything without having earned it.
Some of this is intergenerational friction that reproduces reliably in every era. And some of it is something more specific and more worth paying attention to: a genuine difference in how Gen Z understands work, creative practice, and professional identity — differences that reflect real shifts in the industry and the broader culture, not just personal preferences or poor character.
The Things Gen Z Actually Understands Better
Gen Z grew up with the internet as a native environment, not as a tool adopted in adulthood. This sounds like a trivial observation but has profound implications for how they think about audiences, channels, and creative work.
They understand how digital attention actually works — not how it worked in the planning documents of 2015, but how it works now, in the actual current environment of short-form video, algorithmic curation, parasocial media relationships, and the specific vocabulary of each platform’s culture. The senior creative who learned digital advertising when Facebook ads were revolutionary is working from a mental model that may be significantly outdated. The Gen Z junior who has been actively participating in these platforms as a creator, not just a consumer, often has better intuitions about what will land and what won’t.
They also understand authenticity in a more nuanced way than the corporate definition that pervades most brand guidelines. As we argued in our analysis of the LinkedIn personal brand trap, the performance of authenticity and actual authenticity are very different things. Gen Z, having grown up watching influencers perfect the aesthetic of realness, is remarkably good at distinguishing between the two. When they tell you a brand campaign feels fake, that’s not aesthetic sensitivity — that’s market intelligence.
The Things Seniors Interpret Wrong
The Gen Z professional’s directness about working conditions is consistently misread as entitlement. When a junior creative asks what the advancement criteria are, or asks why a meeting couldn’t have been an email, or says directly that a project timeline isn’t realistic, senior colleagues frequently read this as a lack of deference rather than as a reasonable request for clarity or efficiency.
This is worth examining. The request for clear advancement criteria is a request for the kind of organizational transparency that most workers would benefit from but most organizations fail to provide. The observation that a meeting could be an email is usually correct. The timeline concern is, more often than not, accurate — as we’ve explored in our post on urgency culture and its costs, teams that flag impossible timelines early are doing their organizations a service, not a disservice.
The Gen Z tendency to set clearer boundaries between work and personal time is also routinely pathologized as lack of commitment. What it actually reflects is an accurate understanding, often developed watching older colleagues, of what chronic overwork produces: burnout, compromised quality, and a career that consumes the life it was supposed to support. Gen Z didn’t invent the insight that sustainable work produces better long-term outcomes than heroic unsustainable effort. They just act on it more consistently than their predecessors did, partly because they’re less conditioned by the mythology that overwork is virtue.
What Doesn’t Transfer Automatically
This isn’t a defense of everything about Gen Z’s relationship to professional creative work. Some things don’t transfer automatically, and pretending they do doesn’t help anyone.
The deep craft knowledge that takes years of intentional practice to develop — whether in design, copywriting, strategy, or production — doesn’t shortcut. Platform fluency is not the same as creative craft, and the junior who is excellent at understanding what will perform on TikTok still needs to develop the foundational skills that will allow them to be excellent across contexts, over time, as platforms and formats continue to change.
Feedback tolerance, applied skillfully rather than defensively, is something that takes time to develop regardless of generation. The ability to receive substantive creative criticism — as we explored in our piece on receiving feedback gracefully — and use it to make the work better rather than defending the work as-is is a professional skill that develops through experience. Gen Z isn’t exempt from that development curve; they’re on it, like everyone else at the beginning of their careers.
The Synthesis That Actually Works
The creative teams that navigate generational differences most effectively are the ones that are explicit about what each party brings and what each party is still developing. The senior who acknowledges that the junior’s platform intuition is genuinely valuable, and builds that into how work gets developed and validated, produces better work than the senior who dismisses that intuition as inexperience. The junior who acknowledges that craft and strategic experience take time to build, and actively seeks that knowledge from people who have it, develops faster than the junior who treats everything they know as sufficient.
The creative industry has always been a mentorship economy: the skills that matter most are transmitted between practitioners over time, through close working relationships where expertise flows in both directions. Gen Z hasn’t changed that fundamental structure. They’ve just made visible some of the ways that structure was failing — and that visibility, uncomfortable as it sometimes is, is the beginning of improvement.
Managing a team that spans multiple generations and somehow making work worth caring about? Our shop is for everyone on that team. Yes, even the seniors. Especially the seniors.
