by Ber | Apr 2, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
For roughly twenty years, digital advertising operated on a premise so convenient and so thoroughly normalized that almost nobody stopped to examine how strange it was: that it was acceptable to follow strangers across the internet, building detailed dossiers on their interests, behaviors, health concerns, financial situations, and personal relationships, and then use that information to serve them advertisements — without their knowledge, without their meaningful consent, and without any particularly clear sense of whether any of it actually worked as well as the dashboards suggested.
The third-party cookie was the infrastructure that made this possible. It was also the mechanism that regulators, browsers, and eventually even the advertising industry itself acknowledged needed to go. Google finally completed its Chrome deprecation process. Apple had been blocking third-party tracking in Safari for years. Firefox was ahead of both. The era of surveillance-based digital advertising, conducted at scale without friction, is over.
The advertising industry’s response to this has been instructive: several years of denial, a transition period of “alternative identity solutions” that were essentially cookies with extra steps, and now a more honest reckoning with what it actually means to do digital advertising when you can’t track people across the web without their explicit agreement.
What Was Actually Being Bought All Along
The death of third-party cookies is forcing a reexamination of a question that should have been asked more rigorously twenty years ago: what was all that targeting actually worth? The honest answer is: less than the industry claimed, more than the critics admitted, and much more unevenly distributed than the average CPM suggested.
Behavioral targeting based on third-party cookies delivered genuine value in specific contexts — retargeting people who had already demonstrated purchase intent, for example, is genuinely more efficient than broadcasting to everyone. But the broader promise of “reaching exactly the right person at exactly the right moment with exactly the right message” was substantially oversold. Attribution was murky, fraud was endemic, and much of what looked like targeting precision was actually correlated with reach into demographics that would have been accessible through conventional media planning anyway.
The advertisers who depended most heavily on third-party data for their targeting are the ones feeling the most disruption right now. The ones who had invested in first-party data relationships — building genuine audiences who opted in to communication, building owned channels with real engagement — are finding the transition considerably less traumatic.
The Privacy-First Alternatives (And Their Limitations)
The industry has not been sitting still. Contextual advertising — placing ads based on the content of the page rather than the identity of the viewer — has experienced a genuine renaissance. It turns out that showing a car ad to someone reading a car review is effective advertising, and it always was; the detour through surveillance capitalism was not as necessary as everyone thought.
First-party data strategies have accelerated dramatically: brands building loyalty programs, newsletter audiences, community platforms, and other owned channels where users actively provide information and consent to its use in exchange for genuine value. This is better advertising, in almost every respect, than the alternative — but it requires investment, patience, and the willingness to actually provide something worth subscribing to, which is a higher bar than buying targeting data from a broker.
Google’s Privacy Sandbox and similar industry-led alternatives attempt to preserve some behavioral targeting capability within privacy-preserving frameworks. The efficacy of these systems is still being established, the industry adoption is uneven, and the regulatory landscape continues to evolve in ways that make it difficult to build stable long-term strategies around any specific technical solution.
What the Industry Should Have Known
The honest retrospective on the third-party cookie era is that the advertising industry built a value proposition that depended on consumers not fully understanding or consenting to how their data was being used. When consumers and regulators understood it better, they objected — predictably, rationally, correctly. The scramble to find “cookie alternatives” that preserve behavioral targeting without the tracking is, in many cases, an attempt to preserve the business model without addressing the underlying objection.
The more durable path is the one some brands have always taken: building genuine relationships with audiences based on value exchange rather than surveillance, using creativity and relevance rather than tracking precision as the primary mechanism for advertising effectiveness. It is more expensive per impression. It is less scalable in the short term. It produces better brands and more sustainable advertising relationships in the long term.
The end of cookies isn’t a crisis for advertising. It’s an invitation to do advertising better — which requires accepting that “better” sometimes means “harder.”
The Fuck The Brief mindset applies here too. Sometimes the brief is “reach everyone who might buy our product using the cheapest available tracking infrastructure.” Sometimes the right answer is to rip up that brief entirely.
Build something people actually want to hear from. Shop NoBriefs Club.
by Ber | Apr 2, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
Marshall McLuhan famously argued that the medium is the message — that the form of communication shapes and controls the meaning and scale of human association more than the content itself. He said this in 1964, well before anyone could have imagined a world in which a 23-year-old with a ring light and a phone could command an audience of four million people and move more product in a single post than a national television campaign running for three weeks. McLuhan would have had things to say about this. They probably would have been complicated.
The creator economy has done something genuinely strange to the relationship between media, marketing, and people: it has made the human being simultaneously the medium, the editorial voice, and the advertising inventory. The influencer is not a host for a message; the influencer is the message. Their identity, aesthetic, values, and perceived authenticity are the product being purchased — both by the audience that follows them and by the brands that pay to be adjacent to them.
Why This Breaks Traditional Advertising Logic
Traditional advertising operates on a relatively clear separation of church and state: there is editorial content (the thing audiences come for) and there is advertising (the thing that funds the editorial content). Even advertorials and branded content operate within this framework — they wear their commercial nature on their sleeve or are legally required to disclose it. The audience understands, at some level, that there is a distinction between the content and the commercial message.
Creator content collapses this distinction in a way that is simultaneously more honest and more manipulative than traditional advertising. More honest because the creator’s recommendation comes with a real relationship, genuine familiarity, and often actual experience with the product. More manipulative because the commercial relationship is laundered through that same authenticity — the audience trusts the creator as a person, and that personal trust is what the brand is buying, whether the post is disclosed as sponsored or not.
This creates an interesting problem for brands that have spent decades building the skills to navigate traditional media environments. The rules are different. Reach and frequency models don’t transfer cleanly. Brand safety means something entirely different when your brand is associated with a human being who can have a bad day, an unpopular opinion, or a career-ending moment at any time. The media planning discipline of the 20th century simply does not have the frameworks to handle what creator partnerships actually are.
The Audience Is Also the Product
One of the less-discussed aspects of the creator economy is that it industrialized something that previously happened organically: the monetization of trust. Word-of-mouth has always been the most effective form of marketing; the creator economy built a scalable infrastructure for commodifying it.
From the creator’s perspective, this means their most valuable asset is not their content but their relationship with their audience — and specifically, their audience’s belief that the creator is being genuine with them. The moment an audience perceives that a creator’s recommendations are primarily commercial rather than authentic, the entire value proposition collapses. This is why the best creators manage their commercial relationships with extraordinary care, declining partnerships that don’t fit their identity even when the fees are significant.
From the brand perspective, this means that what you’re actually paying for is borrowed credibility — and borrowed credibility is more fragile than the ones you build yourself. A brand that becomes dependent on creator partnerships without building its own authentic voice is not investing in marketing; it’s renting an audience it doesn’t own, at rates that increase as the market matures and creators understand their leverage.
Where This Goes From Here
The creator economy is mature enough now that its next phase is visible: professionalization, consolidation, and the gradual erosion of the authenticity premium that made it valuable in the first place. As more creators run their channels as media businesses — with agents, brand partnerships teams, and content strategies indistinguishable from small media companies — the distinction between creator content and traditional branded content narrows.
The audiences know this too. Trust in influencer recommendations has declined as the market has professionalized, for the entirely rational reason that audiences have become more sophisticated about recognizing commercial relationships. The arms race between disclosure requirements and engagement optimization continues. The average CPM for influencer marketing continues to rise as the supply of genuinely influential creators grows more slowly than the demand from brands trying to participate in the space.
None of this means the creator economy is ending. It means it’s becoming a more complex, more expensive, and more professionalized media environment — which is what happens to every media environment as it matures. Understanding it requires unlearning quite a lot of what you thought you knew about media and marketing. And having the intellectual honesty to admit that your brand strategy deck from 2019 probably didn’t account for any of this.
The NoBriefs collection is made for marketers who are figuring it out in real time — which is, let’s be honest, all of us.
Think harder about where your budget is going. Start at NoBriefs Club.
by Ber | Apr 2, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
Every quarter, in a meeting room somewhere in this industry, someone asks the question. It comes after the metrics review, usually, when the engagement numbers are flat and the mood is low and someone needs to say something that sounds like a solution. “Can we create something viral?” And every quarter, the creative team smiles the particular smile of people who know the answer but have learned the hard way not to say it out loud.
The answer, of course, is no. Not because your team isn’t talented, not because your brand isn’t interesting, and not because virality is some mystical force immune to human influence. But because virality is, by its nature, an emergent phenomenon — it happens when a piece of content lands at the exact intersection of timing, cultural context, audience mood, and platform mechanics in a way that cannot be reliably replicated or predicted in advance. Trying to manufacture it is roughly as sensible as trying to plan a lightning strike.
The Anatomy of Something That Actually Goes Viral
Study the things that genuinely spread at scale and a pattern emerges — not a formula you can follow, but a set of conditions that tend to coincide. Viral content is almost always one of three things: unexpectedly funny in a specific cultural register, emotionally resonant in a way that feels uncomfortably personal, or surprising in a way that generates a strong “I didn’t know that” or “I can’t believe that” response.
Notice what’s missing from that list: brand values. Product benefits. Campaign objectives. Strategic positioning. The things that marketing exists to communicate are almost entirely incompatible with the things that make content spread. This is not a coincidence. It’s a fundamental tension between institutional communication and human-to-human sharing that no amount of “authentic storytelling” can fully resolve.
When branded content does go viral, it usually does so despite its brand origins, not because of them. The Dollar Shave Club launch video worked because it was genuinely funny, not because it was a great advertisement. Oatly’s weird campaigns spread because they were disruptive and strange, not because they communicated the benefits of oat milk. The brand was incidental to the virality, not its cause.
The Brief That Produces the Opposite of What It Asks For
The “make it viral” brief is the creative industry’s most reliable generator of mediocre work. Ask a team to produce something that will spread organically and watch what happens: the work becomes self-conscious. It tries too hard. It borrows the aesthetic of things that went viral in the past — meme formats, trending audio, whatever style performed well for a competitor last quarter — without understanding that those formats spread because they were novel, and novelty is definitionally non-repeatable.
The brief also creates a perverse incentive structure. If the KPI is shares and reach, the safest bet isn’t to do something genuinely creative; it’s to do something that looks like other things that have performed well. You end up with content optimized for the appearance of virality rather than any of the underlying conditions that produce it. It performs adequately. It doesn’t spread. The brief is declared a partial success. Everyone moves on.
The KPI Shark from NoBriefs was not invented with viral reach in mind. And yet — here we are. Sometimes the things you make without trying to perform are the ones that actually connect.
What You Can Actually Do Instead
The honest answer to “how do we create viral content?” is: you don’t aim for virality, you aim for genuine resonance within a specific community and occasionally something escapes into wider culture. This is less exciting to put in a strategy deck but significantly more likely to produce real results.
What you can do: create content that is genuinely useful, genuinely funny, or genuinely surprising to the specific audience you’re trying to reach. Publish it consistently enough that you’re present when the timing is right. Give it room to breathe — algorithms and audiences both respond to content that isn’t obviously optimized to death. And when something does spread, study why with intellectual honesty rather than immediately trying to replicate the surface features of the thing that worked.
The brands that have built real organic reach over time haven’t done it by planning viral moments. They’ve done it by developing a consistent point of view that people want to follow, creating work that respects the audience’s intelligence, and occasionally — through the intersection of craft, timing, and luck — producing something that the internet decides to amplify for reasons that will always remain partially mysterious.
You can increase the probability. You cannot manufacture the certainty. And the sooner that sentence makes it into a brief, the better everyone’s work will be.
Stop chasing the algorithm and start building something real. The NoBriefs Club shop is for creatives who work with conviction, not just metrics.
by Ber | Apr 2, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
Every marketing team has one. It lives in a shared drive folder called “Strategy 2024 FINAL v3” alongside a content calendar that was last updated in February, three mood boards from an agency that no longer exists, and a PDF titled “Content Pillars” that nobody has opened since it was created. The content strategy. Beautifully constructed. Meticulously presented. Absolutely, comprehensively ignored.
The content strategy is marketing’s version of the gym membership: purchased with genuine intention, displayed with visible pride, and abandoned within six weeks when reality — in the form of a client request, a last-minute campaign, or the simple fact that executing a strategy is significantly harder than creating one — arrives to reclaim its territory.
How a Content Strategy Is Born
The life cycle of a content strategy begins, usually, with a conference. Someone attends a digital marketing summit and returns with a notebook full of insights and the unshakeable conviction that what the brand needs is a “content-led approach.” This person schedules a meeting. The meeting spawns a workshop. The workshop produces a strategy.
The strategy is typically a 40-60 slide deck covering audience personas, content pillars, channel hierarchy, tone of voice, editorial cadence, distribution logic, and KPI frameworks. It takes six to eight weeks to produce, involves at least two external consultants, and is presented to the leadership team with a level of ceremony usually reserved for annual results or product launches.
Everyone agrees it’s excellent. The CMO says it’s “the clearest articulation of our content vision we’ve ever had.” The deck goes into the shared drive. The strategy goes nowhere.
The Execution Gap: Where Strategies Go to Die
The problem isn’t that nobody believes in the strategy. The problem is that strategy and execution require fundamentally different things, and most organizations are structured to produce the former while being entirely unequipped to deliver the latter.
A content strategy says: publish three long-form thought leadership pieces per month, maintain an active presence across four channels, develop a serialized content format that builds audience over time, and align all content with four strategic pillars. What the strategy doesn’t say — because it can’t, without being embarrassingly candid — is that achieving this requires a dedicated team, a budget that reflects actual production costs, a decision-making process fast enough to be relevant, and leadership that understands why “can we just make this shorter and post it on Instagram instead” is not editorial strategy.
Most organizations have none of these things. What they have is one social media manager, a part-time copywriter, a content budget that works out to approximately three blog posts and a sponsored LinkedIn post per quarter, and a review process involving five stakeholders who each have a different interpretation of what the content pillars actually mean.
The Pillar Problem
Content pillars deserve their own chapter. In theory, they’re a useful framework: two to four thematic territories that define what a brand talks about, ensuring coherence across channels and clarity in editorial decisions. In practice, content pillars in most organizations are too broad to be useful, contradictory to each other, indistinguishable from what every other brand in the sector is also talking about, and routinely abandoned the moment someone in sales needs a post about the new product feature.
“We talk about leadership, innovation, sustainability, and people.” Every B2B company in Europe talks about leadership, innovation, sustainability, and people. This is not a content strategy. This is four words that generate zero editorial tension and provide exactly zero guidance when someone has to decide whether to write about the company’s new HR policy or the industry report they just commissioned.
Effective content pillars are specific enough to be exclusionary — meaning they tell you as clearly what NOT to publish as what to publish. They create a point of view, not just a category. “We talk about the hidden costs of short-term thinking in procurement decisions” is a content pillar. “We talk about innovation” is a LinkedIn bio.
What Actually Gets Published (And Why)
In the absence of an executed strategy, content decisions default to the path of least resistance. What gets published is: the announcement the CEO wanted this week, the campaign asset that arrived with a three-day turnaround, the LinkedIn post someone wrote because they saw a competitor do something similar, and the blog article that’s been 90% finished for four months and finally got someone to write the conclusion.
This is not a failure of individual motivation. It’s a structural problem. Reactive content will always beat strategic content in organizations where there’s no protected time, no editorial ownership, and no consequence for abandoning the plan. The strategy exists. The infrastructure to execute it doesn’t.
The fix isn’t more strategy. It’s less. A content strategy you can actually execute — even if it’s humbler than the one you presented — is worth infinitely more than a comprehensive framework that exists only in PDF form. Start with one channel. One pillar. One format. Do that well for six months. Then build.
And if you’re the person who was handed the content strategy and told to “make it happen” with half the resources the strategy assumed — we see you. The Spreadsheet Sloth collection at NoBriefs was made for the moments when the work is real but the support absolutely isn’t.
Browse the full NoBriefs Club collection for creatives who know exactly how the sausage gets made.
by Ber | Mar 31, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
Every January, a ritual unfolds across agencies and marketing departments worldwide. A strategy deck is born. It is sixty slides long, took three months to produce, and contains the phrase “consumer-centric ecosystem” at least four times. It has a section called “Our North Star” that features an actual illustration of a star. There is a slide titled “Key Strategic Pillars” with exactly four pillars, because three felt insufficient and five felt chaotic. The deck is presented to leadership with gravitas. It is applauded. It is emailed to forty-seven people. It is never opened again. And by March, the organization is doing exactly what it was doing in November, just with a new Pantone color and a slightly different mission statement.
The Deck Industrial Complex
Strategy decks have become the creative industry’s most elaborate form of professional theater. They exist not to change behavior but to create the perception that behavior has been considered. The deck is the artifact that proves strategy happened — a tangible deliverable that can be referenced in board meetings and stakeholder updates without anyone needing to explain what, specifically, has changed as a result.
The production process itself has become an industry within an industry. There are people whose entire job is making strategy decks — not doing strategy, mind you, but formatting strategy into slides. There are templates, design systems, and entire agencies dedicated to the craft of making complex ideas look simple on a 16:9 canvas. The medium has consumed the message. The deck is no longer a vehicle for strategy. It is the strategy, and that’s where everything falls apart.
Because a strategy isn’t a deck. A strategy is a set of choices about what to do and — more importantly — what not to do. It’s a framework for decision-making that should make every subsequent choice easier and more coherent. But you can’t put “we’re choosing not to do things” on a slide without someone asking why we need a strategy team if the answer is “do less.” So instead, the deck says “do everything, but strategically,” which is the corporate equivalent of saying “eat everything, but healthily.” It sounds wise. It means nothing.
The Anatomy of a Strategy Nobody Follows
Slide one: A bold vision statement. Something about “redefining the category” or “leading the conversation.” Slide five: Market analysis. Data that confirms what everyone already suspected but presented with enough charts to look like original thinking. Slide fifteen: Consumer insights. A persona named “Digital Dave” or “Mindful Maya” who represents your target audience with the specificity of a horoscope and the accuracy of a fortune cookie.
Slide thirty: The strategy itself. Usually three to five “pillars” or “platforms” or “territories” — words chosen specifically because they’re abstract enough to accommodate whatever anyone wants to do next. A pillar called “Community” could mean a TikTok series, a loyalty program, or a literal community garden. Nobody knows, because the deck doesn’t specify. Specificity would mean commitment, and commitment would mean accountability, and accountability would mean someone might fail, and failure is not an option in a deck that costs six figures to produce.
Slide fifty-five: The roadmap. A beautifully designed timeline that maps twelve months of activity with the confidence of someone who has never experienced reality. Q1: “Foundation Phase.” Q2: “Activation Phase.” Q3: “Optimization Phase.” Q4: “Scale Phase.” These phases will be abandoned by March when the CEO decides to pivot to short-form video because they saw a competitor’s reel during lunch.
Why Strategies Fail Before They Start
The annual strategy fails for one fundamental reason: it separates thinking from doing. The people who write the strategy are rarely the people who execute it. The strategist hands the deck to the creative team, who interprets it through their own lens. The creative team hands it to the production team, who interprets it through their constraints. By the time the strategy reaches the customer, it’s been translated so many times it resembles the original about as much as a photocopy of a photocopy resembles the original document.
There’s also the shelf-life problem. An annual strategy assumes that the market will hold still for twelve months while you methodically execute your four pillars. But markets don’t hold still. A competitor launches something unexpected. A social platform changes its algorithm. A global event reshapes consumer behavior overnight. Your strategy, conceived in the calm of an October offsite, is now irrelevant by February. But nobody updates it, because updating the deck would mean admitting the original was wrong, and the original cost too much to be wrong.
The Spreadsheet Sloth knows this pain intimately — that feeling of watching a carefully planned strategy dissolve in the face of reality while the spreadsheet tracking its implementation remains frozen in time, a monument to what was supposed to happen versus what actually did.
What Would Actually Work Instead
Replace the annual strategy deck with a quarterly strategy brief. One page. Maximum. What are we trying to achieve in the next ninety days? What are we not doing? How will we know if it’s working? Review it every quarter. Adjust based on what you learned. This isn’t sexy. It doesn’t fill a boardroom presentation or justify a six-month engagement. But it works, because it forces specificity and demands regular accountability.
Kill the pillars. Replace them with bets. “We believe that if we do X, Y will happen.” Bets are testable. Pillars are decorative. A bet says “we think short-form educational content will increase consideration among 25-34-year-olds by fifteen percent.” A pillar says “Content Excellence.” One can be proven right or wrong. The other just sits there, looking important, being useless.
Involve the doers in the thinking. The best strategies emerge from teams who will execute them, not from consultants who will present them and leave. When the creative team, the media team, and the analytics team are in the room shaping the strategy, they own it. Ownership produces commitment. Commitment produces execution. Execution produces results. And results, unlike decks, actually matter.
Finally, make the strategy visible. Not in a deck that lives in a shared drive, but on a wall, in a Slack channel, in every brief and every review. If people can’t recite your strategy from memory, it’s too complicated. The best strategies fit on a Post-it note. The worst fit in sixty slides. Aim for the Post-it.
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by Ber | Mar 30, 2026 | Marketing & Strategy
There is a particular kind of courage required to produce a sustainability campaign for a brand whose supply chain, corporate structure, or core product is in direct tension with the values the campaign is trying to project. It is not moral courage. It is something else — a willingness to set aside the cognitive dissonance and focus on the brief, which says “communicate our commitment to a sustainable future” and does not say “reconcile this commitment with the eighteen container ships of product crossing the Pacific this quarter.”
Advertising has always required a certain facility with selective truth. The art of it is knowing which truths you’re selecting and whether you can defend the omissions. Sustainability advertising has elevated this art to new heights and introduced new risks, because for the first time in memory, the audience is checking.
The Rise and Calcification of Green Washing
Greenwashing — the practice of marketing environmental credentials that are exaggerated, misleading, or functionally irrelevant — is now a regulated category in multiple jurisdictions. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority, the EU’s Green Claims Directive, the US Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides: regulators have noticed that brands are using sustainability language as positioning rather than reporting, and they’ve started doing something about it. This has not, notably, stopped the practice. It has made the practice more careful.
The current vocabulary of corporate sustainability advertising is a masterclass in language that sounds like commitment while remaining technically defensible. “Working toward” net zero by 2050. “Committed to” sustainable sourcing. “On a journey” toward circularity. “Exploring” regenerative agriculture practices. These phrases are immunized against most regulatory challenge because they don’t actually claim that anything has happened. They claim that something is being felt about the future — and feelings, in advertising copy, are difficult to regulate.
Meanwhile, the creative team producing the campaign may or may not know the details of the brand’s actual environmental performance. Often they don’t. The sustainability deck that was shared in the briefing was produced by the CSR team, who produced it from the data that told the best story, which was reviewed by Legal, who checked it against disclosure requirements, which were met. Everything is defensible. Whether it is honest is a slightly different question that the brief does not ask.
The Audience Problem
The consumers who care most about sustainability are, statistically, the consumers most likely to research the claims being made. They read labels. They use apps that track supply chain information. They notice when a brand announces a commitment to sustainability in the same quarter that its parent company increases investment in fossil fuel extraction. They are not hostile to brands making genuine progress; they are specifically attuned to brands performing progress they haven’t actually made.
This creates a peculiar advertising situation: the target audience for sustainability messaging is the audience least susceptible to sustainability messaging at face value. They want evidence, specificity, and third-party verification — the things that are hardest to put in a thirty-second spot. What they typically receive is a montage of natural imagery, a commitment statement in a sans-serif font, and a percentage figure whose methodology is buried in a footnote on the website that the ad doesn’t link to.
The consequence is that sustainability advertising, as a genre, has a credibility problem that brands continue to invest in creating. Each new campaign that overpromises makes the next genuine campaign slightly harder to land. The audience’s prior, formed by years of green marketing that hasn’t corresponded to green action, is now skepticism by default.
When It Actually Works
Sustainability advertising earns credibility when it reports rather than aspirates. Patagonia’s environmental messaging works — not universally, not with everyone, but better than most — because it has been built over decades, because the company has made decisions that cost money in defense of its stated values, and because the advertising tends toward honesty about the problem rather than reassurance about the solution. The famous “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign worked because it was legibly absurd: a jacket company running an ad against consumption. The dissonance was the message.
B Corp certified brands, brands with genuine third-party audit trails, brands that show the math rather than asserting the conclusion — these are the ones whose sustainability communications don’t need to be defended in a regulatory letter. They have the receipts. Most brands producing sustainability campaigns do not have the receipts. They have good intentions and a deadline.
The Question Nobody Is Asking in the Brief
The brief for a sustainability campaign almost never asks: should we be running this campaign? Not in the sense of whether it will be effective — that’s the media planning question — but in the sense of whether the brand has earned the right to occupy this space. Whether the campaign will leave the world with a more accurate understanding of the brand’s environmental impact, or a less accurate one.
This is not a question most agencies are paid to ask, and most clients aren’t paying for it to be asked. But it’s the question that separates sustainability advertising that builds lasting brand trust from the kind that generates a case study this year and a regulatory warning the next.
For the creative who finds themselves in the brief where these questions are going unasked, the Fuck The Brief notebook provides a private space to write the version of the campaign that would actually be honest. Sometimes the act of writing it is enough. Sometimes it becomes the pitch that changes the conversation. Either way, you need somewhere to put it. Find your people at No Briefs Club — the ones who believe the work should be able to defend itself.
