There’s a real (parent) insightful moment no one really talks about.

Not when the baby arrives. Not when they start crawling. Not even when they start walking. It’s the moment you quietly realise your house feels like yours again. For the past year, our living room wasn’t really a living room. It was a baby zone. Half of it taken up by foam mats, a massive playpen and toys everywhere. A quarter reserved for the dogs. And then this small leftover corner where we sat, ate and lived.

We didn’t live in our house. We lived around our baby.

// THE SHIFT

But something changed. She’s 16 months now. Stage five clinger. Wants to be around us constantly anyway. And it hit us. Why are we still designing the house like she needs her own world when all she wants is to be in ours? So we started reclaiming it. We removed the playpen, pulled everything back and reset the space. And suddenly, the living room felt like a living room again. Not a daycare.

Now it feels like a house where a baby lives,
not a baby’s house where we exist.

// NOTHING CHANGED.
EVERYTHING CHANGED.

That shift says something bigger about life stages.

Because nothing about us has actually changed. Same taste. Same aesthetic. Same love for a beautiful space. But our needs changed temporarily, and now they’re evolving again. Take something simple like our coffee table. It’s a beautiful piece, hand-carved from an old Indian door. Pre-baby, it was fucking perfect. Post-baby, it’s too big, too hard, and too risky. It dominates the space in a way that just doesn’t work anymore. So now we’re looking for something new. Not less considered. Not less beautiful. Just something that fits this moment. Smaller. Moveable. Adaptable. Something that lets us reclaim the space without ignoring the fact that a toddler still lives here.

// WHERE MARKETERS GET IT WRONG

This is where most marketing falls apart. We reduce people to segments. Parents. New parents. Families. As if that label suddenly defines everything about them. But people don’t wake up and become someone else overnight.

We’re still us. We’ve just moved through a phase.

// LIFE STAGES MATTER MORE THAN LABELS

At one point, you’re selling us baby gates, playpens and foam mats. Everything is about safety, containment and control. Then suddenly, without warning, we’re looking for something else entirely. We want our space back. We want design again. We want flexibility. We want to feel like ourselves again. Not because we stopped being parents. But because we’re starting to remember we’re also people. The same person you sold a big, beautiful coffee table to is the same person now searching for a smaller one. And one day, they’ll want the big one again.

Same person. Different moment.

// THE REAL OPPORTUNITY

If you’re building brands, products or experiences, this matters more than any persona deck. Stop thinking in static categories.

Start thinking in (life stages x transitions x tension points).

Because growth doesn’t happen when someone becomes a parent. It happens in the moments where they’re figuring out how to be a parent without losing themselves.

// RECLAIMING SPACE

For us, it started with something simple. Reclaiming our living room. Not removing her from it, but bringing her into ours.

And somehow, that changed everything.

—

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

Let’s talk about marketing objectives, because most briefs that come through are cooked.

Not bad, not wrong, just trying to do way too much at once. You’ll see it straight away. “We want to launch a new product, build awareness, drive sales, increase retention, grow brand love, make people feel something, make them smile, make them remember us forever and maybe tattoo the logo on their arm like No Ragrets”.

All in one brief. Cool. So what are we actually doing?

I get why it happens. Businesses have pressure. Stakeholders want their thing in there. Everyone’s got a KPI they’re accountable for. So the brief becomes this big bucket of expectations. Let’s just do it all. Kill a few birds with one stone. Except you don’t. You miss all of them. You burn time, waste budget, dilute the idea, and end up putting something into the world that looks fine, sounds fine, feels safe, and achieves not much.

The best marketers I’ve worked with never do this.

The best briefs are actually boring on paper!

They’re clear, tight, precise. They answer one question. What are we actually trying to do here? Not ten things, not a wishlist, one thing.

Part of the problem is people mix up objectives. There are layers to it. You’ve got business objectives. That’s the big stuff. Revenue, growth, market share, what the board cares about. Then marketing objectives. Acquisition, penetration, retention, sales, moving the business forward. Then brand objectives. Awareness, trust, consideration, long term memory, the stuff that compounds over time. All important.

All valid. None of them are the brief.

The brief is the communication objective. What do we want people to actually think, feel or do after seeing this? That’s it. That’s the fucking job…

Say you’re launching a new pair of jeans. Not just any jeans, these are four way stretch, proper innovation, denim Jesus. The brief is not “drive sales, increase retention, build loyalty, grow brand love, educate the consumer”.

The brief is simple. Make some noise. Get attention. Break what people expect from denim. Make people stop scrolling and actually care. Everything else flows from that.

Another thing people get wrong is KPIs. They start loading the brief with metrics. We need to increase traffic, improve conversion, hit this number. That’s fine, but that’s not the job of the idea. That’s how you measure whether it worked.

The job is to create something worth noticing in the first place.

The simplest way I’ve ever seen this explained was with pens. Take a few pens, throw three at someone and tell them to catch them. They panic, miss most of them, maybe get lucky with one. Now throw one. They catch it. That’s it. That’s the whole point.

You might be able to hit two objectives if everything lines up perfectly, but most of the time it’s one, and the more you try to add, the more you water everything down.

Strategy isn’t about adding more thinking. It’s about removing everything that doesn’t matter so the one thing that does actually lands.

If your brief is trying to do everything, it’s not a strategy, it’s a wishlist.

—

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

AI is extraordinary. There’s no doubt about that.

It can write, analyse, design, synthesise, code, optimise and problem-solve faster than most of us on our best day. It can compress hours of thinking into seconds. It can surface patterns we would never spot. It can feel like a superpower.

And it is. Just ask my 70+ Year old mother. Growing up in a household where mum “knows best” just got worse… she’s got fucking Chat GPT backing her up.

So, even though Artificial Intelligence is awesome and all… it is also a temptation.

Not because it will replace us, but because it will seduce us into skipping the hard part. The thinking part. The wrestling. The reps.

The real risk isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s cognitive atrophy.

Your brain is a muscle. If you don’t use it, it weakens. We accept this in every other area of life. Athletes train. Musicians practice. Businesses refine. Skill compounds through repetition and resistance.

Thinking is no different.

Yet increasingly, people are outsourcing the very things that build their cognitive strength. First drafts. Frameworks. Research synthesis. Strategic direction. Even judgement. Before they have properly tried.

That is not augmentation. That is substitution.

We have been here before… Students once read to memorise rather than understand. They could recite the answer, but they could not apply it. They could not adapt it. They could not evolve it. The surface looked competent. The foundation was fragile.

AI risks amplifying that pattern.

You can generate an answer instantly. But do you actually understand it? Can you interrogate it? Can you challenge it? Can you sense when it is wrong? Can you connect it to lived context?

If not, you are not smarter. You are dependent.

Meanwhile, AI is levelling up. It is training on data, recognising patterns, improving at scale. Some humans, on the other hand, are thinking less, struggling more with complexity, skipping discomfort and defaulting to convenience.

Growth does not happen in convenience. It happens in friction. In the messy middle. In the moment when you are unsure and must sit with it. In the process of forming a point of view rather than copying one.

That is where neural pathways are strengthened. That is where judgement is built. That is where taste is refined.

You do not build cognitive stamina by avoiding the reps.

Now consider the next generation. Children growing up with instant answers to everything. No deep reading. No trial and error. No grappling with ambiguity. Just prompt, response, copy, submit.

Convenience is seductive. But development requires resistance.

If we remove resistance entirely, what are we building? Speed without depth. Output without ownership. Efficiency without understanding.

This is not an argument against AI. Quite the opposite. AI is one of the most powerful tools we have ever created. It can elevate thinking, accelerate iteration and expand possibility.

But it should be a sparring partner, not a replacement brain.

Bring a point of view first. Wrestle with the problem. Draft the messy version. Struggle through the ambiguity. Then use AI to pressure test it, expand it, refine it and sharpen it.

Harness its power to strengthen yours.

In the near future, everyone will have access to the same tools. The differentiator will not be who uses AI. It will be who can think independently of it. Who understands mechanics. Who can connect cultural nuance. Who has developed judgement through experience rather than prompts.

AI can generate patterns. It cannot generate lived wisdom. It cannot replace the intuition formed by years of making decisions, getting them wrong, and learning.

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor. And instant answers never built a strong mind.

Use AI. Build with AI. Experiment with AI.

But feed your brain. Train your judgement. Do the reps.

Because the real danger is not machines getting smarter.

It is humans choosing not to…

*mic drop*

—

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia

xx

There’s this industry obsession with oversimplification.

We’re all about condensing, condensing, and condensing some more, as though brevity is always the soul of effectiveness… But what if, in our rush to simplify everything, we’re slicing away the very substance that makes strategy work?

Look, I get it… our job as strategists is to take the chaos and distill it into something that feels like clarity. To strip down the noise and keep things simple, actionable, and, dare I say, inspiring.

The ultimate goal is always to produce an output that’s brutally simple but majestically strategic, right?

Yet, here’s where it gets tricky. Lately, I’ve seen a growing trend of frameworks and “shortcut guides” that do more than just simplify… they fucking oversimplify. And in doing so, they’ve sparked a low-key civil war among strategists across the globe. A framework can be a powerful tool, sure.

But it’s just that: a tool. It’s not the whole workshop, and it sure as hell isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.

As Ryan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer at Junior (ex Ogilvy CSO), once said: “What really matters is who’s using the tool, not the tool itself. Anything that stimulates great thinking can’t be a bad thing—as long as there’s great thinking behind it.”

The real magic isn’t in the framework, it’s in the strategist’s ability to look beyond the four walls of a template and see the full landscape. Sure, frameworks are fantastic for presenting complex ideas in a structured, digestible way, but when we start over-relying on them – especially the oversimplified ones, we lose the nuance. We lose the rigour. And let’s face it: sometimes the messy, arduous process is where the actual magic happens.

Let’s be honest here… our industry fucking loves hacking.

We love the idea of getting to the solution faster, trimming down structures, and finding ways to get to a “BIG IDEA” in half the time. In some scenarios, shortcuts are gold. Tight deadlines? Pitches? MVP startup launches? Sure, a hack might be exactly what you need to cut through. Being clever in a crunch can be a superpower. Sometimes. But not always…

But when it comes to long-term brand growth and creating something with lasting impact, hacks often become a fast track to nowhere. That’s where the rigour comes in. Sometimes, you need to let the process breathe. Let it marinate. There’s nothing wrong with taking the long road if it gets you to a place that’s both creatively explosive and strategically sound. You don’t have to find the end point in one brainstorming session. In fact, for more complex briefs, the real depth and clarity emerge only after you’ve waded through the mess.

And that’s the thing right – strategy often looks like a mess. But that’s because the path to clarity isn’t a straight line; it’s a tangled web of insights, thoughts, ideas, and counter-ideas.

The mess is the magic.

And honestly, the process isn’t something that should be explained to every peer across the agency or even your clients. That’s not their business. The only thing that matters? The final output. The recommendation. The quality of the thinking.

So, here’s a thought… let’s stop trying to turn strategy into something that can be hacked in a sprint session. Let’s embrace the complexity, respect the process, and have a little more faith in the rigour. At the end of the day, the best strategies aren’t the ones that were cut down and diluted for the sake of brevity. They’re the ones that stood the test of messy thinking and came out on the other side with a sharp, unforgettable edge. In the pursuit of turning chaos to clarity, let’s embrace the chaos more and use the best tool – our minds!

💀 🖤

Cheers,

DANIEL JACOBS
http://www.thecreativestrategist.com.au
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denialjacobs/
Melbourne, Australia