Everyone’s talking about the cost of living.

I think we’re asking the wrong question.

What if the problem isn’t just that everything costs more? What if there are simply more things to spend money on than at any other point in history?The Meta algorithm Gods presented to me a Sunrise segment (a popular morning breakfast show here in Australia) earlier this morning about “The Rise of Side Hustles in Australia“.

Nearly half of Australians now have one…

Some are doing it to get ahead, some are saving for travel, but many are simply trying to keep up with the rising cost of living.

// As a strategist, I almost switched off from the story itself and headed straight to the comments. That’s often where the real insight lives. People are less polished, more honest, and far more likely to reveal what they’re actually thinking than they are in a research group or survey. It’s messy, but it’s rich.

// One comment stood out.

Someone argued that there was nothing new here because people have always worked second jobs. They’re right. My parents’ generation did. My grandparents’ generation certainly did. But what they pointed out that people are turning what used to be treats into everyday habits…

But I don’t think what’s changed is the need to earn more. I think what’s changed is what we’re trying to fund.

THE EXPLOSION OF CONSUMPTION

Every generation has faced financial pressure. Housing has always been expensive for someone. Inflation isn’t unique. Economic uncertainty certainly isn’t.

// But this generation is the first to live in a world where entirely new categories of consumption have emerged in the space of a couple of decades.

Before the internet, life was… simpler.

Not necessarily better, just simpler.

You had a watch because you needed to know the time. You had a phone because you needed to call someone. If you wanted takeaway, you drove to pick it up. Coffee was something you mostly made at home. Going out for dinner wasn’t something you did because you couldn’t be fucked cooking – It was an occasion or a special event. TV was whatever happened to be on – which was often hit and miss. If you missed your favourite show because you were out kicking a ball around with your mates, – well, that’s shit bad luck for you. There was no pause, rewind or “start from the beginning”. You waited until next week, or you missed it altogether.

It’s funny how the ad breaks were almost part of the ritual.

Someone would yell, “Quick! Ads!” and suddenly everyone was sprinting to the toilet or the kitchen before the movie came back on. Looking back, it’s ridiculous and an experience no one will ever have to face in this lifetime and beyond.

But at the time, it was just life.

// Those constraints shaped our behaviour in ways we probably didn’t appreciate. We planned around them. We accepted them. We found other ways to spend our time.

CONVENIENCE BECAME A BUSINESS MODEL

Fast forward to today and we’ve quietly built an economy around removing friction from almost everything.

Can’t be fucked cooking?
No worries, there’s Uber Eats.

Don’t want ads?
Cool, just pay for Premium.

Don’t like what’s being served on Free-to-air TV?
Sweet, just hit Subscribe and spend hours deciding on what to watch…

Don’t want to wait for your grocery run?
Same-day delivery…

Don’t want to remember anything?
Buy iCloud storage.

—

Individually, none of these things seem particularly expensive. Most are less than the cost of lunch. Collectively, though, convenience has become its own category of spending.

It’s death by a thousand subscriptions.

Netflix. Stan. Disney+. Spotify. ChatGPT. iCloud. Google Drive. Amazon Prime. Uber One. Gym memberships. Pilates. Coffee on the way to work. Food delivery fees. Service fees. Processing fees.

None of these existed for my parents when they were trying to buy their first home.

It’s fucking fascinating. We’re not just spending more because prices have increased. We’re spending more because there are simply more things to spend money on.

WHAT IF WE LIVED LIKE IT WAS 1998?

This isn’t one of those lazy “stop buying smashed avo” arguments. They’re intellectually bankrupt because they reduce a complex economic problem to personal discipline.

I’m interested in something much more behavioural.

What if someone decided to live exactly as Australians did before smartphones and the subscription economy?

Coffee at home.

Free-to-air TV.

The one Home telephone line… *shudders*

Cooking most nights.

Going for a run,

—

What if someone under 30 lived exactly as Australians did in 1998 for twelve months?

No subscriptions.

NOw… Imagine what would happen?

Would they save $5,000 a year?

$10,000?

$20,000?

// I genuinely don’t know.

But I’d love to find out.

Not because I think everyone should reject modern life, but because I wonder whether we’ve become so accustomed to paying for convenience that we no longer recognise it as discretionary spending.

THE REAL COST OF MODERN LIVING

Maybe the conversation about the cost of living has been framed too narrowly. We talk about inflation, Interest rates, Housing affordability.,Wages etc.

// They’re all real issues.

But what if the cost of living isn’t just about what things cost anymore? What if it’s also about how many things now exist to consume?

Every decade creates new products and services.

The digital era created entirely new categories of consumption.

Maybe that’s the hidden story. Not that life has become more expensive.

// But that modern life has become more expensive to participate in.

And I can’t help wondering whether, in solving so many of life’s little inconveniences, we’ve quietly created a generation that’s paying for convenience without ever stopping to ask what it’s was actually worth.

—

PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.

💀🖤

Cheers,

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

At least according to LinkedIn… (so it must be fucking true, right?)

Every few weeks another “Creative Strategist” role appears in my LinkedIn feed. Not because I’m actively searching for one. The algorithm has simply decided this is who I am. And every time I make the same mistake. I click, hoping this will be the one that actually resembles the discipline I fell in love with. Maybe this company is genuinely looking for someone to uncover insights, challenge assumptions, shape creative direction and solve meaningful business problems. Instead, I find another job description asking for someone to manage Meta campaigns, optimise ROAS, improve click-through rates, brief creators, write social copy, analyse dashboards and report on performance. Occasionally they’ll sprinkle in a line about “creative thinking”, usually somewhere between stakeholder management and proficiency in Asana.

The title says Creative Strategist. The responsibilities say something entirely different.

// Now, before anyone gets defensive, this isn’t a criticism of those jobs.

They’re valuable. Businesses absolutely need people who understand paid media, social, CRM, performance marketing and digital optimisation. These are specialist disciplines that have become increasingly sophisticated over the last decade. The problem isn’t the work. The problem is what we’ve started calling it.

THIS WASN’T ALWAYS THE JOB.

// Creative strategy didn’t begin inside Ads Manager.

Long before social media, before Google Analytics and certainly before TikTok, creative strategy emerged from the world of account planning. The strategist wasn’t there to optimise campaigns after they’d been made. Their job was to help shape what got made in the first place. They immersed themselves in human behaviour, searching for tensions, contradictions, motivations and insights that could unlock better creative thinking. Their contribution wasn’t another variation of the headline. It was understanding people well enough that the creative team had something genuinely interesting to say. Strategy existed to make creativity more meaningful. Not more efficient.

That’s an important distinction because somewhere along the way we’ve confused effectiveness with optimisation.

WE’VE STARTED CONFUSING SPECIALISATION WITH STRATEGY.

// They’re related. They’re not interchangeable.

Today we have paid media strategists, social strategists, CRM strategists, lifecycle strategists, SEO strategists, creator strategists and performance marketers. Every one of those roles deserves respect because every one requires genuine expertise. But they’re specialists in a channel, a platform or a capability. Their role is to maximise performance within an existing system. A Creative Strategist, on the other hand, should be questioning the system itself. They’re asking whether the positioning is distinctive enough. Whether the proposition is compelling. Whether the audience has been defined properly. Whether the insight is actually insightful. Whether the team is solving the right problem before spending six weeks polishing the wrong answer.

Those aren’t execution questions… They’re strategic ones.

PERHAPS THE TITLE HAS JUST BECOME MORE ATTRACTIVE.

// Who wouldn’t want to be called a strategist?

Let’s be honest. “Creative Strategist” sounds better than “Paid Media Manager“. It sounds broader than “Content Lead“. It implies influence. It suggests you’re helping define the direction of the work rather than simply executing it. That’s probably why we’ve seen the title spread so rapidly across marketing. Recruiters like it. Candidates like it. Businesses like it. Everyone wins.

Well, almost everyone.

// The only thing that loses is the meaning of the words themselves.

MY ISSUE ISN’T WITH THE PEOPLE.

// It’s with the advertising industry.

Most people with “Creative Strategist” on their LinkedIn profile are doing exactly what they’ve been hired to do. This isn’t an attack on them. It’s an observation about the way our industry has gradually redefined one of its most interesting disciplines. We’ve taken a role that once revolved around human insight, strategic thinking and creative direction and quietly turned it into a catch-all title for anyone working somewhere between content, paid media and performance marketing. That’s not because those disciplines aren’t important. It’s because we’ve become lazy with language.

And for an industry that prides itself on the power of words, that’s quite the irony.

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST LOSS ISN’T CREATIVITY.

// It’s strategy.

When every execution role becomes a strategy role, strategy slowly loses its meaning. It becomes synonymous with optimisation. We stop asking bigger questions because we’re too busy measuring smaller ones. Should we be making this campaign at all? Is this actually the problem worth solving? Is there a more interesting opportunity we’ve completely overlooked? Those questions don’t usually appear in a dashboard, but they’re often the ones that determine whether a brand grows, stagnates or disappears altogether.

Perhaps that’s why I keep clicking on those job ads. Not because I’m looking for work. Because I’m still hoping to find someone looking for a Creative Strategist.

Not just someone responsible for making ads perform a little better.

Someone responsible for making the work worth creating in the first place.

—

PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.

💀🖤

Cheers,

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

Recently, I shared a tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn post after receiving an email from ANZ with the subject line: “Imminent Candidate Purge Notification.” It genuinely made me laugh. Not because I was offended. Quite the opposite. Somewhere between a perfectly reasonable business process and me opening my inbox, someone had unknowingly turned a recruitment email into something that sounded like it had been written by Skynet’s People & Culture team. “Candidate 47291. Your records are scheduled for permanent deletion…”

Fucking Brilliant. Completely unintentional, but brilliant.

The best part? ANZ responded publicly. They acknowledged the feedback, escalated it internally and changed the wording.

That’s good brand stewardship. It wasn’t defensive. It wasn’t performative. It was simply a brand recognising that even the smallest interactions deserve attention.

But this was never really about the word purge.

It reminded me of something I’ve believed for years…

YOUR BRAND DOESN’T STOP AT MARKETING…

In fact, I’d argue marketing is only responsible for introducing people to your brand. The rest of the business is responsible for proving it.

We spend months obsessing over positioning, brand guidelines, tone of voice, messaging frameworks, campaigns, sponsorships, social content and launch films. We debate colours. We debate typography. We debate photography styles. We debate whether the logo should be 24 or 32 pixels wide. Then we high-five ourselves because the brand looks beautiful.

Meanwhile, somewhere else in the business, Finance is sending invoices that sound nothing like the brand. HR is sending robotic recruitment emails. IT is writing error messages that feel like they were translated from binary. Procurement is implementing platforms that nobody ever stops to customise. Customer Service is using scripts written ten years ago. And suddenly the brand you’ve invested millions building quietly starts leaking out through a thousand tiny cracks. 💀

That’s the thing about people. They don’t experience organisations in departments.

Nobody ever says, “That wasn’t really ANZ. That was just their recruitment platform.” Or, “That wasn’t Qantas. That was just Operations.” They simply experience ANZ. Or Qantas. Or Apple. Every interaction becomes another data point helping them decide what that organisation feels like. Not what it says it stands for… what it actually feels like.

Which is why I’ve always loved airline safety videos.

Think about it for a second. They’re mandatory. Highly regulated. Compliance-driven. Every airline has exactly the same job to do: tell people where the exits are, how the oxygen masks work and what to do in an emergency. The information barely changes.

The old world treated that moment like an obligation. The best brands treated it like an opportunity.

Qantas. Air New Zealand. Virgin Australia. They all realised something beautifully simple. If someone has to watch this anyway… why not make it unmistakably ours? Why not make it entertaining? Why not make it memorable? Why not create something people actually look forward to seeing? Something they share. Something they remember years later. The compliance didn’t change. The information didn’t change. The feeling changed.

That’s what great brands understand.

EVERY FUCKING TOUCHPOINT IS A BRAND TOUCHPOINT…

Not just the glamorous ones.

// The password reset email. The chatbot. The rejection letter.

// The confirmation SMS. The invoice. The onboarding pack.

// The error message. The hold music. The automated workflow.

Every single one of them is teaching people who you are… whether you intended it to or not.

Maybe that’s why I get so “passionate” about this stuff. Because I genuinely believe brand is an operating system, not a marketing function. It should influence how you think, how you write, how you design, how you recruit, how you invoice, how you apologise and how you celebrate. It should be seen, heard and more importantly felt everywhere.

So here’s a challenge for every leadership team.

Next time you’re reviewing your brand guidelines, don’t just invite Marketing.

Invite HR. Invite Finance. Invite IT. Invite Customer Service. Invite Procurement.

Then spend a day walking through every email, every workflow, every automated notification and every customer interaction you can find.

Ask yourselves three questions:

• Does this sound like us?
• Does this feel like us?
• Would someone know it’s us if they never saw our logo?

Because that’s where the real work begins.

Not in the campaign. Not on the billboard. Not on LinkedIn.

But in the thousands of tiny moments where brands either reinforce what they stand for… or quietly undermine everything they’ve spent years trying to build.

That’s the stuff people remember.

Even if the subject line says “PURGE.” 💀🖤

—

PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.

💀🖤

Cheers,

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

I’ve written something before about Opinions & Assholes (everyone has one)…
I couldn’t help myself for this next blog post… 💀

I’ve watched the Levi’s Stadium conversation unfold this week and honestly, I think most people have completely missed the fucking point.

The hot takes have been “predictable” and bland…

“They should have wrapped it in denim. They should have integrated the stitching. They should have referenced the back pocket. They should have made the architecture feel more Levi’s”. They should have, they should have, they should have.

And whilst opinions are like assholes (i.e. everyone has one), what fascinates me is that nearly all of the commentary has focused on what Levi’s could have added, rather than recognising what they’ve already built.

Because the fact that Levi’s didn’t need to do any of those things is precisely why it’s such a powerful example of branding.

One of the biggest misconceptions in our industry is that brands grow because they attract attention. They don’t. Attention is important, but attention is fleeting. Memory is what matters. The strongest brands in the world understand that their job isn’t simply to get noticed today. Their job is to be remembered tomorrow.

When people saw Levi’s Stadium, they weren’t seeing a naming rights deal. They were seeing the accumulated effect of more than 170 years of disciplined brand building. They were seeing the result of decades spent investing in distinctive assets, memory structures and cultural meaning that have become inseparable from the brand itself. The red tab. The stitching. The leather patch. The horses. The silhouette of a 501. The colour red. The role the brand has played across generations, subcultures and communities. All of these things compound over time.

The irony is that the same people arguing Levi’s should have leaned harder into these assets are unknowingly proving how effective those assets already are. The fact they can immediately recall them, reference them and imagine them being used is evidence that the work has already been done.

That’s what strong brands do. They create shortcuts in our minds. They become familiar. Instantly recognisable. Easy to retrieve.

What many newer brands get wrong is that they’re obsessed with standing out. They chase trends, aesthetics, cultural moments, algorithms, colours, typography systems and whatever the latest platform is rewarding. Every few years the industry collectively falls in love with something new. Minimalism. Maximalism. Millennial pink. Brat green. Whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. The problem is that trends create attention, but assets create memory. One is rented. The other is owned.

I’ve always believed being distinctive is more important than being different.

Different is easy. Different can be copied. Different often disappears the moment the next trend arrives. Distinctiveness is much harder because it requires consistency. It requires repetition. It requires discipline. It requires organisations to continue investing in the same signals long after marketers have become bored of them.

That’s another uncomfortable truth. Marketers often confuse boredom with ineffectiveness. We spend every day immersed in brands, campaigns and assets. Consumers don’t. What feels repetitive to us often feels familiar to them. What feels old to us is often what makes a brand easy to recognise in the first place.

Levi’s didn’t become an icon because they reinvented themselves every few years. They became an icon because they understood what was worth protecting. They understood that familiarity is not the enemy of creativity. Familiarity is one of the most valuable assets a brand can own.

The real lesson from Levi’s Stadium isn’t that they should have done more. It’s that they didn’t have to. The strongest brands eventually reach a point where the logo gets smaller, the branding gets quieter and the impact gets bigger. Not because they’re doing less work, but because they’ve already spent decades doing the hard work.

To me, that’s not a missed opportunity. That’s the reward.

—

PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.

💀🖤

Cheers,

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

One of the biggest misconceptions in marketing is that growth comes from doing more… More content. More campaigns. More products. More channels. More customers. More followers. More every-fucking-thing.

But some of the fastest growth I’ve ever seen came from doing the opposite.

It came from getting clearer.

Years ago, I had the privilege of working with the founders of Threebyone, the business behind Neuw Denim, Rollas and Abrand Jans. Looking back, one of the biggest lessons wasn’t about denim. It wasn’t about retail. It wasn’t even about marketing.

It was about culture.

On paper, all three brands sold jeans. In reality, they occupied completely different worlds.

Neuw was built around individuality, creativity and self-expression. It attracted musicians, photographers, designers, agency folk and people who generally didn’t care much for fitting neatly into boxes. The jeans weren’t really the product. The product was identity. The stories, scars and experiences that make us who we are.

Rollas occupied a different space. There was still an Australian spirit to it, but it felt more relaxed, nostalgic and effortless. There was music, there was romance, there was a little rebellion, but there was also accessibility. It felt like a brand people could see themselves in.

Abrand played a different role again. Younger. Louder. Faster. More trend aware. More social. More connected to self-expression, belonging and identity formation. The products changed faster. The culture moved faster. The audience expected something different.

Three brands. Three audiences. Three cultural spaces.

And that’s where most businesses get growth wrong. They think growth comes from reaching more people. Growth usually comes from mattering more to the right people.

The best brands I’ve worked on weren’t obsessed with demographics. They were obsessed with understanding the role they played in people’s lives and the culture surrounding them. That’s a very different exercise.

Which brings me to trends.

Marketers bloody love trends. #Obsessed

Soft girl era. Clean girl era. Quiet luxury era. Whatever era TikTok decides to invent next week.

The problem is that most people confuse trends with culture.

A trend is simply the visible expression of something happening underneath. It’s the symptom, not the cause. The real opportunity sits beneath the trend.

// Why are people gravitating towards softness?
// Why are people rejecting hustle culture?
// Why are younger generations dressing, behaving and consuming differently?
// Why are attitudes shifting?

That’s where strategy lives.

Not in the trend itself, but in the tension and cultural shift driving it.

The best brands don’t chase culture. They participate in it. They contribute to it. Sometimes they help shape it. But they don’t stand on the sidelines desperately trying to borrow relevance because they saw something trending on TikTok.

Culture isn’t a costume you put on for a campaign.

It’s a community you belong to… and the strongest brands understand exactly where they belong.

That’s why I often think growth is less of a marketing challenge and more of a clarity challenge. Most businesses don’t have a content problem. They don’t have a social media problem. They don’t have a performance marketing problem.

They have a meaning problem.

They don’t know who they’re for. They don’t know what role they play. They don’t know what makes them distinctive.

So they end up doing more. More content. More activity. More campaigns. More noise.

When what they actually need is more clarity.

The brands that win aren’t always the biggest. They’re the ones that understand people better than their competitors do. They understand the culture they’re participating in, the role they play within it, and the value they create for the people they serve.

Everything else is just execution…

—

PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.

💀🖤

Cheers,

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

I bought a pair of noise-cancelling headphones years ago because I wanted better sound quality. Turns out I completely misunderstood the point…

The goal wasn’t to make the music louder.
The goal was to make everything else quieter.

And lately I’ve been thinking that’s probably one of the more important lessons I’ve learned about strategy, creativity and modern work.

We’re surrounded by noise.

Notifications. Meetings. Slack messages.
Emails. LinkedIn experts. Podcasts.
Newsletters. Dashboards. Opinions…

More information than any human being could reasonably process.

Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves the answer is more.

More inputs. More data. More reports.
More tabs open. More productivity hacks.

As strategists, marketers and leaders, we’re often expected to consume enormous amounts of information and somehow make sense of it. Research reports, interview transcripts, focus groups, sales data, social listening, stakeholder feedback, competitor reviews and whatever fresh hell someone has uploaded into a shared drive this week.

The challenge isn’t finding information anymore.
The challenge is figuring out what matters.

Because information isn’t insight. Volume isn’t wisdom. And activity sure as shit isn’t progress.

Some of the best thinking I’ve ever done didn’t happen sitting at a desk. It happened walking the dog, driving the car, staring out a plane window or standing in the shower pretending I wasn’t thinking about work.

Which is funny, because we’re taught that productivity looks like focus. Head down. Laptop open. Working.

But some problems aren’t solved by concentrating harder. They’re solved by creating enough space for your brain to finally connect the dots. That’s why I’ve become increasingly obsessed with environments.

Not productivity, but Environments.

Knowing where you do your best analytical thinking. Knowing when your brain is firing. Knowing when you should push through. Knowing when you should walk away.

Most people spend their lives optimising tools. Very few spend time optimising themselves. And I think that’s where the real advantage sits.

Not in hearing more. In hearing less.

In a world obsessed with amplification, clarity is becoming a superpower.

And the people who can consistently separate signal from noise will always outperform the people simply consuming more of it.

—

PS: Clarity is easy to talk about and surprisingly difficult to create. If your team is currently navigating complexity, competing priorities or strategic drift, I’d be happy to have a chat.

💀🖤

Cheers,

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

—

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many businesses don’t actually have a marketing problem…

They have a leadership problem disguised as marketing.

And honestly? Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Most founder brands, charities, NFPs and growing businesses can’t afford a proper CMO, Head of Marketing or senior commercial marketing leader. So what happens instead is marketing becomes a shared hallucination. A group project. A democratic free-for-all where everybody has opinions about “the brand” despite nobody actually steering the fucking thing properly.

// The founder has opinions.
// Sales has opinions.
// Finance has opinions.
// The board has opinions.
// The agency has opinions.
// Hell… The intern who watched three TikToks about “growth hacking” suddenly has opinions.

And slowly, over time, the business turns into a Frankenstein stitched together from random advice, reactive decision-making and panic disguised as productivity.

Which is where things get really interesting. Because most organisations think they’re doing marketing.

But what they’re actually doing is communications.

There’s a huge difference.

Marketing was originally supposed to influence:
product, pricing, distribution, experience, customer behaviour, commercial growth, market positioning, competitive advantage, fame, memory, culture++++++

Now?

Fuck. Me: Most internal “marketing teams” are basically exhausted content engines trying to justify their own existence through dashboards, engagement metrics and acronyms nobody outside the industry gives a shit about.

“Look at the CTR.”
“Look at the CAC.”
“Look at the impressions.”
“Look at the engagement.”

Cool. But how about WTF?

But is the business actually becoming more valuable?

Is it becoming more memorable?
More trusted?
More culturally relevant?
More commercially effective?
More distinctive?
More chosen?

Or are we all just feeding a machine because activity feels safer than strategic clarity?

// Mark Ritson would probably argue most businesses haven’t practiced proper brand management in years.

// Byron Sharp would likely point out that nobody can buy your brand if nobody fucking remembers it.

// Porter would quietly remind everyone that operational effectiveness is not strategy.

// Kahneman would whisper “Humans are irrational, you spreadsheet goblins.”

// And Godin would probably ask the most important question of all:
“Why would anyone choose to talk about you in the first place?”

But somewhere along the way, marketing became obsessed with proving short-term value rather than creating long-term value.

And I get why.

Because performance marketing gives businesses the illusion of certainty. Numbers. Attribution. Graphs. Dashboards. Immediate feedback loops. It feels measurable. Defensible. Safe.

Until six years later when the company realises nobody actually gives a shit about the brand anymore.

Les Binet and Peter Field have been screaming this for years. Short-term optimisation slowly cannibalises long-term growth. But businesses continue doing it because “performance” is easier to explain in boardrooms than emotional salience, memory structures and cultural meaning.

And honestly? I don’t entirely blame internal marketing teams either.

Inside agencies you have a platoon of head hours and skills:
strategists, researchers, media specialists, behavioural scientists, developers, SEO experts, UX designers, copywriters, creative directors, producers, analysts, account leads & office support animals…

Entire ecosystems of expertise.

Then client-side you often have one exhausted Senior Marketing Manager expected to:
manage agencies, approve creative, write copy, analyse performance, brief designers, update websites, handle PR, manage events, report to leadership,
run socials, justify budget, justify existence and somehow still “drive growth”.

Half the time they’re drowning.
The other half they’re trying to prove they deserve to exist.

And this is exactly why so many businesses end up running marketing departments without actual marketing leadership.

Not communications leadership.
Not channel management.
Not content production.

Marketing leadership. Someone capable of zooming out and asking:

What are we actually trying to become?

// What’s fragmented?
// What’s duplicated?
// What’s reactive?
// What’s wasting energy?
// What’s performative?
// What should we stop doing?
// What should we protect at all costs?

Because the irony is most organisations don’t need:
more content, more campaigns, more automation, more dashboards, more AI-generated slop, or another fucking workshop about workshops.

They need clarity.

A clear position.
A clear strategy.
A clear understanding of what should never be optimised away in the first place.

Anyway….

DM or Comment “WORLD PEACE” and I’ll send you a complimentary dashboard proving your brand is culturally irrelevant at scale.

—

💀🖤

Cheers,

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