Probably.

I was on a flight recently when an announcement came over the in-flight system in a voice that was beyond hysterically upbeat. Not just the pep of a local drivetime DJ about to push the faders up and slide into the weekend, but an elevated, cultish level of derangement that could only be conjured by a megachurch pastor snorting something illegal. I could actually taste the smile in her voice. Ugh.

But it wasn’t just the tone. The message itself was so saccharin sweet I felt myself begin to bloat as it entered my ears. The words were a clumsy, dumbed-down mantra about having a wonderful holiday and buying tat onboard. But seemingly aimed at a five year old.

I’m used to this infantilised, matey tone these days. Because it’s ever-ree-fucking-where. And what’s branding got to do with this? Quite a lot.

Tone of voice became integral to branding late in the last century, to the point that every well-considered brand now knows how it speaks. Unfortunately for us (and them), the default voice almost always has to sound: friendly, upbeat, approachable, human (‘human’ used to make me cringe, now thanks to the roboverlords I actually appreciate the sentiment).

It’s worth saying that when Innocent drinks first dropped this voice it sounded radical; it’s since been hammered to death by every other FMCG brand, before permeating supermarkets, financial advertising, insurance and almost every other sector.

What’s chilling is that this bland, friendly voice has become not just the de facto sign off to adverts, it’s slithered its way into our public spaces.

Today’s safety announcements are no longer direct, they are Disney princess proclamations; “we want you to have a great…!!”, “and don’t forget to…!!” It’s as if we’re a nation of petulant children, ready to tantrum off the platform at the slightest hint of authority.

I don’t need a chummy voice to tell me to close a train toilet door, or even continue the creepy conversation long after I’ve unzipped. Honestly, listen to this clip and tell me your ick level is still in the green.

This tone is so pervasive, we’ve become numb to it. If Big Brother did start speaking to us directly, booming out of every device across the land, it wouldn’t be in a clipped Etonion tone, it’d be in a chummy approximation of a cosy Coronation Street actor’s voice.

This is symptomatic of a wider trend of infantilization across every aspect of society. We’ve become a nation of kidults, grasping for sugary pills every time we feel the slightest discomfort. Demanding to be pandered to rather than instructed.

Or have we? Are we asking for this voice and tone, or is it simply the result of too many cosy brand managers who don’t understand the difference between pleasant and smug? One thing is for certain, as AI starts scraping data and creating computer VOs, the likelihood of hearing even more of this comfy tone seems inevitable.

Where’s Sean bastard Bean when he’s needed?

The sad revelation of AI:

Just good enough is good enough for the vast majority of people.

They don’t need friction: ideas that are too clever. A dog in a tuxedo on a moped is already a pretty damn clever idea ;-).

That’s it.

‘Therapy speak’ has now completely infiltrated everyday vocabulary, to the point where it’s almost invisible:

— people are toxic,
— events are triggering,
— we know we’re being gaslit.

Many of these phrases are so common place that they simply pass as everyday conversation — who doesn’t have boundaries?

Language betrays not only what we say, but what we want to be seen to say.

Therapy speak is a subconscious attempt to reveal a deeper sense of emotional intelligence behind our words, a connection based on rationality and analysis. In reality it’s often second-hand language filtered down through self-centred Hollywood psychiatry, self-help books and vibes podcasts.

Brandspeak isn’t far behind.

It starts with businesses — they appear to be constantly on a mission, to deliver value and live up to their purpose. Whilst these conceits are usually ring-fenced within the parameters of a corporate website, brandspeak is shuffling off the edge of the PDF and into real life.

You might have a friend soft launching a new relationship, or getting a glow-up that inevitably becomes a rebrand.

In fact rebrand has become the go-to word for a reinvention across the board.

In a world of content creators, wannabe creative directors (more on them in a later rant) and personal brands, how long will it be before it’s everyday parlance to declare that being spotted sitting in Pret infringes our identity guidelines, or that we’re choosing a sight hound on the basis of it being a great brand extension?

Or that “now we’re settled and the short-term colab is turning from a roll-out into a strategic partnership, we’re thinking that a couple of kids would offer great sub-branding opportunities, allowing us to cut through in such a crowded sector (e.g. the constant lines at Broadway Market on any weekend).”

Meh.

Where’s the vision, though??

You might initially imagine that creative projects follow a typical flow, from brief through to execution, and are instigated for entirely rational and realistic reasons. But throughout my career I’ve discovered individuals and agencies doing projects that stand way outside of conventional methods and reasoning.

These projects are often so strange, they act not just as a scope of work, but also as a commentary on the space that design inhabits within society.

Here’s two of the wilder jobs I’ve heard of that are guaranteed to be conversational catnip at any dinner party:

Pack of 20 Idealism Menthols, please.

Back in the smoggy days after the cold war unfroze, Big Cig set its sights eastward, ready to discover fresh new lungs to corrupt with its delicious tobacco. They wanted this new audience to actively choose their cigarettes, and rapidly build brand loyalty. To do this consumers would have to make a dedicated choice.

A designer I met revealed his entire role was to design fake cigarette packaging — fully conceived pseudo-brands that didn’t actually exist. Real packs, real cigs, but with none of the hype, advertising or cultural cache of the big global players. These packs were shelf fillers, put in stores so that newly liberated comrades could recognise the western brands they’d heard whispers of, and feel like they were making their own informed decisions. The packs he designed were simply cyphers; unheard of products that made selecting the front-running brands such as M….. or C….. an easy, obvious choice

A strange strategy, but one that had no doubt been rigorously planned out. There’s a black ops vibe to the entire exercise — showing ex-communist states the plethora of choice seemingly available in the West. File under weird.

Harpooning the whale

Over a beer I was introduced to a person whose day to day role was to design very specific adverts for an online betting site. Adverts targeted and fed to one single person; a prominent celebrity who loved to gamble very high stakes. Sounds crazy, but as it was pointed out, if you can guarantee a single advert might result in 100k of revenue in a single day from a couple of transactions, that’s a far better bet than firing generic adverts into the digital ether and hoping ten thousand newbs each stump up a tenner.

I feel that there is a novel or screenplay in this relationship — the uncanny sense of unease as the advertiser and celeb both begin to feel the connection, then vibe off of it.

Scrub that, it’s a Black Mirror episode.

***

These are two examples; others will probably return to me in fever dreams.

Feel free to send examples.

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Ok, put down your avocado toast, this isn’t a wild fantasy, it’s reality. And it’s not their (or your) fault.

After all, their entire lives they’ve been acclimated to the idea of spending very little or nothing at all on any media, production or creativity. Where did anyone think this would lead?

They came of age in the era of streaming, where paying to physically own the music you love is more of an absurd luxury and less of an essential. Books, films, magazines, art… pretty much any other media is available (or at the very least easily discoverable) on-demand, often with slight concern for reimbursement or acknowledgement of the original creators.

We all demand free shit — millennials were just the first generation to come of age on the free access planet.

They screenshot and drag from browsers onto desktops with no sense of guilt whatsoever (Gen Xers may have had at least a pang that this might be unethical, but they soon washed away the guilt and hopped on board the free ride though).

They have the ability to produce content at an incredibly high level of quality, for free. Phone cameras have become so powerful that the gap between an image shot on a DSLR and an iPhone snap is virtually unnoticeable.

This has been replicated across every aspect of creativity - from apps that edit films, to DIY web design platforms, to music production tools, to… well, everything.

Layer LLM, AI and a billion template tools on top of this, and there is little or no expertise or production experience needed to create a decent website, photoshoot or thought-piece article.

And decent is often exactly enough. In an increasing hyper saturated visual meme-culture, nobody has time to spend time designing anything substantial. Why should they? We rarely interact with any information other than on-screen.

Then there’s the other issue: convincing some clients of the need to spend money has always been a challenge.

But this was definitely easier before on-demand, freely-available, zero-consequences content. Clients couldn’t produce a hi-res artwork-ready magazine advert, knock-up a film with an elaborate soundtrack or launch a website without buying the software, hiring professionals and paying for content.

But if you’ve been raised on free, decent and immediate, paying for ‘great and wait’ is not an option.

Creativity and production was an opaque world, full of arcane knowledge and expensive kit. Content was ring-fenced by companies such as photo-libraries and font houses.

At the end of the last century the creative industry was run by craftspeople: typesetters, photo-retouchers, pack-shot artists, rub-down manufacturers, visualisers, film editors and other professions that have since disappeared. Every corner of Soho and SOHO housed a photo processor or a colour print bureau. Apple and Adobe killed most of these professions; transferring that power to graphic designers.

The old industry world disappeared slowly. Even at the beginning of the digital design revolution, time was still the most obvious constraint. Yes, you could get a colour print of the document, but it took a few hours to deliver. This allowed time to discuss, think, design. These pauses also ensured billable time.

Nowadays all that design power has been further transferred down the chain to literally anyone who calls themselves a creator.

Slip a little further down that greasy pole, and we see the power is being drip fed to AI.

Where is this leading? I suggest that only the thinnest sliver of Gen Z clients will care about creative craft at all, because there will be so little evidence of it left to even reference.

I have.

In a pitch.

These weren’t tears of joy or despair, but a salty stream of pure pent up emotion. And this was no mean feat: the client was a high-end property developer, typically a breed with the outward emotional range of an excel spreadsheet. On reflection we should have bottled those tears as they’re probably more valuable than Horseshoe crab blood (look it up afterwards; weird).

We’d taken a bold decision to create a brand concept film for the pitch, bringing to life their vision of a development that would usher in a ‘new way of living’. Side note: seriously, I’ve seen so many ‘new ways of living’ that none of us should be now be living in a standard apartment or semi-detached. Side side note: to be fair this client genuinely developed a radical way to build real community.

The creative team had spent time and effort weaving the brand concept and messaging into the film, and it showed. It looked fantastic. It brought the idea to life, told an emotional story and ended with a name and logo that were essentially a turnkey solution. More important than the emotional arc of the film, was that the whole presentation felt convincing.

So convincing that as the film ended, across the table, a tear was shed. Can you imagine a solitary sob in the type of Mayfair boardroom that wouldn’t have felt out of place holding a Paul Allen business card throwdown? Perfection… but also alarming.

“I can just see it. I really can. You’ve brought it life so wonderfully. I feel a little emotional.”

“Yes, yes, YES! It’s exactly what we had in mind.”

Smiles all round, those warm, positive vibes that say only one thing: there’s two agency presentations left to see, but they’re now just formalities. You smashed this.

A few niceties and myself and my creative partner left on a high, straight to a pub round the corner to congratulate ourselves. There’s something glorious about the sunny mid-afternoon pint after you’ve pulled a few late evenings getting together a pitch and then delivered it with the effortless precision of a Federer serve.

Yeah, well keep your fucking tears. We didn’t win the job.

As the cool continental lager slipped down, I would have given us a conservative 98% chance of winning — but in that brief alcoholic reverie I’d forgotten that I was an idiot. The lager had gone to my head and I’d dismissed the immutable law of the pitch; even if they say the job’s yours, even if they look you in the eye and pat you on the back whilst they say it, the job’s not really yours until they sign on the line.

We got the call two days after with the news that they’d gone with someone else. In their wisdom, the developers just liked one of the names another agency had proposed, and that swayed the pitch. They simply liked a name. At a concept stage. With no trademark checks. No guarantee that that name could ever be used.

But the film, the vision, the emotional connection, the tears, FFS??

All for nothing. Just swilling down the drain. Consternation all round, files filed away on the server, despondent debrief to the team who couldn’t wrap their heads around the decision.

Yet again clients remain unknowable, shifting, removed, like the obscure creatures of the deep ocean.

But we go again, brave mariners.

We go again.

I was in the Creative Director’s office getting ready to show some concepts I’d been working on, about to flex my chops through some outré art direction suggestions, when he waved my work out of his face as if it was a bluebottle pissed on Bulmers.

“Put that away and just explain it to me. If you can’t tell me your idea, then it’s not a good idea.”

‘WTAF?’ I would have thought, but this was pre-WTF days.

Instead I was baffled. Style was my currency. I’d graduated not from some lowly provincial technical college, but one of the world’s great art schools. I’d earned the right to sneer at a poor font choice, to knowingly nod approval at a particular cache of photographers, to hold illustration in disdain*.

And here was this over-compensated over-forty-year-old asking me to describe my ideas?

As I eventually learnt, he was of course, correct.

Only creatives really care about such trivialities as font choice. The Hairy arsed public just remember the cute little animated gonk on the advert. The creative who had the idea for the gonk? Amazing. The designer who slaved away on the typography and the logo flourish? Pfft, whatever.

Whether it’s shot on film or a vintage digital is pretty much irrelevant. Art direction is the polish spread on an idea. Yes, there are ideas that only exist because of the art direction, but these are pretty disposable whether intentionally or not.

All great ideas take residence in our minds.

The good ideas are usually seamlessly transferrable; they’ll work as a YouTube pre-roll blipvert, as a social post or a Tube ad.

But a really massive idea is different. It works when one mum mentions it at the school gate or three blokes laugh about it down the pub. It becomes a meme, culture, a shorthand, a comedy punchline; it becomes golden.

*I got over this, as did the entire industry eventually.

Say the word and eyes involuntarily begin to glaze over.

Snap, back in the room chief, because data has become a catch all demand on every brief. Clients have become enthralled and then mesmerised by the word. And have you looked at job ads on LinkedIn? Understanding and manipulating data has become a prerequisite skill for any role that goes beyond clicking on Figma.

Of course there was always a rich seam of creatives who did love data, back when visualising it used to be exciting, arcane or potentially beautiful. Remember Data Flow or the books of Edward Tufte? Fascinating representations of the unseen.

Visualising data used to throw up interesting design challenges, but today its ubiquity has rendered it dull.

Everyone, everywhere seems to be enraptured by data, and this is an obsession that’s coming from the top down.

It’s pretty obvious why — data is fact, and nobody got sacked by the facts, amiright? If your job depends on justifying your job to those above you, then you better hope you can justify real good. If you pull out a deck showing how you’ve been making thoughtful ‘data-driven decisions’ then you’re as good as in the clear.

After all, the data doesn’t lie. If those data-driven decisions don’t actually turn out to be the way that customers acted, then that’s simply due to people acting irrationally, not your decision making. Bingo, vindicated to hell, bitches.

Data is solid, trustworthy — not like when you have to rely on those pesky creative-types and their wild ideas to get their hit or miss results. Trust them and where might we end up? No, we’re now in the shiny new world of ‘let’s base our marketing, campaigns, media spend and brand strategy on data’. Let’s go with what we know as fact, not what we might sense as truth.

Whilst the emphasis on data has become all important, creative work has been blanding-down across the board. Look no further than the endless churn of chumbox content, and proliferation of general internet slop that no creative is signing off — as highlighted in this FT magazine article (paywalled, use magic or money to read). Someone’s data is suggesting this is a good idea.

Back in the old pre-Hairy days I was pretty good at maths and tech; I even wrote a published computer game. I figure that I have a better understanding of numbers and stats than most, but it’s still there irritating me from the wings with its incessant chant: data, data, more data.

Here’s the thing; I’m not sure how many people I encounter can actually read, understand or process data. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not many. There’s a lot of folks paying lip service by simply referencing it, or using it at its most simplistic level. And, pull together a large and varied enough data set and those that are clever will know exactly how to edit or extract the insights they’ll need. I know, as I’ve done just that in the past.

Data has become a mantra, a smokescreen and a tickbox. But it’s also become a kind of religion, with an accompanying fervour to how it’s discussed. It’s not just that using data solves all; it’s that saying we’re using ‘data’ somehow solves most issues.

Here’s how this credo breaks down:

Declaration from on-high; our lords and masters, the technorati-dollar fetishists: “You must embrace data. Data tells us everything and there’s literally tons of it out there. We want to know it all. We want to scrape it off the bones. We want to quantify it all. No more uncertainty. Just facts. REMOVE the curse of human creativity!”

Disciples cheering: “Yes, data solves all!”, “Track that ROI”, “More dashboards!!”

An hour later: “hold on, wait a minute… ice buckets, Baby Reindeer, Skibidi Toilet, people behaving in unpredictable ways. Data didn’t tell us any of this. It never prepared us, why not?”

Follow up directive sent to marketing teams: “Do some memes. Make a meme from our data. Look at the data and tell us why our comms failed. Dig deeper into the data. Analyse the dashboards.” Etc.

To be clear; those currently sitting atop of the many business pyramids we’ve helped to build appear to hate uncertainty. They loathe that they have to pay money to create brands or content or advertising that will ensure that their ideas are understandable and attractive to us plebs. And they must really hate that it’s often the clumsy, weird or illogical ideas that connect with audiences; a talking Russian Meerkat or Nutter Butter’s TikTok.

They are suspicious of the practices of design, marketing and creativity because they are wrapped up too closely with the idea of ‘art’ — an idea that to them is the polar opposite of the rationality they crave.

This is why data has become far more important than it should be, because they can understand it, measure it, quantify it. They can’t quite quantify a design concept or a film or a movie, as much as they might try. They can only log the sales, the eyeballs, the downloads. Data in this context is the anti-art.

To be very clear I’m not anti-data; that would be insane.

Rather I’m anti-everything that the demand for data has come to stand for — the drive to remove intuition, instinct and irrationality and replace them with measurement and the blandest level of accountability… and the inevitable dross that is the result.

PS. Did you get the Easter egg? Lame innit?

So what?

If everyone can create art, then everyone is an artist. If everyone can make music, everyone is a musician. If everyone can make a movie… you get the point.

None of the greed dweebs have stopped to think what this actually means. If we eliminate the sanctity of the creative act then what’s really left for humanity?

I mean Shakespeare was OK, but Claude just wrote me an update of Othello that really fucking slaps. You’re telling me Vermeer only painted 40 artworks? I can pump out 50 a day…

Let’s make everyone an artist sounds great on a tote bag.

Think about the reality. Fucking horrible.

All profundity sanded down to a gloss. Any sense of awe slowly being removed from our collective experience. And so, so, so, so much slop.

The artist’s journey reduced to a single step; from shit thought to keyboard prompt.

Whenever someone has described me as being “arty” I’ve felt the bile rise and my forced smile begin to congeal. It’s a word that masks confusion, indifference or simply a whole host of weird prejudices. It’s also wildly patronising.

In certain social situations, revealing that you work in the creative industries can, admittedly, be a conversation killer. At a wedding surrounded by finance wannabros and regional recluses, it often means jumping immediately into validation mode. I’ve found myself zoning out to my own drone as I waffled truisms about the real financial value of the creative industries to the UK economy, in front of a row of bored and unimpressed Sebs and Jontys.

“Arty” sums up the barely-disguised contempt that society has for those who somehow have inveigled to use their imagination to fund their lives.

There’s a feeling that creativity is not the foundation of a real job or career — unlike say, showing people round houses, or sitting in a glass box speculating on financial charts, or caring for the infirm and elderly. BTW, the last on that list is a real, decent job that puts all others to shame.

Let’s go back to Seb, Jonty et al. They are perhaps intrigued by what you might do, but also confused. Often downright mistrusting, like a cloud of retriever puppies encountering a sink plunger.

In this or countless other scenarios, saying someone is “arty” is a weapon that’s used against a creative professional. “Arty” reeks of amateurism and happenstance, as if you fell luckily into a job that allows you to do thirty minutes of finger painting every day just to break up the monotony of flouncing around in a dress-code-free, meeting-lite playpen.

It’s a shorthand that allows Seb to decide that you’re going straight in a mental rolodex he’s already labelled ‘irrelevant’. After all, nanny made him give up finger painting when he was fifteen.

Recently, though I have noticed a slight shift in attitude. As all these guys began to read books that touched on branding (Shoe Dog take an inevitable yawn and bow), and listen to endless creativebizdotorg podcasts, you’re now met with a little less mistrust and perhaps almost a degree of mild interest. There’s still an underlying whiff of contempt though, because Jonty will have to accept that the PE house he works at is buying businesses partly for the value of their brands — and that’s an uncomfortable and unquantifiable figure staring out from a spreadsheet.

The truth is, if you work in the creative industry you’re always likely to get the odd patronising comment from a civilian. On meeting a CEO he looked me and a colleague up and down and declared ‘huh, typical marketing guys’. I reminded him that if we were typical he wouldn’t have called us in to meet him. And that I wasn’t a marketing person. He liked this pushback, and within a year his organisation had become our biggest client.

Here’s a Hairy tip. Every time someone refers to what you do as ‘arty’, feel free to slap them down with an equally patronising descriptor; Teams-jockey, number clunt, data slave, money launderer etc.

Or casually drop that you’re part of the £120bn added annually to the UK economy by creative industries. Or that you’re using your imagination to enhance commercial success, and what are they using — Excel?

Then flounce away — artily.

Four globo-corporates dancing around a giant cupcake.

A gooning balloon surrounded by blank-faced friends; the tip of a couple of party cannons (or perhaps they’re on-the-wonk Singaporean skyscrapers?) spewing glitter.

All these cursed sigils can only mean one thing:

Congratulations Sindee! You’re super happy to announce that you’ve just started a new role as Junior Marketing Executive Intern (short-term contract) at EnormoConsult in Dubaiiiii!!

Meuurghh. Enough already.

Is there anything less inspiring than logging onto LinkedIn?

It might have once been relevant (can I even remember when it was?) but today the whole thing is jaded, clunky, humble braggy, and also a bit boring. A bit too Facebooky.

You’re always one scroll away from the following:

1. The tedious pitch wrapped up as short-form learning.
   An emoji populated post (rocket emoji, tick; chart going up emoji, tick) full of learnings on growth hacking, lead gen and brand scaling that essentially hype everything to the point of absurdity. 5 things I learnt, yadda yadda. Just put the link in bio and shut up.

2. An ‘I’d never condone it but, here’s an AI slop picture I knocked up to prove a point about how crap AI is’ post.
   Hopefully we’re at the end of this tiresome cycle of ‘just for lolz’ pics of British Bulldogs riding Lime bikes dreamt up by Terry from accounts. BTW that lame prompt just cost the Earth some energy that we won’t be getting back.

3. Poorly taken photos of staff out and about and interacting with real world networks of actual humanz.

   Good to know that people are actually still forced to step out and meet awkwardly IRL at empty-brained marketing events. But take some better pictures guys. Or tone done the CEO’s awkwardness filter for a moment, his charisma is showing.

4. Humble brag masquerading as life-lesson.

   “As a successful businessperson with an eight figure business, people often ask me about how I got my first break” etc etc. Again, just paste the link in comments below, bro.

   

5. More likely: that same advert you’ve seen about 20 times already.
   For a platform with soooo many marketing, tech and ad professionals, is this binary option the best they can come up with? I feel frustrated just being confronted with these two decisions. Annoying or not interesting are not even in the same wheelhouse. How about a button marked “it’s not relevant to me or my sector?” As for telling the algo that I’ve seen the ad before? Fugeddaboutit. I’ve clicked on these options and nothing seems to happen, except the advert reappears.

These are only indicative of The Hairy Arm’s feed. There’s probably a whole other mountain of slop you’re looking at if you are from a different industry: checking in at a Cement Supply Conference, six ways to streamline your logistics, how I built a medical supplies network from my kitchen. I like to imagine each industry with its own unique hellscape of content personally tailored to its audience. Or maybe that’s a fever dream I had.

And then there’s that weird area of LinkedIn Pulse where you can add your expertise to a gazillion AI generated sloppy topics (slopics?). Those that I’ve read seemed to be full of generic platitudes written by multi-hyphenated people only six months out of college, but light years ahead in terms of opinions. Thanks for your insight, bro.

Perhaps, secretly, we kinda love LinkedIn?

In its present incarnation it feels like a necessary evil — it’s the only place to creep on old colleagues; find out what your oddly quiet client studied at Uni, and discover exactly how out of of touch your CFO is after they post a weekend trip to Monaco with their bros.

It should feel so right, but it just doesn’t. It’s all algo and no rhythm.

Credit where credit is due, in a world of relentless optimisation from myspace > facebook > twitter > IG > TikTok > inevitable blipvert brainchip, LinkedIn has held on staunchly, batting aside any upstarts. It must be all those powerful friends it can call on.

It holds all the profiles, all the expertise, all the connections (this sounds more and more like an organised crime syndicate) — LinkedIn just needs to stop being lazy and use that data to deliver a better service. Weed out the lukewarm takes, the FB-lite posts and the AI warriors, and start serving better content by those whose opinions matter. And promote them more consistently.

And actively shadowban the lead-gen course promoters. If your business is to be a business on LinkedIn selling tips on how to do better on LinkedIn, you should have to pay quadruple.

And lower the cost. C’mon guys it’s way too expensive to upgrade to the useful stuff.

And stop asking us to answer questions generated by AI.

And… etc.

I can’t remember exactly when the growth grifters started polluting my feeds, probably around the time that Musk soiled X.

Here’s the website/intro video template. Some greased-up Apprentice-type sat unnervingly close on a gaming chair in his parent’s spare room, extols the virtues of his company’s proven system for success. Throw in a few flashy shots of the founder in Doo-Bai, natch, and a series of promises so vague they barely sound credible…

One I got really obsessed with had a series of circle-jerking videos of barely post-pubescent men (always, always men) talking about how after just a month on a lead-gen programme their agency had signed $60k retainers, $250k deals, had gone to £100k in two months!!

Doing what exactly? Always something marketing adjacent, yet weirdly unspecific.

I know great agencies and consultancies that struggle to sign contracts of that size, and when they do it takes significantly longer than a month to negotiate. The young men in these case studies have a spunky whiff of Tate’s war room about them. None of them look remotely credible, or commercially savvy enough to close any deal larger than a Boots meal deal.

But here’s the thing. Perhaps they are signing the clients — just a weird niche of clients. Let me explain.

Digging a little deeper into the case studies on one of these growth hacking websites and pretty much every business they’ve helped seems to be also an agency focussed on helping businesses to scale or generate leads. By selling tools to help them scale, and thereby advising others on how to scale.

Snuffle around a bit more and it’s a web of interconnected shills all stroking each other’s online reviews ever upwards. It’s giving strong homo-erotic cult vibes, and I for one am turned-off — but buy curious. As in who the fuck is buying this?

Suddenly it’s less of a circle jerk and more of a pull-off pyramid. And we know what happens to those at the bottom of the pyramid.

Where will this all end? The conclusion I’m coming to is that in the future there will be no actual jobs, just millions of people selling millions of courses on how to create and monetise courses for millions of others seeking to monetise their knowledge to those millions who are seeking skills for jobs that don’t exist.

As you’d expect, it’s not just courses on how to win clients or scale using AI; there are also a ton of online courses on every aspect of design and creativity. Maybe I should get involved: why not sign up now to the Hairy Arm substack course about creating substacks?

As Gino the Ghost says: “just put the link in the bio”

Guilty of applying a veneer of urbane, metropolitan sheen to a perfectly anonymous slab of outer, outer London brownfield.

Guilty of promising a bright, shiny co-working future in a forgotten and forgettable postcode.

Guilty of placemaking.

Of course there’s good and bad placemaking. When it’s good, it helps to turn the lens onto an area that desperately needs focus. It picks out and polishes the hidden gems, and weaves genuine local stories in with a sense of progression and optimism. It gives pride and definition to an area that’s been sadly overlooked or has yet to find its raison d’être. And at its most successful, it is the unquantifiable essence that defines an area in people’s minds; an effortless yet meaningful sense of place that becomes part of the vernacular.

All the best neighbourhoods have a certain something that’s hard to grasp but easy to feel. Great placemaking understands this, and creates something that becomes part of the fabric of our built environment.

But at its worst, placemaking is the cheese in the trap. It helps lure first time buyers to some hellhole Zone 5 netherworld — beyond the bridges and under the tunnels and to a place that promised a vibrant arts scene and coffee culture, but delivers a broken down boozer with BT Sport and XL bully pups on sale for a monkey.

The peripheries of our major cities are ringed by shiny hoardings promising a new way of life just beyond the collapsing Heras fences and overlit portakabin marketing suites. All you have to do is imagine, let your mind convince itself of the potential. Place yourself into the developer’s rendered reality, sitting on a yet to be commissioned bench in a bland central square that nobody will ever, ever use.

A new quarter. A destination location. A square springing up in a forgotten factory yard. A re-envisioned neighbourhood full of people just like you. A place that you will be proud to say out loud, no matter how wafer-thin the promise it’s selling or how goddamn awful the name sounds at first.

Placemaking’s fundamental problem is that it goes hand in claw with the need to rinse every last dime out of urban environment.

It’s one of the principle weapons in the developer’s marketing arsenal. And, as I’ll undoubtedly say in other places, developers are a particular breed of client for creative agencies. Many are philanthropic, looking to leave a positive mark on the built environment. But in an industry where what really counts is $£ per square metre, the ultimate aim for others is to shift units.

Design and architectural decisions are then driven by costs. In this equation — and in the eyes of certain developers — placemaking is a grudging but necessary expense, one they’ll pay out for because they need to make their increasingly unaffordable properties in distant postcodes appear somehow enticing.

Placemaking has been successful not just in shaping our cities, but also carving them up into ever more twee districts that no-one asked for. Spraying too much gloss onto areas that often had their own unique ambiance. An ambiance that developers simply hadn’t dug far enough to find — or chose to ignore.

Remember London’s NoHo? No? Oh…

It was a clown car attempt to rebrand Fitzrovia (perhaps the only moderately authentic part of the capital’s heartland that still survives) as NoHo, north of Oxford Street. Locals objected, because as well as turbo-cleansing Fitzrovia’s history with all the subtlety of a Turkish tooth-job, it simply sounded shit. Luckily we have the strong local community to thank for never having to hear an influencer breathlessly declare that they’ve found “five must visit pubs in NoHo”.

To be fair even neighbourhood names that seemingly appear by osmosis rather than design can be equally grating, as the sneering commentary surrounding NYC micro-neighbourhood, and almost punny funny Dimes Square proves.

Look around the city you live in and ask yourself, have we reached peaked placemaking? Do we need every scrap of urban development to be badged and defined? Or are we destined to move across a city by stepping from one semi-autonomous branded zone to another, barely recognizing the signs that declare we are on private land, patrolled by security staff and watched over by a bored control man in a distant office?

For every slick Granary Square there’s a liminal brownfield zone with flimsy cookie-cutter marketing masquerading as placemaking. It isn’t surprising there’s so much blandness out there; to do placemaking well demands effort and investment. There’s a few agencies who do it very well, and many who’ve attempted it badly.

It’s difficult; a genuine creative challenge. Because when it comes to property, once you remove the building or development you are selling, there’s only a finite number ways to tell an interesting story. I know because it’s something I’ve had to do a number of times. In my view there are three big overarching themes: location, history, amenities (feel free to add more in the comments). Placemaking has to weave together this often uncomfortable trifecta whilst somehow not feeling completely removed from a city’s own geography or reputation.

So is placemaking responsible for making places more shit? If the location can never live up to the brand then the answer must be yes. Whether that’s the fault of the creative agency is debatable, although in some instances the blame must fall at the feet of a team who haven’t pounded the pavements, done the research or listened to the locals.

There’s a limit to the amount of placemaking any city can realistically stomach. We should not only accept this limitation, but celebrate it. There’s no need to have every block badged and named; for creative teams, planners and developers to codify every cobblestone and canal.

Some areas don’t need to be validated, they already are. Others need time to grow and the opportunity to define their own atmosphere. The most elegant solution is the often the one that already exists.

Nods of approval all round.

“Actually, why are you still awarding projects that aren’t real?”

Yes readers. This was me, piping up with a particular beef when a noted international creative network invited some paid members to a workshop on how to improve their offer. An awkward minute followed as everyone in the room chipped with the many fake (or forced) projects they’s seen that ended up with a gong.

Even the staff of noted international creative network seemingly recognised they were awarding non-projects.

What’s all that about? Is the creative industry so brittle that it needs validation at any cost? Oh yes, of course it does.

Even having the flimsiest of awards in your creds deck suggests a modicum of gravitas in an industry that’s slowly being dragged whimpering to the bottom of a dark and dangerous alley.

We’ve all seen these ghost ‘winners’; here’s three tell-tale project types that shouldn’t really get anywhere near a serious award.

Example 1. Solution desperately seeks client.

When idea needs a client to become reality — I’ve witnessed this firsthand. I worked alongside a designer who created a clever visual identity for a very niche profession. He pitched it to a high profile person within that industry, they were amused and got some fun business cards, and as a young creative he won an award. Perhaps it’s no biggie, he was simply hustling to get some clout. But high profile agencies get involved in this type of client fishing — developing a clever brand and finding a client happy to play along. Not clever.

Example 2. Agency side hustle +++

From OTT Xmas cards to rock band merch, there’s a glut of naval-gazing ideas that have found their way onto winner’s lists. No matter how great the execution, if you’re the client something tells me it’s a little easier to get sign-off on an extra metallic ink or creating a lavishly produced film for an imaginary website.

Example 3. Ideas amped beyond credibility

LinkedIn and Behance are full of campaigns that look real except the OOH is always that same grotty Shoreditch bridge or SoHo corner site. Then there are genuine projects that exist in the liminal space between one solitary execution and its own social clout. Enough media spend to show it actually happened, but not enough to make a campaign. An idea that can live in Hackney Wick or Williamsburg, but not in Coventry or Columbus. There’s a particular cereal brand that’s employed this tedious tactic to the nth degree. Bore off.

Of course every creative or agency turns up the volume on their portfolio —filling in the pieces that the client didn’t quite have the cash or the balls to see through. But when a single billboard becomes a stand-in for an entire campaign, then is this really worth an award?

And does this all even matter? Should we care that an idea has been born not from necessity but from pure invention? As long as great ideas are getting out there and inspiring others, who gives a rat’s ass?

Well, we should. At a basic level it’s all about (ahem) integrity. With so much other shit squelching lazily over the horizon, the last thing the creative industry needs is to be seen to celebrate fakeness. We should be awarding the work that gets out there and does the heavy lifting. Genuine ideas solving genuine problems, or smart, elegant solutions in an otherwise bland world.

The more experienced you are, the more obvious it is that any fool can produce something ‘cool’ ‘edgy’ (add relevant yoof synonym) in Peckham, but to create something meaningful that works in Port Talbot — that’s an altogether more difficult challenge. And that’s why it’s far easier to produce a campaign with the thinnest of executions that lives solely within Zone 2. Or better still, exists only in the reflected glory of the industry.

Perhaps integrity’s days are well and truly over.

The creative director was nodding over two concepts we all knew were solid. Job done.

But not quite. The client had strenuously insisted we bring three ideas to the table, so they would be able to “make a proper decision”.

That’s when I was introduced to the Hairy Arm, and the second of my great lessons in the creative industry — lesson one I’ll come back to at a later date — let’s talk about the Hairy Arm

The Hairy Arm is a creative failsafe that exists to ensure a certain type of client makes the right decision. And most importantly, it makes them believe that they are making the right decision.

We all know that some clients consider themselves as creatives. Some are genuinely innovative thinkers — many are clueless or tasteless. And perversely, of course, the less creative a client is, the more likely it is that they want their opinion to not just be heard, but seen to be heard.

Let’s suppose you present two great ideas; a client without any critical faculties is suddenly perplexed. It’s like asking a dog to choose between an oboe and a Subaru. You’re offering a binary decision in a non-binary world. And nobody likes that anymore. And if they can’t differentiate the relative merits of both concepts, then both stand a good chance of being dumped. And you’re fucked.

Now suppose there was an obviously terrible, shitty idea that leaps out and bawls ‘swipe left’? An idea so screamingly bad that even the least informed fool can quickly rule it out?

That concept is your Hairy Arm.

Anyone involved in the project can see that it stinks. After all they’d made sure it stinks. But it’s not complete weapons grade Stilton; it’s somehow vaguely plausible, but probably completely impractical for any number of reasons. Too expensive to execute, too nuanced to understand, too reliant on a vast media spend that will never materialise.

The Hairy Arm allows an opinionated client to puff out their chest, state their reasoning with unfounded confidence, and eviscerate one idea. It gives them the thrill of power to be able to diss an idea. Depending on exactly how patronising a client is, it allows you to appear humble before their critique — all the time knowing that this was a trap laid just for them.

After ripping into the Hairy Arm, they’re more likely to give time and effort to what’s left on the table. They won’t feel the need to shit on the existing ideas, as they’ve already pulled the chain on one.

The Hairy Arm is cannon fodder for a client’s ego. It’s one of the most important weapons in a creative’s arsenal.

But use it wisely. Throw out a Hairy Arm every presentation and you’ll end up looking like a team or an individual with a large proportion of shit ideas.