Forward Thinking

What we are learning, shared

Essays, notes and research on where marketing and communications are going. Written by the people doing the work, for the people running it.

Latest · Essay · 4 min readAI changed the cost of making. Not the cost of being wrong.Generative AI has made production almost free. The expensive part of marketing has moved, and most teams have not followed it.Read

Essay · 4 min readAttention is the new reach.Why the brands people choose to watch are built differently from the brands people are made to see.

Essay · 4 min readWhy the room still matters.The case for being in the same place, in a market that lives on its phone.

Note · 3 min readWhat a marketing system actually looks like.The parts, the connections and the people that turn campaigns into something that runs every week.

Essay · 4 min readMeasuring what marketing changed, not what it shipped.A practical way to agree what success means before the work starts, and to show it after.

Essay · 6 min readThe marketing department, rebuilt.What years of building and running marketing departments taught us, and what we would design differently with the tools available today.

Note · 4 min readWhy we split one agency into four specialties.The broader marketing became, the more agencies tried to become everything. We chose the opposite.

Archive · 8 min readThe power of benefit-led communication.Features tell people what a product does. Benefits tell them why they should care. First published in three parts on LinkedIn.

Archive · 3 min readDisruptive marketing: going against the normal.Why the brands that break with convention get remembered, from Nike and Red Bull to Web3 and the metaverse.

Archive · 3 min readGeneration Y and Z: marketing and storytelling dynamics.Storytelling keeps attention. Knowing which generation you are talking to decides which story to tell.

Coming nextThe State of Marketing, Gulf edition. Our annual read on the region. In preparation

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