This is the second piece I read about the “bullshit jobs” we perform day by day.
I am sure you’ve heard already about the “school of moral ambition” founded by Rutger Bergman. It might be a generational pull that we’re feeling all at the same time?
I might be that I am clearly not the only one feeling heavy because the world as I know is collapsing as every day goes by and I am sitting at my laptop marking amends for a junior designer on a product newsletter that no one is going to read?
Hopefully at some point we will gather together, leaving screens and devices and realising we want to use our brainpower for something real. Real and good. Especially when there are brains now being used for something (real as well) that went from a cheesy Spotify end of year wrap, to sell Ai systems for warfare.
Интересно, а кто по-вашему определяет когда наступит этот момент? От кого зависит наступит ли он этот момент? Или ещё более важный для меня вопрос: До какого отчаяния нужно довести людей, чтобы они решились на вполне разумные для них перемены? Заранее благодарю за содержательные ответы - эти ответы действительно значимы для меня...
I feel this all so deeply. I left agency strategy roles eight years ago to work in client-side brand strategy purely because of what you've described. That feeling that I was applying my intellectual strengths to something so banal with so little meaningful value in the real world.
Moving client-side is of course, not perfect, but the input feels more tangible. In the last six years I've spent a lot of time with investment teams who have taught me about what makes a business great - why you would want to invest in it, and how to identify what will bring a real return. Those lessons gave me a different perspective to brand strategy. It's also the perspective that the CFO / CEO understands, and those are the kinds of people I deal with most days now. Tangible strategic conversations where you have to have the data and intellectual rigour to participate.
So much of my work agency-side was overwrought and overthought. As you described in your own story, I would get lost in the research and become completely immersed in audience insight and data when it needed something simple. Just tell the audience about the real problem it's solving - not an ethereal, emotive experience over some item they never think about. Rory Sutherland talks about met needs and met "un-needs". I think in marketing (and business as a whole), we spend so much time and money meeting those un-needs. We've created a whole industry looking for them.
The great sin of strategy was the separation of thought (or intention) from action. In a school of thought little studied in Anglo-Saxon academia, philosophers like Maurice Blondel developed a comprehensive theory of action towards the end of the 19th century. They posited that action is an impulse representing the intention to do something. Subsequently, these concepts were developed and refined by futurists like Michel Godet and Francisco Mojica, who successfully implemented the idea that a will to do something (the vision) must first exist, and then everything is done to make it happen. Another school of thought that explored this was the emergent strategy theory, with authors from Henry Mintzberg to Alejandro Salazar, who agree that strategy is not what is written or conceived in a project's initial roadmap (the workshops, frameworks, and other performative acts), but rather what is executed. In conclusion, we strategists have been victims of this original sin: confusing initial thought with strategy, when in reality, strategy is action. The future for strategists and planners lies in being executors, not just thinkers. This is why, in advertising, the great strategists are often the creatives or marketers who make ideas possible, not the one who wrote the deck
🙌 This, totally. I worked with stuck-in-their-head strategists who would produce a 45-slide deck and say to me 'So if you [the writer] could do a slide showing how we'll put that into practice…' I would look at their beautiful theory and realise the work hadn't even started. So I'm going to steal your line about executors not just thinkers, it's at the crux of it and thanks for the references you've given - lots for me to follow up there.
Unfortunately very true… so many smart people but working in a broken system: nothing’s gonna change if you need to bill hours to show value. 20 people in a meeting? No one needs that… except whoever’s responsible for billable hours.
When you remove the theatre around strategy, it actually is quite fulfilling. Are we solving anything actually truly important (except to our client)? Probably not. Does the answer need to be a mind-blowing breakthrough? Usually no. But helping create an effective ad campaign that resonates with the right audiences & helps a business succeed? That definitely feels good… or at least certainly not shameful.
Change the process —> lose the nonsense —> provide real value —> feel good about your job. It’s not easy but soooooo worth it 😊
The focus on billable hours instead of outputs or value added for the client is an issue. I moved from journalism/publishing (mainly output and deadline based) to marketing/tech/investor relations (billable hours). Suddenly a whole crowd in meetings, as you say. I was used to one or two people going to a key meeting and then feeding back fast to the rest of us anything useful that came out of it. Being concise and helpful was really valued. In my new world, there was no collaborative working like this. In fact I noticed a real inability to sum up what was going on and communicate that in a sentence - colleagues found it really stressful and difficult to do and often didn't know where to start. In my new agency world there were regular stand-ups where we had to applaud colleagues' work (whether or not we thought it was any good). I felt that the bar was really low compared with what I'd been doing before.
This feels like a beautiful articulation of the inner monologue of our era’s most intelligent yet under-utilized minds. The “split self” isn’t just personal; it’s systemic — the tension between what we’re capable of and what the world asks of us. The fortunate few find spaces where impact and meaning align. Most don’t.
This is the first piece I have read from you Zoe. Absolutely loved - hated it. Loved it because i could relate to all of your points, experiences and frustrations. Hated it for the same reasons.
I’m on the brand side.
When I think back to one of the first brands i worked on, I shake my head. We spent a whole day offsite in a brand workshop. Everyone “important” was there. We were so proud of our post-its and the output. One of our big eureka moments was when we concluded that the brands’ persona was equal magician and protector. It was also a hand sanitiser!
No wonder some of the sales team smirked when the slide deck was presented. This would not help them protect our listing in Boots, let alone Sainsburys.
It was a lesson learnt hard and well. Now I try and cut the BS. It’s not always easy when many c-suites love the theatre. But, that’s our collective job.
(As an aside, I saw and bought the Positano inspired candle yesterday as a gift while visiting family in Sydney. No joke!).
Thank you so much for sharing, this is deeply personal and yet it speaks of the advertising industry and, in my opinion, about the state of marketing as well. Marketers should be involved with the 4 Ps but ended up being hyper focused on the Promotion P only (of course there are many reasons at play here, so no judgement). Then, this is the same Marketer that will end up contracting the creative/ad agency…It ends up becoming a vicious cycle…
I've been in so many workshops and stuck on months long projects that fit this mold.
100% agree with the theatre of it all. Fundamental challenge is that it's not just expected but half the time it's literally what the client is briefing us to do. They want the faux rigour to meet their own PDP goals rather than to meaningfully shift the dial for their brands / companies.
Needs to be an agency & client drive to drop the shiny and focus on what matters. Be interesting to see how the AI shift will impact the expectations from clients, the days of charging crazy fees for insights seem numbered.
I read every word and I'm glad I did. The pain and shame come through loud and clear. What is not clear to me is what you believe the true root of the shame to be.
In places you lament the performance aspect. I would argue that performance is inevitable and necessary, though--it is how ideas travel. Even scientists perform to persuade.
In other places you suggest that the strategic work isn't really being used to generate insights that will inform decisions and drive action. Rather, strategy is used to justify decisions that have already been made. I agree that this can be demoralizing. For a strategist, it can seem dishonest and pointless. To an executive playing politics, however, it can be essential. While it may be crap to a strategist, it fills a real need in a business that, like it or not, operates according to its own internal politics.
In yet other places you complain that strategic thinking is deployed in service of trivial ends. This raises the question of whether helping a client sell their products is ever nontrivial. If consumer goods marketing is a fundamentally about achieving nothing of true importance, then investing one's time and intellectual energy in it will surely not feel particularly rewarding. But marketing does matter--companies seem to need it to thrive, and we do need thriving companies. So perhaps what feels so unpleasant is the mismatch between the seriousness and rigor of the strategy process and the triviality of the product.
I can understand the shame. With your talents and values, one can imagine other careers that might feel more meaningful and fulfilling. But I also believe that we have the potential to infuse whatever we are doing with meaning. Until we are clear about what different career path we may wish to choose, and develop a strategy for transitioning to it, perhaps the best we can do is find meaning where we can.
The last couple of years, the majority of my clients as a 'futurist', have been PR agencies looking for a foresight report with ready-to-apply snippets and quotes, that will confirm that whatever product launch they are working on, is the pinnacle of forward thinking. It should also highlight how their client companies are always pioneers, fully in tune with not only 'the soul-dimension' of people, but also their future needs and demands. Suffice to say, I know all about shame.
This is the second piece I read about the “bullshit jobs” we perform day by day.
I am sure you’ve heard already about the “school of moral ambition” founded by Rutger Bergman. It might be a generational pull that we’re feeling all at the same time?
I might be that I am clearly not the only one feeling heavy because the world as I know is collapsing as every day goes by and I am sitting at my laptop marking amends for a junior designer on a product newsletter that no one is going to read?
Hopefully at some point we will gather together, leaving screens and devices and realising we want to use our brainpower for something real. Real and good. Especially when there are brains now being used for something (real as well) that went from a cheesy Spotify end of year wrap, to sell Ai systems for warfare.
Such a huge fan of this movement! Discovered it whilst I was travelling and it inspired me to leave my job and focus on bigger problems!
Интересно, а кто по-вашему определяет когда наступит этот момент? От кого зависит наступит ли он этот момент? Или ещё более важный для меня вопрос: До какого отчаяния нужно довести людей, чтобы они решились на вполне разумные для них перемены? Заранее благодарю за содержательные ответы - эти ответы действительно значимы для меня...
“It’s not imposter syndrome … you genuinely don’t believe in what you’re promising” My therapist.
I feel this all so deeply. I left agency strategy roles eight years ago to work in client-side brand strategy purely because of what you've described. That feeling that I was applying my intellectual strengths to something so banal with so little meaningful value in the real world.
Moving client-side is of course, not perfect, but the input feels more tangible. In the last six years I've spent a lot of time with investment teams who have taught me about what makes a business great - why you would want to invest in it, and how to identify what will bring a real return. Those lessons gave me a different perspective to brand strategy. It's also the perspective that the CFO / CEO understands, and those are the kinds of people I deal with most days now. Tangible strategic conversations where you have to have the data and intellectual rigour to participate.
So much of my work agency-side was overwrought and overthought. As you described in your own story, I would get lost in the research and become completely immersed in audience insight and data when it needed something simple. Just tell the audience about the real problem it's solving - not an ethereal, emotive experience over some item they never think about. Rory Sutherland talks about met needs and met "un-needs". I think in marketing (and business as a whole), we spend so much time and money meeting those un-needs. We've created a whole industry looking for them.
The great sin of strategy was the separation of thought (or intention) from action. In a school of thought little studied in Anglo-Saxon academia, philosophers like Maurice Blondel developed a comprehensive theory of action towards the end of the 19th century. They posited that action is an impulse representing the intention to do something. Subsequently, these concepts were developed and refined by futurists like Michel Godet and Francisco Mojica, who successfully implemented the idea that a will to do something (the vision) must first exist, and then everything is done to make it happen. Another school of thought that explored this was the emergent strategy theory, with authors from Henry Mintzberg to Alejandro Salazar, who agree that strategy is not what is written or conceived in a project's initial roadmap (the workshops, frameworks, and other performative acts), but rather what is executed. In conclusion, we strategists have been victims of this original sin: confusing initial thought with strategy, when in reality, strategy is action. The future for strategists and planners lies in being executors, not just thinkers. This is why, in advertising, the great strategists are often the creatives or marketers who make ideas possible, not the one who wrote the deck
🙌 This, totally. I worked with stuck-in-their-head strategists who would produce a 45-slide deck and say to me 'So if you [the writer] could do a slide showing how we'll put that into practice…' I would look at their beautiful theory and realise the work hadn't even started. So I'm going to steal your line about executors not just thinkers, it's at the crux of it and thanks for the references you've given - lots for me to follow up there.
Unfortunately very true… so many smart people but working in a broken system: nothing’s gonna change if you need to bill hours to show value. 20 people in a meeting? No one needs that… except whoever’s responsible for billable hours.
When you remove the theatre around strategy, it actually is quite fulfilling. Are we solving anything actually truly important (except to our client)? Probably not. Does the answer need to be a mind-blowing breakthrough? Usually no. But helping create an effective ad campaign that resonates with the right audiences & helps a business succeed? That definitely feels good… or at least certainly not shameful.
Change the process —> lose the nonsense —> provide real value —> feel good about your job. It’s not easy but soooooo worth it 😊
The focus on billable hours instead of outputs or value added for the client is an issue. I moved from journalism/publishing (mainly output and deadline based) to marketing/tech/investor relations (billable hours). Suddenly a whole crowd in meetings, as you say. I was used to one or two people going to a key meeting and then feeding back fast to the rest of us anything useful that came out of it. Being concise and helpful was really valued. In my new world, there was no collaborative working like this. In fact I noticed a real inability to sum up what was going on and communicate that in a sentence - colleagues found it really stressful and difficult to do and often didn't know where to start. In my new agency world there were regular stand-ups where we had to applaud colleagues' work (whether or not we thought it was any good). I felt that the bar was really low compared with what I'd been doing before.
This feels like a beautiful articulation of the inner monologue of our era’s most intelligent yet under-utilized minds. The “split self” isn’t just personal; it’s systemic — the tension between what we’re capable of and what the world asks of us. The fortunate few find spaces where impact and meaning align. Most don’t.
This is the first piece I have read from you Zoe. Absolutely loved - hated it. Loved it because i could relate to all of your points, experiences and frustrations. Hated it for the same reasons.
I’m on the brand side.
When I think back to one of the first brands i worked on, I shake my head. We spent a whole day offsite in a brand workshop. Everyone “important” was there. We were so proud of our post-its and the output. One of our big eureka moments was when we concluded that the brands’ persona was equal magician and protector. It was also a hand sanitiser!
No wonder some of the sales team smirked when the slide deck was presented. This would not help them protect our listing in Boots, let alone Sainsburys.
It was a lesson learnt hard and well. Now I try and cut the BS. It’s not always easy when many c-suites love the theatre. But, that’s our collective job.
(As an aside, I saw and bought the Positano inspired candle yesterday as a gift while visiting family in Sydney. No joke!).
I’m glad someone is talking about that clearly and loud. It’s a real shame and I don’t know what is to come when we think about AI getting into this.
I loved this, thank you for giving words to my inner dialogue!
Boom.
"The performance of strategy"
You're not the only one seeing things like this lately.
Jake Sanders has been writing good stuff about what he calls "the performance of marketing."
And it all ties together.
Justification for doing things that were going to happen anyway, strategic or not.
Thank you so much for sharing, this is deeply personal and yet it speaks of the advertising industry and, in my opinion, about the state of marketing as well. Marketers should be involved with the 4 Ps but ended up being hyper focused on the Promotion P only (of course there are many reasons at play here, so no judgement). Then, this is the same Marketer that will end up contracting the creative/ad agency…It ends up becoming a vicious cycle…
Brilliant as always Zoe ✌️
I've been in so many workshops and stuck on months long projects that fit this mold.
100% agree with the theatre of it all. Fundamental challenge is that it's not just expected but half the time it's literally what the client is briefing us to do. They want the faux rigour to meet their own PDP goals rather than to meaningfully shift the dial for their brands / companies.
Needs to be an agency & client drive to drop the shiny and focus on what matters. Be interesting to see how the AI shift will impact the expectations from clients, the days of charging crazy fees for insights seem numbered.
I read every word and I'm glad I did. The pain and shame come through loud and clear. What is not clear to me is what you believe the true root of the shame to be.
In places you lament the performance aspect. I would argue that performance is inevitable and necessary, though--it is how ideas travel. Even scientists perform to persuade.
In other places you suggest that the strategic work isn't really being used to generate insights that will inform decisions and drive action. Rather, strategy is used to justify decisions that have already been made. I agree that this can be demoralizing. For a strategist, it can seem dishonest and pointless. To an executive playing politics, however, it can be essential. While it may be crap to a strategist, it fills a real need in a business that, like it or not, operates according to its own internal politics.
In yet other places you complain that strategic thinking is deployed in service of trivial ends. This raises the question of whether helping a client sell their products is ever nontrivial. If consumer goods marketing is a fundamentally about achieving nothing of true importance, then investing one's time and intellectual energy in it will surely not feel particularly rewarding. But marketing does matter--companies seem to need it to thrive, and we do need thriving companies. So perhaps what feels so unpleasant is the mismatch between the seriousness and rigor of the strategy process and the triviality of the product.
I can understand the shame. With your talents and values, one can imagine other careers that might feel more meaningful and fulfilling. But I also believe that we have the potential to infuse whatever we are doing with meaning. Until we are clear about what different career path we may wish to choose, and develop a strategy for transitioning to it, perhaps the best we can do is find meaning where we can.
Incredible. Thanks for sharing.
The last couple of years, the majority of my clients as a 'futurist', have been PR agencies looking for a foresight report with ready-to-apply snippets and quotes, that will confirm that whatever product launch they are working on, is the pinnacle of forward thinking. It should also highlight how their client companies are always pioneers, fully in tune with not only 'the soul-dimension' of people, but also their future needs and demands. Suffice to say, I know all about shame.