The Gift.

Thursday night. End of year in adland.

The kind of busy that makes you numb. Deadlines stacking. Clients panicking. Everyone trying to close things out before Christmas while pretending they're not already mentally checked out.

I'm on the couch, phone in hand, doing that thing where you're not really watching anything, just scrolling. Instagram surfaces a couple of beautiful design posts. Three seconds. Hmm. Keep moving. Then some memes. Then nothing.

I have Andor Season 2 playing in the background. Barely paying attention. One of those slow episodes, more action than talking. Which is only a problem to this specific show of Star Wars. Please watch it if you haven't.

And then this character appears. Saw Gerrera. A revolutionary in the Star Wars universe. Ragged, paranoid, addicted to the fumes that keep him alive and kill him slowly. He's talking to a young recruit named Wilmon, trying to convince him to join the fight.

And he delivers this speech:

"Remember this. Remember this moment! This perfect night. You think I'm crazy? Yes, I am. Revolution is not for the sane. Look at us."

I put my phone down.

Something just unlocked.

He continues: "Unloved, hunted, cannon fodder. We'll all be dead before the Republic is back and yet... here we are. Where are you, boy? You're here! You're right here, and you're ready to fight! We're the rhydo, kid. We're the fuel. We're the thing that explodes when there's too much friction in the air."

I've been stuck for months trying to figure out things. Many of them. But one in particular is my personal take on what's happening in advertising. I'm an ad nerd, I love this thing and I want it shining in fucking splendor.

All these events that feel connected but I couldn't say how. The mergers. The layoffs. The exodus. The holding companies collapsing. The AI panic. The cuts that started quiet but now won't stop.

It all feels like the beginning of something. The endgame for this generation. Like we're approaching the moment we have to hand this industry over, but first we have to do… something.

A reset, I kept thinking. Advertising needs a reset. What does that even mean?

But I couldn't figure out what that looks like. What shape it takes. What we're actually supposed to do. It sounded flat. I sounded bullshit.

Also had this project stuck. This personal decision I've been avoiding. This stupid blog series I started and the aim to make a post for Christmas, hoping for a gift. A gift to give.

And then Saw Gerrera's speech unlocked it.

Not because he said "revolution." Duh. But because of where he put the weight.

The people.

"Look at us."

That's what unlocked it.

Not the strategy. Not the plan. Not what needs to happen.

The people. Who does this? The kind of person who becomes fuel.

"Unloved. Hunted. Cannon fodder."

The insane ones. The ones willing to burn.

Saw doesn't talk about how to win. He doesn't have a five-year plan. He doesn't promise success.

He just points at the people and says: look at us. We're crazy. We're expendable. We'll all be dead before this works.

And yet here we are.

That focus on the people, that's what solved it for me.

Because I'd been thinking about what advertising needs. What has to change. What the reset looks like. By the way, a reset has never happened before. I fucking hate the word "reset". If anyone tells you we need a "reset," tell them to fuck off unless he shows up with a Neuralyzer.

Saw reminded me: revolutions aren't about what needs to happen.

They're about who's willing to make it happen.

So this is my Christmas gift to you.

Not my analysis. Not my take on the industry. Just this speech. These words.

Because focusing on the people unlocked everything for me. The stuck project. The decision. The frustration I couldn't articulate.

Maybe it does something for you too.

Maybe it reminds you that if you're feeling all this friction, if you're restless and exhausted and unable to stay, you're not broken.

You're exactly the kind of person revolutions need.

"We're the thing that explodes when there's too much friction in the air."

Look around. The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. This is the time of monsters, as Gramsci once said.

Creatives launching incredible studios. Starting weird consultancies. Building their own platforms in strange places. The exodus filtering down from executives to the young ones who generate the ideas. They're realizing they could be reaping the rewards themselves.

Omnicom and IPG merging. Thousands cut. Networks desperate to survive.

Greg Hahn at Mischief: "If you focus on what makes you special, the money will follow. If you focus on the money, you'll cease to be special."

Aaron Starkman at Rethink refusing to sell while everyone consolidates. "WE WILL NOT SELL RETHINK." He knew. "The work is going to get shitty."

Javier Campopiano at McCann: "Advertising is going through an identity crisis... Finding truth is a human ability."

Nils Leonard: "Apathy is a bigger threat to creativity than AI ever will be."

There's too much friction.

Look at the people willing to become fuel.

The ones who can't let mediocre work ship. Who care about details nobody asked for. Who've been feeling this without knowing what to call it.

Unloved by an industry that puts work third. Hunted by a system that sees care as inefficiency. Cannon fodder in a moment of mass layoffs.

And yet here we are.

Merry Christmas.

Remember this. Remember this moment.

You think you're crazy? Yes, you are.

Revolution is not for the sane.

Look at us.

We Sold Care For $2.50.

November 11, 2013. 6:30am.

I'm in a taxi, leaving the agency. Everything was made by hand back then. No AI. No shortcuts. Just you and the work until one of you gave up.

I didn't give up.

I look exhausted in the photo. But not defeated. I'd stayed all night because something wasn't right and I couldn't let it go. Nobody asked me to stay. Nobody paid for those hours. The client would have been happy with what we had at midnight.

But I wasn't.

So I stayed.

And sitting in that taxi, watching Barcelona wake up, I felt proud.

I thought I was caring about craft.

And to all my knowledge, I was right. I was caring.

But I was also building a monster.

A time-hungry business model that's in shambles today. An industry that trained itself to sell care for nothing and expect someone to donate the difference forever.

You want to see what that looks like now?

Last year, Omnicom and IPG announced they're merging. Not because they're winning. Because they can't survive alone. Two giants, $13 billion deal, and the first thing they promise? $750 million in cost synergies. You know what that means. Thousands of jobs gone. Again, careless.

IPG had already cut 3,200 people in 2024. Omnicom shed 3,000. And now they're looking to cut another 10% of staff costs. These aren't numbers on a spreadsheet. These are people who learned to care in this industry. People who probably stayed late more times than they can count.

The same holding companies that were built on decades of donated care, all those nights, all those weekends, all that unpaid obsession, are now collapsing into each other. Vacating office space. Slashing headcount. Desperately trying to squeeze out enough savings to stay alive.

Why?

Because the business model was never sustainable.

They sold excellence for the price of mediocrity and bet that people would keep donating the difference forever.

They bet wrong.

Look, I'm not saying this is the only thing that fucked the industry. It's not.

Consultancies invaded and bought up agencies like they were collecting baseball cards. Accenture alone spent over a billion dollars in 2017 acquiring creative shops, and suddenly we're competing with McKinsey and Deloitte for creative work.

Google killed third-party cookies, ending 20 years of tracking and targeting that the whole programmatic ecosystem was built on.

AI is commoditizing production faster than anyone predicted, making it cheaper to create more mediocre work at scale.

And the quality crisis is real. Everyone knows it. Advertisers, agencies, publishers, they all cite quality as their primary concern. But nobody wants to pay to fix it.

So yeah, a lot of things killed the industry.

But here's what makes the unsustainable care model different: it's the one thing we did to ourselves.

The consultancies invaded because we let them. Cookies died because we abused them. AI is replacing us because we made ourselves replaceable.

But selling care for $2.50? That was our choice. We built that. We normalized it. We made it the standard.

And now we're living with what happens when you build an empire on donated labour.

Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud.

When working late is the only way to produce excellent work, the system is already broken.

Excellent work costs time. Time costs money. But we sold it for $2.50 and expected someone to donate the difference. That someone was always the person who cared most.

Every time you stayed late to make something right that the budget didn't pay for, you were stealing from yourself to subsidize a client who wouldn't pay for craft.

We called that passion. I call it theft.

Jony Ive's team shot one flower for 285 hours. Over 24,000 shots. Just so you might smile when you look at your wrist.

You know why Apple could do that? Because they charged for it.

The cost of shooting a flower for 285 hours was baked into the price of the watch. The cost of finishing the back of the drawer was built into the business model.

When Ive said someone unwrapping a cable and thinking "somebody gave a shit" was "a spiritual thing," he wasn't romanticizing unpaid overtime. He was describing a business that valued care enough to pay for it.

Meanwhile in advertising, we decided care should be free.

We wrapped it in beautiful language. This is a passion business. We do it for the love of the work. Great creatives obsess over details.

All prettier ways of saying we're not paying you to care, but we expect you to do it anyway.

And we did. Because we were young. Because we wanted to prove ourselves. Because we believed caring about craft mattered more than getting paid for it.

The industry looked at all that donated labour and said, perfect. That's the business model.

You want to know why the work keeps getting worse?

It's because the people who used to donate their care for free finally did the math.

They looked at that taxi ride at 6am and realized I just worked 14 hours for free to cover up the fact that we sold this project too cheap.

So they stopped. And the industry acts shocked that nobody wants to stay late anymore.

Here's what I wish someone had told that kid in the taxi.

The work needed 20 hours to be excellent. The agency sold 8. And you're donating 12 to make up the difference.

Caring about craft isn't free. It never was. You can't deliver $10 worth of care on a $2.50 budget unless someone donates the difference.

For decades, that someone was us. We subsidized an entire industry's inability to charge what craft actually costs.

So when people say nobody cares about craft anymore, what they actually mean is nobody's willing to donate their labor to cover up our pricing problem.

When they say this generation doesn't have the same work ethic, they mean this generation did the math.

When they say advertising is dying, they mean we built an industry on donated care and we're running out of donors.

Maybe that kid in the taxi was caring about craft.

Actually, he was. He absolutely was.

The problem wasn't him caring. The problem was an industry that saw all that care and decided not to charge for it.

They saw people staying late, obsessing over details, perfecting things nobody asked for, and instead of thinking "we should price this properly," they thought "great, free labour."

They built a business model on the assumption that someone would always donate the difference between what craft costs and what clients want to pay.

Until we couldn't anymore.

So when I look at that photo now, I don't see someone doing it wrong.

I see someone who cared in an industry that didn't care enough to make caring sustainable.

And that's why we are where we are today.

The saddest part? The industry still doesn't understand what it lost.

It looks at people leaving at 5pm and thinks they don't care anymore.

If you want advertising to care about craft again, it starts with charging for it.

Build the time into the budget. Price the obsession into the model. Stop expecting someone to donate the difference between good and excellent.

Advertising Is Dead. Ok, Let's Be Ghosts.

The first time I heard advertising is dead, I was a junior art director at DDB Barcelona, previously known as Tandem Campany Guasch, yet to be called DDB Spain. Someone said it over coffee. Half gossip, half prophecy. The place felt haunted. It had stories. It was the real deal.

I didn't believe in ghosts then. But I should have.

Because that's what we were becoming. Not dying. Haunting. Still present, but no longer solid. Working in an industry that everyone kept saying was over, yet somehow we kept showing up, kept making things, kept believing in ideas even as the walls became transparent around us.

The agency back in those days still smelled of ambition and short Marlboro Reds, five euros a pack back then, mixed with the sticky sweetness of Ratafia, a nice Catalan drink you start to love if you stay in Barcelona long enough. That was our perfume. Nicotine, sugar, and the hope that one of our ideas might just change something, somehow.

We were already ghosts. We just didn't know it yet.

Because here's the thing about ghosts: they're not gone. They're just operating in a different realm. They move through walls instead of doors. They don't follow the rules of the living because they've already died once and survived it.

Advertising is dead. Good. Now we can finally haunt properly.

At that time, Alex Bogusky had just left CP+B. The guy who made burger chains feel punk and tiny cars feel like rebellion suddenly walked away. He didn't quit creativity. He just stopped believing in the building.

He moved to Boulder, Colorado and started something new. The first piece of work was haunted. The Real Polar Bears—a campaign that hijacked Coca-Cola's beloved icon to expose the truth about soda. The irony was brutal: his former agency had worked for Coke for years, and now he was using their own imagery against them. Go and look for it if you haven't watched it before.

But here's the thing. Even after that, the world outside didn't act like advertising was dying. There were still rockstars around. The myth was still pretty much alive. Agencies were temples, and we were the congregation.

The second time I heard it, the death felt more real. A wave of layoffs hit Spain. The old guard disappeared almost overnight. The well-trained, ad-cultured creatives, gone.

It was the pseudo-digital era coming fast. Not to confuse with the real deal happening in Silicon Valley. Suddenly, people who knew how to make ads were replaced by people who knew how to make websites. "Advertising is dead! Long live digital!" That was the anthem.

Chaos followed. Those same creative directors who were pushed out started opening their own small shops. Brave, independent, full of character. The big networks went from dreams to nightmares.

And the funny thing? The new digital kids could build a website blindfolded but had no clue how to make a campaign that made you feel something.

I remember walking through those years half-excited, half-lost, not sure if we were building the future or just burning incense for the past.

Then came all the other small deaths. Tiny funerals disguised as trend reports. Every time a new platform appeared, or a new job title was invented, someone would say it again. "Advertising is dead." Until the phrase itself became background noise. A drone. A mantra we stopped hearing.

But the third time, that one cut through. Because this time, it came from inside the house.

Nils Leonard said it. Not a cynic. Not a client. A creative who actually makes work that still feels alive.

When Nils wrote "Advertising is Dead, Long Live Creativity," it wasn't a complaint. It was an exorcism. He wasn't blaming the world; he was looking straight at all of us and naming what we'd been doing since the beginning as he shook an aspergillum of holy water over all of us.

We killed it when we invented "client services." When we started selling time instead of ideas. When we stopped asking why clients came to see us in the first place. We killed it every time we said "creative" like it was something soft, something optional, something separate from the money.

We've been killing advertising since day one. Nils just finally wrote the autopsy report.

And he's right. But here's where it gets interesting.

Because that realization doesn't feel like a tombstone to me. It feels like a seance.

Maybe that version of advertising is finally dead. The one we kept murdering slowly, meeting by meeting.

But something else stayed behind. A restless spirit that never signed the timesheet. A creative force that doesn't care about your process deck.

So yeah, advertising is dead. Good.

I'm done trying to revive the corpse.

Now we do something darker. Something older.

We summon what's been waiting underneath this whole time.

Ghosts don't ask for permission. They don't follow process. They just appear. Unforgettable, unexplained, terrifying. They drift through walls, slip through systems, and make strange, brilliant things that don't fit any format you've seen before.

Witchcraft doesn't work in conference rooms. It works in the dark. It works when you stop asking and start conjuring. When you trade the template for the spell. When you light something on fire just to see what the smoke reveals.

If advertising is a corpse, creativity is the demon we should have been summoning all along.

And tonight, the veil is thin.

Somewhere, in one of those DDB corridors that smelled of ambition and Marlboro Reds, you can still hear Bernbach's words echoing through the walls:

"Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling."

That's the ghost we keep. The one that reminds us this was always supposed to be simple, human, brave.

So here's the ritual: Light a candle for the old ways. Then blow it out. Step into the dark. And make something so brilliant it scares them.

In honor of Mr. Bernbach. And in defiance of everything that killed what he helped built.