After 20 years in agencies, I've seen brilliant work and genuine talent. But when 55% of clients are ready to walk within six months, something's broken. Here's what's really happening with agency overhead costs, and the alternatives that might actually work better for your business.

Byron Sharp changed everything we thought we knew about customer loyalty and targeting. His research at Ehrenberg-Bass proves that successful brands don't chase ideal customers, they make themselves the easy choice for everyone who might need them someday.

Only 5% of your customers are shopping now. The other 95% will buy eventually. Discover Professor John Dawes’ research from Ehrenberg-Bass that's revolution how brands build for the future, not just today's conversions.

Many brands are burning money on the wrong things at the wrong time.

Picture this: every retailer screaming "SALE!" at Christmas while their competitors do exactly the same thing. The noise cancels out, budgets drain away, and nobody wins. Meanwhile, the smart brands have been quietly building something far more valuable.

A place in people's minds.

You could book the biggest band in the world, but if no one knows about it, then it’s a gigantic waste of money. Or, as John Phillip Jone’s outlined in his groundbreaking 1990 research, even the best creative in the world will fail without the spend.

New research proves what legends have always known.

Creativity isn't a risk. It's the biggest controllable factor driving profit.

After brand size (which you can't change overnight), creative quality delivers a 12x profit multiplier. When you combine emotion, distinctive branding, entertainment, and consistency, that jumps to 21x.

After nearly two decades in creative agencies, I've learnt something the industry doesn't like to talk about: freelancers are often the real creative firepower. Here's how smart businesses are maximising their creative investment.

Maybe instead of spending so much time worrying about the future that hasn't happened, we should spend more time learning from the past. Because advertising back then sure as hell sounded like “the most fun you can have with your clothes on”.

AI can do incredible things. What it can’t do is actually create (it can only copy what it’s been taught). And it doesn’t care.

Just like when everyone thought they could be a designer when PCs landed (and design tools stopped costing more than a small car), a photographer when the iPhone got portrait mode, and Hemingway because Grammarly could fix their spelling, with AI what’s actually going to happen is the gap gets wider.

We started the Pitch Collective with a simple belief: great creative thinking shouldn't be available only to those with the biggest budgets.

Why aren’t we an ad loving nation? Maybe it’s because the advertising industry once asked for permission to interrupt with something worth watching. Now it demands attention without offering value in return.

What better way to kick off the Pitch Collective than with a world-first protein bar launch?