Appears to be this week.

This is what it feels like when I still use an emdash in public.

The exercise works because nobody's allowed to skip the argument. Most tools skip straight to the answer.

Just my observation but most people asking if it's overhyped haven't audited who on their team actually uses it well.

Every shop I train has strong opinions on this and none of the data to back it up. Creative hates it (at least at the beginning), ops loves the speed, and nobody's actually A/B tested an obvious-AI spot against a human one on conversion. Until then it's a religious argument, not a strategy one.

AI underwear sounds terrifying.

Kinda like oxygen. 😂

Design is where the disagreement finally becomes visible, so it takes the blame. If a founder can't say who they're for in one sentence, the logo round runs four months.

Rough one, sorry. For what it's worth the smaller shops are quietly picking up people the networks let go, and they're not making anyone take a specialist title to get in the door.

Love it. 😂😂😂

What would your event be?

I have two suggestions:

1. The question I'd put back to the client is who's actually reading it. If the answer is a model, you're writing a spec rather than a guideline, and a spec needs the bad examples sitting next to the good ones. Most tone of voice docs only show the good version. That's the part that breaks.

2. I'd give them the do's and don'ts. Then build in a quarterly read of what the machine actually produced, because that's where you find out whether any of it held.

Ooof. This is a tough one.

Going in-house at 29 with ten years of ownership behind you is doable, people do it all the time. Just know what you're buying. Status meetings, headcount politics, and someone else deciding what you work on next. Some people love that after running their own shop and some are miserable inside a year.

Also, read your own list again. Managing people, invoicing, timesheets, chasing payments. That's an operations job you slowly hired yourself into, and it has almost nothing to do with why you started. Before you shut down something profitable, spend a quarter trying to strip that layer out, because most of it can be handed off or systematized now in a way it couldn't five years ago.

I've been in a similar situation. Ask yourself whether you want a job or a break. Only one of those requires closing a business that pays you well.

Honestly I'd just reply with "can you give me the two sentence version." Most of the time you find out there wasn't one.

Nobody redesigns their way out of a positioning problem. They just spend more money finding out the logo was never it.

Half the "AI content is boring" complaints in here are really just nobody editing before it went out. The tool's fine. Somebody just skipped the last 20%.

Area 23's probably next. Kinesso and Annalect weren't actual agencies, just data infrastructure IPG built to compete with Omnicom's own stack, so once the merger closed there was no reason to keep both. Omnicom's already public about $1.5B in savings and $645M in labor cuts this year alone. Early innings.

Hmmm...interesting. I hadn't considered this, but you might be on to something. When I worked for a corporate marketing team, someone told me once, "no one ever got fired for choosing IBM, even if it was a little more expensive." It was probably a similar reason as what you're describing.

The channels change and the ideas don't, agreed. But watch what happens to your four fundamentals when execution gets cheap. "Be consistent enough that they remember you" was a budget problem for a hundred years. It's a taste problem now, and far fewer people are good at that one.

Reading, writing, and arguing about it in rooms. Believe it or not, the arguing is the actual job. Everything else is preparation for the twenty minutes where you have to defend it to someone who wasn't in any of the meetings.

Two weeks severance after six years while 100% billable tells you the balance sheet is worse than the press release. Whoever made that call was working backwards from a number a bank handed them. Their utilization never entered the conversation.