We need to talk. But perhaps not in another bloody panel |
I’ve spent much of the past year in rooms full of people trying to make sense of what’s happening in our industry. I’ve delivered keynotes at conferences, interviewed extraordinary thinkers for my podcast, advised business leaders and founders, sat on multiple advisory boards and endured a truly heroic number of panel discussions.
Across those experiences, ranging from the inspirational to the occasionally dispiriting, I’ve noticed something. Almost everyone has a theory about what’s happening in our industry and in the wider world. Far fewer seem confident about what to do next.
The AI evangelists insist everything is changing. The traditionalists insist the fundamentals haven’t changed at all. The technologists are building extraordinary new capabilities. The creatives are in equal measure excited and worried about the consequences. And all of us are adopting so many new AI productivity tools that I’m beginning to wonder when we’re supposed to get any actual productive work done.
What? Now! is Mumbrella360 2027’s logline (design by Weave)
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We have more information, expertise, opinions and predictions than at any point in history. What we’re desperately short of is sense-making. Not another hot take. Not another breathless declaration that something is dead. Not another LinkedIn thought leader announcing that everything you know about marketing is wrong, accompanied by a photograph of themselves looking wistful in an airport. No, we’re short of genuinely useful ways of understanding what’s changing, what isn’t, what matters and what each of us might actually do about it. Which brings me to Mumbrella360.
Our theme for 2027 is deliberately short and deliberately punctuated. ‘WHAT? NOW!’ Two words. One question. One imperative.
When we ask ‘WHAT?’, we mean: what the hell is going on? What’s really changing? What are we misunderstanding? What matters? What are we allowing ourselves to be distracted by? And what should we really be focused on or curious about?
When we declare ‘NOW!’, we’re suggesting that, at some stage, questions need to turn into answers. So what are we going to do? What should we change? What should we protect? What should we invest in? And where might we find the courage to do something genuinely different?
‘WHAT? NOW!’ is our theme for Mumbrella360 next May. It’s also a big, open-ended invitation to you to help us populate it. And that openness should, I think, inform everything we talk about and explore.
I’m increasingly convinced that the most interesting answers to the challenges facing our industry won’t come from choosing sides or seeking to simplify away the complexities of the landscape we’re operating in. They’ll come from understanding the tensions between competing truths and embracing what Mark Ritson sometimes refers to as “bothism”. Consider a few of our industry’s favourite false binaries.
Marketing has changed forever AND marketing hasn’t changed at all. Both are true. We have extraordinary new ways to understand, reach and influence........