MARKETING AND BRAND
COMMUNICATION IN 2026
HOW TO CUT THROUGH
THE CRAP
Andy Palmer
Vic Polkinghorne
at Sell Sell London
Andy Palmer and Vic Polkinghorne at Sell Sell London
Wed 1 July 12.52 BST
SO HERE WE ARE IN 2026
It seems like there has never been a more competitive time to be in business.
For marketers, this means increased pressure to deliver tangible results and return on investment. Often with ever more limited resources.
And it seems like there have never been more people willing to offer opinions and theories about what you should be doing with those resources.
An endless stream of waffle about what you should be doing, what you shouldn’t be doing, or what might or might not happen in the future, this trend or that trend.
And the frightening thing is that many of the people offering this advice have never actually been involved in the development of any great work themselves.
At the same time, out in the real world people have become swamped with unremittingly bland, forgettable and formulaic advertising and communication that is not getting noticed and failing to move the needle for brands in any meaningful way.
It makes one wonder why this abundance of free advice is not yielding an era of brilliant and successful advertising.
Meanwhile in small corners of the industry some people are just getting on with doing arresting, insightful, effective things that cut through the crap and get results for their clients. Those people rarely give away their secrets.
We are some of those people. And this is a little bit of how we do it.
1. CREATIVITY AND CRAFT ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER
Marketing has never been more demanding and challenging than it is today.
Marketers are armed with more tools and data than ever before. Plans, strategies and campaigns are agonised over through multiple rounds of review, research, approvals and meetings.
With all this rigour, why does so much of current communication end up being uninteresting and flat, why is it failing to get the attention of the audience?
Simply put, in too many cases it is lacking in real creativity and craft.
Allow us to be truthfully blunt, because this matters. No one really cares about what you have to say. This must always be the first principle of communication.
Your audience, your potential customers, are busy people living their everyday lives. They are not sat waiting for your message.
You might have a perfect positioning, and the soundest strategy in the world, but if no one pays attention, who cares?
This is even more important in this era of the mindless scroll where our social feeds are filled with an infinite stream of content.
Brand comms sit between videos and images of hugely varied subject and random quality. In this environment the closer you are to average the more likely you are to be simply ignored or scrolled-past.
While in higher quality video environments like TV and cinema, the current crop of ads is no longer enjoyed by the audience.
The ‘social contract’ between advertising and audience, who give their precious attention in exchange for being entertained or rewarded, interested or informed, has been broken. And that attention is being lost.
The art of the simple and arresting has disappeared. Gone are the iconic images and enticing headlines that made brands famous.
Today’s posters, print and online display ads have become overcomplicated, muddled and overloaded with elements.
So what’s the answer? The precious skills of creativity; great ideas, writing, art direction, design, typography and film direction. The timeless crafts that can turn the mundane into the unmissable, the whatever into the compelling.
They’re the difference between the unsuccessful and the successful.
You could have two campaigns with the same strategy, where one fails and one succeeds. The difference is how well that strategy is brought to life.
And this isn’t just our opinion by the way. An extensive study of 598 campaigns over 24 years shows that creativity is a primary driver of marketing effectiveness, a CFO-captivating four times as efficient at driving market share growth.
That’s why, even in this era of thoroughly planned and meticulously thought-through marketing, creativity and craft are rising to the top again as the skills most valuable to business when it comes to marketing.
Embrace funny, embrace unusual, embrace intelligence, simplicity and beauty, embrace surprise.
They are commercial advantages.
2. BRANDS WIN BIG WITH BIG IDEAS
A Big Idea is more than an advertising idea.
It is a unifying thought and expression that holds all of your brand’s comms together and makes it work much harder, and it gives companies something powerful to stand for and get behind.
A Big Idea doesn’t just give you something to say, it gives you something to be. This is important because a strong brand isn’t just built in media. It’s built in every interaction a customer has with a company; the product, the service, even the way a complaint gets handled.
A genuine Big Idea creates coherence across all of this and can become a filter through which decisions get made; what to build and what to cut, who to hire, what to charge, which partnerships to accept and which to walk away from.
It gives leadership a shared language. It makes some choices feel obviously right and others obviously wrong, which is enormously valuable in organisations where those debates can otherwise go on forever. Invested in over time, a Big Idea is one of the most powerful tools to build a robust brand.
The only trouble is that not everyone has the capability to come up with Big Ideas, or has the experience of having done it. That’s why some agencies attempt to wow you with their tech prowess or a flashy technique, to distract you from their lack of heavyweight thinking.
Don’t be seduced by stylistic froth or superficial sizzle. Demand a powerful long-term Big Idea.
That’s when creativity can create real business value.
3. THE BEST COMMS PUTS PEOPLE FIRST
How times have changed in the last fifty years. Technology, the speed of living, hairstyles, the relative girth of trouser legs.
The possibilities that new media and technology offer are very exciting.
But it’s easy to be seduced by the technology and forget the fundamental truth about marketing. Although a lot of things have changed drastically, the one thing that is a constant is human nature.
We are all still driven by the same basic needs, emotions and desires as our parents, grandparents, and their great-grandparents. The truth is, the very best, most powerful marketing is still about understanding and connecting with people.
Genuinely thinking about people as people, not as ‘the consumer’. Finding out how and why your brand or product might play some part in their lives (or why it currently doesn’t).
Answering the important question why should this person pay attention to or choose your brand? And working out how best to influence that decision.
4. DARE TO BE DIFFERENT
Isn’t it odd that marketing and advertising is such a dynamic branch of business, but in almost every category, brands end up acting very, very similarly to each other?
We unconsciously adapt to act like those around us. It’s part of being social animals. In marketing this manifests itself by there becoming a default or standard way of behaving or communicating in any category.
It’s like everyone has been on the same marketing course, they come with the same buzzwords, the same soundbites, and they are all doing the same things.
A homogeneity of thinking and of execution is leaving brands too similar to each other and is leaving consumers indifferent and unmoved.
With brands it is terrible business to blend in. You need to stand out.
The power of simply acting differently in your category is immense. Suddenly, everything you do stands out.
Now your brand sparks attention, and everyone else in your category looks like everyone else.
You become the interesting one. The one that comes to mind, that people gravitate towards.
And the best thing about being different in the category is that it’s FREE.
It doesn’t cost any more than not being different in the category. In fact it can make it seem like your budget is going a lot further.
5. BUILD SOMETHING THAT LASTS
Hundreds of companies are pumping out streams of tactical one-off executions instead of investing in activity that can build a brand.
We’ve sleepwalked into an addiction to short-termism where the immediate dopamine hit of fresh content is king. We live in a world where the quarterly report trumps the five-year plan. Why invest in something that takes a couple of years to pay off when you can post a reel and check the likes before lunch?
Evidence shows that long-term brand building delivers greater profit than short-term activation. And our own experience over the years bears this out. Continuously investing in the same campaign over time so that your brand is the first one that comes to mind is a surefire way of driving market share.
Brand building isn’t a luxury reserved for companies with deep pockets. And a great campaign that runs for a long time doesn’t get boring. It gets you famous.
6. TARGET THE WHOLE ICEBERG
NOT JUST THE TIP
Millions of pounds are spent every year on segmentation studies.
And hundreds of brands unquestioningly take the findings as gospel and end up targeting ever-narrower audience slices.
They fall for the logic that precision equals efficiency and guarantees effectiveness. It rarely does. Whilst the obsession with aiming your marketing investment at a very specific audience segment can be seductive, it’s usually a costly mistake.
Ehrenberg-Bass Institute research shows that in most categories, light and lapsed buyers account for the majority of a brand’s volume growth and not the supposed core of so-called ‘loyalists’ that hypertargeting optimises for.
Narrow generational targeting is often the most persistent offender, with many marketers mistakenly fixated on their brand appealing to a particular generation. Often at the expense of their actual customer base. (Obsession with Gen Z anyone?)
The deeper flaw in hypertargeting is structural: it concentrates spend on the small percentage of buyers who are in-market right now, while ignoring the much larger pool who will buy in the future.
Binet and Field’s long-running analysis of the IPA Effectiveness databank found that brand-building campaigns with broad reach consistently outperform activation-heavy, narrow-targeted strategies on long-term profit growth, often by a significant margin.
Some people in the business treat reaching someone outside of a narrow target as wastage. But this is nonsense. Real waste is not communicating to the people who will become next month’s or next year’s customers.
Broad targeting does something hypertargeting can’t match. It builds mental availability, familiarity, and trust amongst people before they become buyers (or get round to buying again).
That budget you “saved” by not reaching a wide group of potential consumers is precisely the investment that will build future demand.
Don’t get lost in the niche.
7. BE WARY OF THOSE PROFESSING ABOUT ‘THE FUTURE OF ADVERTISING’
You could probably power a small republic with the energy wasted every week by people theorising about what might happen in the industry in five or ten years’ time.
These people are obsessed with how the industry might change. Many thousands of words are committed to pixels in this pursuit. They dedicate whole conferences to it.
But the people doing this theorising and pontificating don’t tend to have the harsh reality of getting results now to worry about. They are not on the front line of marketing.
Without wanting to go all Yoda-like, you will never be marketing in the future; you will always be marketing now.
Focus your energy on doing the most valuable things that you can be doing for your brand now. The best ways of reaching and getting customers now.
Don’t jump on the bandwagon and slavishly adopt the latest trends, that just puts you in the same space as hundreds of other brands that are following trends rather than having their own plan.
And if you ever wonder how good those predictions of the future tend to turn out to be, count the brands who have become huge through their use of user-generated content, blockchain, NFTs, social purpose or the metaverse.
It won’t take very long.
8. ACTION. NOT WORDS
There are 2952 words on this page, but words in themselves are useless.
Time spent talking about stuff rather than doing stuff is time wasted. Time your campaign could be out there connecting with your audience, making a difference.
Understandably, especially in these pressurised times, everyone wants to be properly prepared and rigorous. But months after endless months are often wasted in rounds of meetings, gathered around charts and descriptions, tinkering away.
What might seem like a rigorous process is actually bad practice and counterproductive, too many people involved, too many meetings, too many decks. Instead prioritise direct conversations between key decision-makers and the people doing the work.
Why do small brands often run rings around the big guys? Because they get to the doing quicker. Big companies are often hamstrung by their bureaucracy. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that to be right, something has to take a long time.
No matter how many meetings you have, you can never be certain that what you are proposing is perfect. Better to be out there, competing.
Act like a challenger. Take action.
9. TALENT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN AGENCY MODEL OR PROCESS
There’s a lot of stuff written about agency models. Mega networks, holding companies, independents, in-house, freelance collectives. Which is best? Which are obsolete?
The truth is that all of these different types of agencies are capable of producing great work. And all of them are capable of producing garbage.
Conversations about agency models overlook a fundamental truth: they are all only as good as the people working within them.
The reality is, regardless of agency size or type, for any client a very small number of key people will determine whether it is successful or not.
What really counts is who is actually doing the work.
There isn’t one type of agency model or any ‘unique’ proprietary process that will magically make your advertising more successful, it’s the quality of strategic and creative talent working on your business that makes a difference.
Who is going to be at the coal face with you helping to solve your business problems with their creativity?
How much expertise and experience do they really have? Are you working directly with them and developing a productive, long-term relationship? Are you only paying for people who add value?
The smartest clients know the best ideas come from talented people.
Agencies find it hard to be honest about this because real talent is scarce and not distributed evenly. And people are complex, they have bad days, they get sick, they leave. So agencies put the emphasis on their proprietary process or unique system.
But the truth is, the agency’s most valuable product comes from the brains of talented people.
These people are much rarer than you may think. Seek them out.
10. WHO THE HELL ARE WE?
We are Sell! Sell! a small, independent creative studio based in London.
Today’s smart and ambitious clients don’t want slow and laborious agency processes or the legions of people adding to costs. They want to work directly with experienced, talented people who roll up their sleeves and get things done. So that’s how we’re set up.
Our clients work directly with our partners, Andy Palmer and Vic Polkinghorne, highly experienced strategic and creative directors with a huge portfolio of successful work (Stella Artois, IKEA, Clarks, Boots, BT, Racing Post and Timothy Taylor’s, to name just a few of the brands they’ve helped to grow).
Some of our clients call it our secret sauce, Andy and Vic work as a tight-knit team, strategy and creative working hand-in-hand from the very start. This produces stronger work and gets to the ideas more quickly.
Company founders, CEOs and CMOs come to us for big ideas, strategic thinking, cut-through creativity, and brand design that helps them and their organisations meet and exceed their goals.
We don’t have a one-size-fits-all process that every client is forced into. We work closely with our clients in an enjoyable, streamlined and productive way that fits around their individual needs and the challenges they face.
The flexible way we operate means we can work well with organisations of different sizes and types. Making available a high level of work that we believe can only be achieved through the passion and personal commitment of highly experienced people who love their work and are tireless in the pursuit of excellence (that’s us, by the way).
This has enabled us to bring success to a wide range of brands.
We helped one climb from eighth in their category to number one, we’ve helped a tech startup become the market leader then achieve a lucrative acquisition, we turned a historic brand around from sales decline into healthy growth, and helped a publishing brand expand from a paper-based product to market leader in digital media, and many more beyond that.
And in doing so we’ve built warm, long-standing partnerships of mutual trust with our clients along the way.
We’re not everyone’s cup of tea but if you’re ambitious and you want to cut through the crap of agency nonsense, poor advice, unnecessarily long processes and uninspiring ideas, it might be worth a conversation?
We think all good things start with a simple chat. You can call or message Andy on 07956 482270, and Vic on 07930 386669. If you prefer email, it’s andy@sellsell.co.uk or vic@sellsell.co.uk
Good luck out there.
Copyright 2026. Sell! Sell! Ltd. London.