• by Morten Pedersen , May 30, 2025

You can be brilliant, respected, at the top of your game. And still get the chop. Not because you failed. No. But because someone with a spreadsheet couldn’t explain your value in a scope.

That’s what’s happening across the industry. Quietly. Systematically. We delete experience. Not because it’s not needed. But because we don’t know how to price it.

We fool ourselves into believing that we’re replacing it with clarity. With coverage. With precision.

So we ask for more decks. More data. More dashboards. More dashboards about the data. More content. More process. More noise.

We build teams to execute, not challenge. Strategy that sounds like formatting. Plans made by platforms. Media that no one sees. Work padded to feel busy, not to change anything.

We know full well that performance is plateauing. We know the work we produce is getting flatter. But the system keeps going. Campaign after campaign. Month after month. Day after day. Because it’s easier to feed the monster than to fix it. It exposes us less.

And the people most capable of fixing it? Sidelined. Undervalued. Cut.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s a talent crisis dressed up as efficiency.

Judgement and experience are getting pushed out of the room. The kind of perspective that sees what the brief missed.

Welcome willful blindness to good ideas. When the story is wrong because the metrics don't even mean anything anymore. That’s what undermines the advertising and media industry.

Look at the headlines. WPP sunsetting GroupM's legacy. In some markets, they were the last line of protection between clients and the system. But they are not alone. When models drift too far from purpose, even the biggest ones break.

So maybe this is the moment. Not a collapse, but exposure. A moment of truth.

We don’t need more dashboards. We need better decisions. And those come from people who’ve done the hard work. From people who can spot the difference between busy and effective.

If we want better, we need to stop erasing the people who know how.

Onwards.