The Year We Stop the Doom Loop

We’ve become the industry of the heavy sigh. We’ve replaced water cooler high jinx, with a wine and whine. Much like the news cycle, we’re trapped in a doom-first mindset: AI will kill creativity, Gen Z are un-engageable, the funnel’s been trampled on, advertising’s “lost its magic”, agency brands are being tossed away. Like one long looping doom scroll.

Is it any wonder? A good strategist can’t ignore the cultural headwinds; “a 7 per cent decline globally in people feeling optimistic” says IPSOS.

But maybe we can. We’re in a negativity wind tunnel, thanks to what Hans Rosling called our “negativity instinct” in his book Factfulness: even though the world in many ways gets better, our brains overweight the bad. And the media knows this engagement cheat code. It understands that bad news travels faster.

As a former journalist, I understand only too well the allure of the ‘angle’, the call of the critique. And we’ve inhaled that logic in our industry, seeking tensions, as the starting point for any strategic answer. Briefs framed as existential threats.

It doesn’t stop with strategy; doom bias is leaking into the work. Our industry now seems prone to prove that “emotion connects” by tugging at heart strings as if our lives depended on it. Outside of Christmas, we’ve leaned into melancholy like it’s a KPI. Parking ourselves in a poignancy cul-de-sac.

Meanwhile, culture has moved on. Comedic social is the pressure valve: Subway Takes on Instagram, Chickenshop side glances, from every clippable, bitesize quip, a spring of hope.

And this year saw a few brands following suit, finding possibility in the problematic: Vaseline ‘Verified’, Stella ‘worth the wait’ or just joy from stellar star-studded performances (Burberry).

This isn’t trivial; it’s relief. Emotion is a spectrum, and levity, humour, surprise is the medicine we all need. In fact, consumers are demanding it, our Future 100 report revealed 49 per cent of are more likely to buy from brands that bring joy into our lives. So why not let the advertising create the cracks in our melancholy media that lets the light in?

After all, for every doom mongering headline, or strategic start point, there’s always a positive spin - zoom in and the picture shifts.

Recent research by the Observer on teens deemed that Andrew Tate had been relegated to “Just a meme now”. Gen Z have become adept at navigating the wild west of influence they inhabit, theirs is a story that is nuanced, more hopeful, less apocalyptic, more choiceful, than we’ve been led to believe.

This generation are not only not all right-wing Tate-toting misogynists, they also are not un-engageable rejectors of advertising, after all these are the ‘flat-funnelers’ who are willing to give brands a go before we’ve even built them, who throw caution to the wind with every affiliate click.

With trust and loyalty now built post the point of purchase, this is an opportunity for us to extend our thinking into the nurturing of longer-term relationships through bigger and longer ideas, that provide a guiding light to improve the customer experience.

The same reframing is overdue on AI. The prevailing narrative says it will flatten originality. Yet across VML we’re using it to widen possibility: faster thinking, piloting, prototyping, richer world-building, smarter localisation. System 1 recently proved these types of AI interventions are actually improving the engagement scores on work.

Not only is AI a liberating tool, but it’s also going to create a climate where brand building is even more important, to short circuit agentic driven conversations and pre-programmed preference. A world where generating brand desire is even more important sounds like a good world to me.

Looking inward, at our own rapidly evolving industry landscape, there is change happening that is not only structural, but seismic. We can’t look past the fact that jobs, lives, and legacies will be affected. But while the models are changing, the needs aren’t. Strategy still matters, creativity is vital, the power of what we do and create is still proven. The structural frameworks might be shifting, but the people, the talent, the skills and the outputs that live inside are positively necessary.

Now more than ever, we need to stop the doom loop.

Not just for our clients or work, but for ourselves. The industry needs to be its own hype man again, if consumers are ever going to believe our hype.

Kate Nettleton is head of strategy at VML