The100: Hindsight bias, conversational dogmas and air fresheners

Jazz, blues, and Chicago views

Yesterday we ran our second ever event in Chicago and what a day it was! We had almost 100 people in the room, listening to 6 ace speakers and a superb client panel, all on the subject of ‘Communication: Less conversation, more action’.

Thank you to all of those who came along and made the day so special :-)

We’ll start working on and sharing the highlights once my body has gone through its deep dish and Jimmy John’s withdrawal. Watch this space…

Revolutionary consistency

Now that the Super Bowl is over, the real competition begins… Which brands do consumers remember being advertised during the game? Mark Ritson and Ipsos have enlightened us with the answer: Budweiser, Pepsi, and Dunkin'. All by doing the same thing they've always done. Which, ironically, is actually pretty revolutionary.

“So what separates the winners from the losers? It’s mostly a story of consistency [...] These kinds of long-running campaigns outperform short, opportunistic ones by margins that should embarrass every creative director who has ever pitched a “fresh direction.” [...] Most marketers know this. But very few act on it, because patience is not rewarded in quarterly business cycles and it certainly won’t win any industry awards.”

File under: really flipping useful

‘AI’ has become a catch-all term and bucket into which we throw everything. Narain Jashanmal has had enough of the hand-waving and built a framework for talking about AI based on what it actually does. 

“We use Analytical AI to decide, Semantic AI to understand and remember, Generative AI to create, Agentic AI to act, Perceptive AI to sense, and Physical AI to move.”

“I knew that all along”

Hindsight bias, also known as the knew-it-all-along phenomenon, is the tendency to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were. And it can cause us to fall into the snare of overconfidence as a result. 

The good news: there's a fix. The annoying news: it requires you to imagine failure before you've even started. Over to you, Richard Shotton:

““Team members are asked to imagine that the project has gone wrong. They visualise this failure, and work backwards to generate ideas for why this happened. Each member gives a reason from their list until all imagined reasons have been discussed. Afterwards, the team works on ways to strengthen the plan. It’s subtly different to identifying possible future risks, because it goes a step further, and asks the team to put themselves in the mindset of the failure state.”

The Church of Interruption

Sam Bleckley wrote about two conversational orthodoxies: The Church of Interruption (speak until interrupted, jump in to show you understand) and The Church of Strong Civility (speak briefly, use physical cues to show you’re following and are ready to speak).

A lifetime of habits makes clashes hard to avoid, but it's a good one to be aware of…

“I turned red, because I was imagining all of the conversations I had completely muffed. Everything was backward! All the evidence I read as ‘Keep talking’ might really be saying ‘SHUT UP ALREADY!’”

And finally…

One of those ‘I wish I thought of that’ ideas. An ad for Ambi Pur air freshener by Grey back in 1984. Smart. Very smart.

Pew Research Center on what makes people proud of their country. 

Never has a series of photos given me such a mixture of the heebie-jeebies followed by gleeful-delight. I give you: The Underwater Photographer of the Year 2026. Strange, fascinating, slightly unsettling. Just how we like it.

Bon weekend,

Fran