In the last year, I’ve become a sort of creator and I’ve been interviewing creators and it’s made me realize something profound…

Advertising, for all its neuroses and committees and strategic throat-clearing, has something rather wonderful going for it: it is still, at heart, a makers’ business.

That is easy to forget beneath the decks, the procurement rituals, the risk mitigation, the disclaimers, the social-first ecosystems, and the sort of synthetic earnestness that now clings to modern marketing language like static.

But strip all that away and what remains is this: advertising is made by people who make things.  Writers.  Art directors.  Directors.  Editors.  Designers.  Production designers.  Cinematographers.  Stylists.  Animators.  VFX artists.  Grips.  Gaffers.  A small army of obsessives with difficult taste and highly specific skills, all trying to wrestle a bit of magic into existence before the client changes the supers.

And yet, bizarrely, the industry persists in treating the making of the work as if it were a state secret.

Everything is embargoed.  Everything is precious.  Everything is hidden until launch day, at which point the campaign is hurled into the world with the faintly desperate hope that people will not only notice it, but care.

And presuming people will care about advertising is a kind of madness.

Advertisers today have far more in common with creators than they do with Hollywood.  And I think this is a good thing.  Because creators, unlike Hollywood, have understood something enormously important: the story of creation is itself valuable media.

They build in public because they know that process does not diminish the thing.  It enlarges it.  It gives people something to root for.  It allows audiences to invest emotionally before the final object is even finished.  It creates anticipation, familiarity, affection, and trust.  It turns the work from an isolated drop into an unfolding event.

And in this regard, advertising is leaving a ludicrous amount of value on the table.

Agencies and brands should learn a lesson Hollywood still refuses to learn: show the making.  Show it early.  Show it while it is happening.

Not after the ad has aired, not tucked into some tasteful behind-the-scenes cut-down that appears a day later when the oxygen has already left the room, but in the weeks leading up to launch, while the thing still has momentum to gather and meaning to accumulate.

Because what, exactly, are we protecting?

The secret ending of the John Lewis Christmas ad?  The punchline of a beer spot?  The reveal of a delightful visual trick for a cereal brand?  Please.  We are not safeguarding the nuclear codes.  We are selling soup, trainers, and mobile contracts.  The public is not sitting there trembling with concern that the emotional arc of a holiday commercial might be spoiled in advance.

Indeed, even modern film marketing has become so deranged in its willingness to give away entire plots in trailers that I’ve stopped watching them altogether…. I sit listening to music with my eyes down until the movie starts.  I love movies so much, I have to protect myself from their creators who seem utterly committed to ruining them for me!

It makes advertising’s paranoia all the more absurd.

If film people wish to remain addicted to secrecy, one can at least understand the lineage of it.  Cinema was built in the age of scarcity.  The logic was simple: protect the release, protect the mystique, protect the asset.  That logic has become less convincing with each passing year, but one can see where it came from.

Advertising, however, doesn’t have that excuse.

Advertising exists in the open air.  It competes not with rival campaigns alone, but with the entire culture.  It is interrupted by memes, devoured by feeds, and judged against the standards of a world in which everyone from a teenage furniture flipper to a one-man design studio has already learned to narrate the making of their work better than most global brands.

The creator economy has demonstrated, beyond any reasonable dispute, that people love watching something come into being.  And they don’t care if it’s poorly filmed… in fact, that’s a feature not a bug.

They love seeing a thing before it is perfect.  They love becoming attached to the people making it.  Above all, they love feeling included in a special little club.

And that feeling, the glorious human satisfaction of being brought into the process, is not some side issue.  It’s media value.

Massive media value!

Am I speaking brand language yet?

Impressions, yes, if we must use the dead language of the industry.  But more than that: attachment.  Affection, anticipation, cultural texture.  A sense that the work matters before it arrives.  A sense, even, that one has a stake in it.

Imagine a costume stylist like Mr Gammon developing a devoted audience of his own because people simply cannot get enough of his taste, his eye, his running commentary… meow.  Imagine an agency creative team, creating an audience that is already primed for a brand launch because they have watched the thing develop in real time.  One could happily listen to Ed Wild tell cinematography war stories for hours.  I once got to watch Rich Orrick edit in real time and I was transfixed.  Let alone the opportunity to listen to Charlie Crompton tell a story… even the joy of wishing he’d end it could become meme worthy!  And Daniel Bergman?  Frankly, it is astonishing there is not already a camera on him twenty-four hours a day.  And lets remember Ringan…. If there ever was a face that had no business behind a camera… he would have been a star by now…  This is the point: the talent is there.  The fascination is there.  The audience is there.  The industry is simply failing to turn the camera around.

Remember when I said it was an absurdity that people would care about advertising… I’m not suggesting they would with this change.  I’m suggesting they would care about the people of advertising doing hard work well.

This is not some utopian fantasy.  It is simply the application of creator logic to an industry still behaving as though it is 1997 and mystery and spectacle alone can carry the day.

And there is, of course, another reason this matters now, one rather larger than media efficiency or launch strategy.

AI.

Our industry spends a great deal of time talking about AI, usually in one of two ghastly registers: either the breathless gospel of efficiency, or the hand-wringing lament about slop.  But if one steps back from the noise, one thing becomes rather obvious.  In an age when synthetic output is cheap, abundant, and increasingly plausible, the most valuable thing creative industries can do is demonstrate the reality of craft.

Not merely assert it.  Demonstrate it.

Show the choices.  Show the iterations.  Show the labor.  Show the taste.  Show the dead ends.  Show the absurd amount of expertise required to make something look effortless.

Because creators have already stumbled upon one of the best antidotes to slop: they let people see the work being worked on.

That is what gives it provenance.  That is what gives it texture.  That is what gives it human legitimacy.

The next generation has grown up in a media environment so thick with manipulation, performance, polish, and now machine-generated plausibility that authenticity can no longer be assumed.  It has to be evidenced.  Not solemnly proclaimed in a manifesto, but evidenced in the grain of the process itself.

And process, crucially, is not the enemy of magic.

This is the great misunderstanding of old media institutions.  They imagine that to reveal process is to diminish wonder, when in fact the opposite is true.  Showing what it takes to make a thing often increases the audience’s awe.   A beautifully built set is more impressive when one understands that somebody dreamt it, drafted it, fought for it, and then stood under impossible time pressure trying to get the paint right before dawn.

The making, especially in an age of cheap artifice, consecrates the work.

And yet here is the truly maddening part.  Everyone in advertising is forever lamenting the decline of craft.  Craft is not respected.  Craft is under pressure.  Craft is being flattened.  Craft is dying.

Fine.  Perhaps.

But here is the slightly embarrassing question: in an industry supposedly populated by the most media-literate people on earth, why is nobody making the media that might actually help save it?

Social media is sitting right there!

And what does the internet spend its time watching?  Craft!  Constantly.  Happily.  Obsessively.

I watched a man cut a lawn for fifteen minutes the other day.  Riveting.  A craftsman, plainly.  Then a woman cleaning a rug so filthy it looked medically concerning, and I watched that too.  Ten minutes gone.  Spellbound.  The algorithm, in its crude and often depressing way, has figured something out that much of advertising still refuses to admit: people are deeply drawn to watching skilled human beings do things well.

They like the process.  They like the transformation.  They like the judgment, the rhythm, the little decisions, the evidence of care.

In other words, they like craft.

So why, exactly, are we behaving as though our own industry is exempt from this?  Why do we insist on discussing craft solemnly on panels, over cocktails, and in green rooms, while refusing to use the most obvious medium imaginable to make craft visible, legible, and culturally magnetic?

It is a peculiar form of professional self-sabotage.

We say craft is dying, then hide the craftspeople.
We say the public no longer values the work, then refuse to show them the work being worked on.
We say the machines are coming, then decline to demonstrate the very human brilliance those machines are threatening to flatten.

Meanwhile, a generation of creators, many of them young enough to make the rest of us feel our joints ache, are building audiences by doing precisely what we will not: turning process into media, skill into story, and craft into something people can follow, share, and care about.

So yes, it does boggle the mind.

We are being outflanked not because craft has lost its value, but because others have become far better at making that value visible.

And while we are busy whining to one another about the death of standards, the kids are out there making the media that is eating our lunch.

Which is why the notion of the making-of video is both promising and, in its usual form, hopelessly timid.  Vix Jagger at Droga5 makes the case that we are moving into the age of the making-of video.  She is absolutely right!  But the industry’s current instinct is to make such material, wrap it in embargo tape, and release it after the campaign has already had its moment.  At which point it becomes less a cultural accelerant than a polite appendix.

What on earth is the point of that?

If the making is valuable media, then its value is greatest before and during the launch, not after the room has emptied.  Show the sketches in the lead-up.  Show the production design tests.  Show the camera rigs.  Show the agency creatives wrestling with the idea.  Show the comedy of it, the jeopardy of it, the absurd humanity of it.  Let people feel the work gathering.

Think of the impressions, yes.  Think of the earned media, absolutely.  But more importantly, think of the feeling.

Think of an audience that no longer sees an ad as a unit of branded communication, but as the culmination of a little drama they have already been enjoying.  Think of people who want to see the finished spot because they have become fond of the people who made it.  Think of what that does not only for campaign performance, but for the perceived value of the craft itself.

Because this is the deeper point.

When industries hide process, they accidentally train audiences to value only output.

And if audiences are trained to value only output, then output becomes easier to replace.

That is the genuine danger in the age of AI.  Not simply that machines will make things.  It is that humans will have done such a poor job of explaining what human craft actually consists of that the public will be invited to assume it was never all that meaningful in the first place.

Advertising has a chance to do better.

It can show people that craft is not decorative.  That taste is not interchangeable.  That great work emerges from collaboration, intuition, leadership, obsession, failure, adjustment, timing, memory, and instinct.  That the difference between something disposable and something unforgettable is often hidden in a hundred tiny human judgments made by people who have spent years becoming capable of making them.

And perhaps, in doing so, it can give a bit more public glory to the craftsmen and women who deserve it.

This should be their era.  They should be stars.  The production designers, costume designers, the editors, the agency teams, the art directors, the makers of peculiar brilliance.  They should not remain anonymous functionaries behind the curtain while the industry frets about the asset.  They are the asset.  They always have been.  But in an age of openness, we’re hiding them.

Show what it means for someone to become a head of department after years of honing their craft.  Show the wins.  Show the near-disasters.  Show the problem-solving.  Show the lives inside the work.

Bring people into those victories and you do something remarkable: you expand the love of advertising from a love of the finished ad to a love of the people who make it.

That is not indulgence.  That is strategy.

More to the point, it is common sense.

Hollywood, with its mausoleum instincts and velvet-rope secrecy, may continue to believe that concealment creates value.  But advertisers ought to know better.  We live in an age of abundance, not scarcity.  In an age of infinite content, the thing that cuts through is not just the finished piece, but the human trail behind it.

So… to the brands out there… for God’s sake: let the creatives post!  Let the production designers post.! Let the agency teams post!  Let the cinematographers, stylists, editors, and makers post before the ad launches!

Build in public.

Not because it is trendy.  Not because it is social-first.  Not because some innovation consultant with a lovely deck told you so.

Build in public because it is good for the work.
Build in public because it is good for craft.
Build in public because it is one of the best ways left to prove that people still made this.

And if you don’t do it for any of the good reasons I just listed above… do it just because you’re leaving masses of free, valuable media on the table!

You are sitting on a mountain of potential media value and behaving, for reasons no sane person can explain, as though it would be vulgar to use it.

The creators have already shown us the way.