This is the spot:

It is pretty damn good.

But these awards are all a little bit fake anyway. You make the real campaign for the client, then you make the awards version. (and the awards version has a more compelling narrative, more gritty footage, the stuff that felt a little too risky for the real spot). I don't think my preferred version of a brand campaign spot has ever gone live, but it’s definitely been submitted as part of an awards package. (That’s kinda the whole point of a director’s cut.)

The awards system rewards the case study. Not the campaign that lives in real life.

We’ve now built an entire incentive system around awards and then clutch our pearls when people optimize for winning them. Agencies sell creative work. Awards are the proof that the creative work was good. If the proof can be manufactured more cheaply than the work itself, someone is going to manufacture the proof. That's just how incentives work.

The people most affected aren't the ones who got caught. They're the creatives who made real work, for real clients, that ran in real markets and actually moved numbers. They watched a fabricated campaign take the stage at Cannes while their project, the one that performed, never had a case study budget. I think it’s important to celebrate work, even if it didn’t get that big grand stage award. Here’s one spot I’m loving this week from Etsy:

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

He is wearing his own clothes. There are no fashion credits. MORE.

Image credit: Jurgen Teller

To understand what the hell is going on here, we have to understand Žižek.

Let’s start with Karl Marx: Marx believed that people go along with systems that exploit them because they've been tricked. They don't see what's really happening. The capitalist tells you the wage is fair and you believe him. The priest tells you suffering is noble and you believe him. Lift the veil, show people the truth, and they'll revolt.

Žižek’s career has been focused on flipping that idea: He says no, people aren't fooled. People know perfectly well that the wage isn't fair, that the ad is manipulating them, that the influencer was paid, that the politician is lying. They participate anyway. A cynical distance doesn't free you from the system, it lets the system keep running. "I know it's bullshit, but I'm doing it anyway" is not resistance, it’s compliance.

Žižek is really useful for thinking about advertising. The old worry was "people are being brainwashed by ads." Žižek says "people know they're being sold to, they make jokes about being sold to, and they buy the thing anyway, and that's worse."

His most repeated example is Coca-Cola, which he argues markets itself as special and necessary. But it doesn’t do what it promises, it doesn’t quench your thirst. That’s the trick of the perfect commodity in Žižek’s eyes, satisfaction is not the point. The point is to connect with your desire. You drink the Coke, you want another Coke. You buy the bag, you want the next bag. You are now in a loop that doesn’t end.

So Why Did Vogue Put Žižek on It’s Cover?

There’s a few layers happening here (I think). A philosopher who has built his career on the idea that capitalism survives by absorbing its critics shows up on the cover, gets photographed in front of a wall that calls the audience suckers, and tells the interviewer he calls himself a “moderately conservative communist.” It’s almost too spot on. The system takes a guy who criticizes the system, puts him on a Vogue cover, and sells him back to us.

Initially, I thought this was the point. Capitalism eats its critics. Critique becomes content.

…But maybe that’s not the point?

Image credit: Jurgen Teller

He’s not styled. The poses are bad (maybe on purpose). The locations are fine. The cover isn’t a cover, it’s a man looking through a hole in a wall. It’s a bit jarring. Photographer Jurgen Teller has spent 30 years making fashion look awkward and exposed, and he’s using that whole skill set here. Vogue Adria isn’t trying to make Žižek fashionable. Vogue Adria is making his refusal to become fashionable into the fashion story.

The interview (I think) supports this interpretation. Žižek didn’t want to do the interview or the shoot. He told the writer, Teodora Jeremić, that he had already said everything he had to say in his books. He spends the conversation on the things he actually cares about: that the liberal center is disappearing, that Trump is power’s “obscene dimension” made visible, that the left has lost the language of dignity, and that he was happiest during Covid because he didn’t have to see anyone. He says he likes being a passive smoker. He says he would prefer to live in Svalbard.

None of this is fashion writing. It’s a man being himself in a magazine that normally asks people to be a very polished, extreme version of themselves.

So then, who is laughing at who?

Image credit: Jurgen Teller

Žižek isn’t laughing at Vogue (I don’t think). Vogue Adria isn’t laughing at Žižek, they’re letting him be the version of himself that doesn’t (necessarily) sell magazines. Teller isn’t laughing at either of them, he’s doing what he always does. The reader is in there somewhere, possibly the sucker in the whole thing (maybe not).

The cover doesn’t resolve to a clean thesis. And maybe that’s the point.

Go back to the ice cold Coke. The perfect commodity doesn’t satisfy you. It produces more wanting. You drink it, you want another one. Žižek would say the Vogue cover is doing the same thing. You look at it and you don’t know what to think, so you look again. You read the interview, you text the link to a friend, you write a Substack post about it. The cover isn’t selling you Žižek. It’s selling you the experience of not being able to figure out what Vogue is doing. That experience doesn’t end. So you keep looking.

I think that’s my main takeaway as someone working in advertising. Most brand work tries to resolve. The manifesto resolves. The values statement resolves. The brand film about joy resolves. The form and the message are saying the same thing, you absorb it in three seconds, and then you’re done. The work satisfies you and you move on.

Vogue Adria made something that doesn’t satisfy. The cover is a man looking through a hole in a wall. The interview is a philosopher saying he wants to live in Svalbard. The styling is whatever he had on. None of it adds up to a clean message, which is why I’m still thinking about it two weeks later.

Žižek would say we already know we’re being sold something. We’re going to buy the issue anyway. Maybe that’s what makes it work.

Xx, Caitlin

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

Purpose-driven work won pitches. It won awards. It gave CMOs something to talk about. I mean, in many ways, it gave me purpose. I built many campaigns around representation, around equity, around the idea that a brand’s values were a competitive advantage. In 2021, I worked on the team that launched Meta’s We The Culture initiative on Instagram and Facebook, which showed the creative process of Black creatives working in different mediums. I don’t think that brief would exist in 2026. (And looking back, maybe that’s for the best. Maybe co-opting Black culture wasn't something Meta should have ever been dabbling in. Also, was I the right fit to lead a project dedicated to celebrating Black voices? So many after the fact reflections on that one.)

But other brands are following Meta’s path. Scrubbing their website of initiatives, pulling impact case studies, and letting the commitments they made expire. Public DEI disclosure within Fortune 500 companies dropped 65% this year. More.

You're supposed to act like those commitments were never made.

The creative directors who staffed up purpose-focused teams in 2021 are dissolving them in 2026. The CMOs who stood on stages at Cannes talking about "brand bravery" are now in boardrooms talking about "focus" and "core competency" and whatever other corporate speak words mean we don't do that anymore. I don’t think they ever believed it. They believed the market believed it.

Nobody in leadership will say this out loud: the retreat isn't strategic. It's cowardice. Brands aren't pulling back because purpose didn't work. Some of those campaigns drove real results. Real audience growth. Real cultural relevance. (I can say that for a fact. I have the reporting.)

But that's the new brief: Make something that can't offend anyone. Make something that doesn't say anything. Make something that, if someone screenshotted it and posted it with a furious caption, would be so bland that the fury would have nowhere to go.

You can build a career on that kind of work. People do. But let's not pretend it's creative direction. It's risk management and a boring as fuck mood board.

If your portfolio includes purposeful work, keep it. Meta is staying up on my portfolio (even though most of the campaign is now stripped from the internet). Right now, the industry will not reward you for purpose-first work. But I think you keep it in. Because you made something that meant something to someone, and the fact that a holding company got skittish doesn't actually matter. The work can be real/good, even if the commitment wasn't.

The industry will find its next big idea about what brands should stand for. It always does. And when it does, it will need people who know how to make that work.

Xx, Caitlin.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

The pitch deck says “our team,” but the org chart is actually three dudes in a basement (and they somehow all report into each other).

This isn’t new. Agencies have always used freelancers. But there did used to be a core. A bench of full-time people who held some kind of institutional knowledge, who knew the client’s brand guidelines front to back, who had worked together for years. In some shops, that’s gone. Maybe there’s a producer, an account lead, and a creative director, but their jobs are more about assembling the right team of freelancers fast enough to hit the timeline.

Image credit

The client rarely knows the difference. They signed up for the agency. They got the agency's logo on the cover of the deck. But the people doing the work are independent contractors who also did work for two other agencies this month. The strategy your brand is paying for was developed by someone who was developing a different strategy for a competitor last Tuesday. Nobody is lying about this. Let’s be clear about that part.

Adweek called this the "creative freelance boom" and asked who the winners and losers are. The winners are senior freelancers with reputations and full calendars. The losers are junior creatives who can't get hired because there's nothing to get hired into. The entry-level job used to be the entry point. Now the entry point is a freelance gig that pays a flat rate and doesn't lead anywhere, because the agency that hired you for it doesn't have a career ladder. They have a budget…for this one project.

This is the part that should bother people more than it does. The agency model was never just about making ads. It was a system that trained people. Juniors sat next to seniors. They learned by being there. They absorbed taste, timing, client management, the thousand small things that make someone good at this job. That system required full-time employment. It required people being on the same team for longer than one campaign cycle.

The freelance model doesn't train anyone. It extracts. It takes what you already know and rents it by the day. You don't leave with a mentor, or a network that invested in your growth, or the knowledge that comes from watching the same client relationship evolve over two years.

The agency of the future has fewer employees, more contractors, and a cool-looking website that says something like "we believe in the power of ideas." The "we" just changes every quarter.

If you're building a career in this industry, understand what you're walking into. The job listing might say "agency." The reality might be a holding company, a project manager, and a Google Drive full of freelancer NDAs. That doesn't mean it's bad work. It might be great work. But the thing people used to get from agencies (the mentorship, the community, the slow accumulation of craft through years of collaboration) that's not part of the deal anymore.

You have to find that mentorship somewhere else. LinkedIn, Substack, even TikTok can all be great places to start.

Xx, Caitlin.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.

The roles getting cut are execution roles. The people who did banner resizes. Who formatted decks. Who produced the 47th version of a social asset. The roles that aren’t getting cut? The tastemakers.

Taste. Discernment. Judgment. The ability to look at fourteen AI-generated options and know which one deserves attention and which one belongs in the trash. Adweek ran a whole piece about how every creative needs to think like a creative director. The argument being that when there’s a machine that can produce endlessly, the only scarce resource is someone who knows when to stop it.

I agree. Clients can now ask AI for ideas. They’re not paying agencies for output. They’re paying for someone to tell them which output is actually good, actually worth their time. That’s the job. That’s actually always been the job, but used to be a little bit more buried (under more corporate jargon).

So what does this mean if you’re building a career in advertising right now?

It means your portfolio of banner ads doesn’t matter as much as your point of view. It means the person who spent their twenties in weird corners of the internet now has an advantage.

Taste isn’t a talent. It’s an accumulation. Every strange film you watched. Every designer whose work you studied without being assigned to. Every brand campaign you pulled apart just to understand why it worked. That stuff has compounded. And it compounded in a way that an LLM can’t replicate. Taste requires a body that has lived in the world. Formed opinions about the world.

The lame part is that taste is hard to prove in an interview. You can’t put it on a resume. You can’t link to it. But you can demonstrate it in how you talk about creative work. In what you reference. In what you reject. The creative directors I’ve worked with who had real taste never had to explain it. You could feel it in their confident “no.”

If you’re early in your career, start developing your “no.” Go look at work that’s getting awards and figure out what’s actually good versus what’s just making a lot of noise (or creating a lot of useless “buzz”). Go look at failed campaigns and figure out what they got wrong. Train your instincts. Your specific point of view.

Xx, Caitlin.

If you’re new here, I write a monthly serialized novel called Everything is Advertising, about a burned-out Creative Director and his cynical team that accidentally create QAnon through a viral marketing campaign. If you like that kind of thing, you can start at Part One and catch up from there.

'Everything is Advertising' | Part 1

Every Wednesday, Open Woods tracks the cultural moments worth paying attention to. Curated weekly for brands that want to move first.

Open Woods.

Every Friday, The Business of Advertising shares lessons from over a decade working on the front lines of advertising.

The Business of Advertising.

Every Sunday, Above the Fold breaks down what’s running in advertising, what’s landing, and what’s a total disaster.

Above the Fold.