Mark Braddock: The view looking east
Five days. Twenty-six meetings. Notes from a field trip to the big smoke. By Mark Braddock, Creative Strategy Director of Block.
We spent five days meeting an incredible range of potential partners, clients and collaborators in Sydney. My pencil-sketch impression, since you asked:
On first look the Sydney creative sector resembles a gleaming fossil bed after a flash flood, shot by Stanley Kubrick: ribs of old Holdco ad and branding agencies bleaching in the sun, logos still blinking above half-empty warehouse-cool offices, the grand old reptiles gently insisting they’re still alive and relevant if you just give them another quarter. Around their ankles scurry nimble mammals – two-person studios in shared spaces, thirty-person indie media companies spread across five time zones, production hybrids running on caffeine and AI, planners who bill by the idea not the hour. The evolutionary leap we’ve all been forecasting has already happened; the carcasses just haven’t been told.
What’s striking is how familiar it feels. If Perth is Gondwana, we’ve evolved in splendid isolation long enough to grow our own strange mammals – marsupials if you like – lean, nocturnal ways of working; budgets that squeak; creativity that hunts because it has to; creatures that hop because it’s more efficient than walking.
The word *advertising* sounds like the last sputter of a dying fax machine. You can call yourself an ‘advertising agency’ if you fancy being ignored with ceremony. Clients don’t want the noun. They want verbs: launch, fix, ship, sell. Ideas are currency; outcomes the receipts. The data guys will skin the numbers later. For now, make something worth measuring.
Gary Larson’s “Bummer of a birthmark, Hal” cartoon became my mental mascot. I thought of it in the lift of a half-empty holding-company office, heading to coffee with the head of a brilliantly scrappy indie media shop. Perfect metaphor: a roomful of deer with targets on their chests, wondering why the forest is so quiet. Up there: target practice. Out here: movement.
The solo creative superstar feels like a talent show on Betamax – charmingly obsolete. The hero now is the model: a way of working that turns ambiguity into action without theatrics. Small, experienced, repeatable. Replicable beats scalable. Scale suggests bloat – more mouths at the meeting and fewer getting the work done. Replication is elegant: take what works on Tuesday, improve it, reapply it Thursday, repeat.
“Stop telling us you do everything.” Clients don’t want everything. They want the one thing you do better than anyone else. Say it. Do it. Do it well. If you can’t articulate it in a sentence, you don’t have it.
It’s about finding people who want to make something and then finding someone to pay for it. In that order. Not fecklessness – strategy. “Let’s find something cool to do together” kept surfacing. The cool thing attracts the money, not the reverse. When the thing is cool enough, procurement becomes a footnote.
The herd where process used to graze is thinning. Fewer decks, shorter emails, briefer briefings. No fetishising the journey. Just: is it good, does it move, can it be done now?
There’s still theatre. Show business without show is just PowerPoint. But it’s smaller, drier, funnier. Less velvet curtain, more black-box rehearsal. A lot of “we can show you tomorrow” and almost no “we’ll come back in three weeks with a 120-page deck explaining why your logo is secretly a fascist rune.”
Words that kept popping up: sharp, quick, senior, punchy, weird (good), honest (better), accountable (best). Words that didn’t: purpose (unless it actually meant something), omnichannel (mercifully), disruption (unless the speaker owned a hammer).
And yes, amid all this modernity, dinosaurs still chew the cud, drafting statements about transformation. But even they are slimming down, grudgingly teaching their front legs to run. The threat of extinction is a ruthless personal trainer.
What did we learn? That the gap between how Perth has had to work and how Sydney now wants to work is hairline thin. That the myth of “bigger is safer” has flipped. That the people who will thrive are the ones who can point to a thing and say, “By Friday, that,” and then actually do it.
Dinosaurs make excellent landmarks. You can navigate a city by the bones. They show you where not to stop. The food is where the little mammals are – those jumpy, inventive creatures building in alleys no one used to walk down, caffeinated, under-decorated, very alive.
Five days, twenty-six meetings, several good coffees, one Far Side cartoon, and a notebook full of verbs: make, launch, move, ship, fix, sell. All strangely familiar. We’ve spent the last twenty-three years building a business for what suddenly feels like the brave new world.
I’m not smug about it. There’s real pain out there, and more coming. This is no time to gloat — just time to be grateful to be on the right side of history, for now. Because none of us knows for whom the AI clock will toll next. Complacency will kill quicker than anything.
Pack light. Work fast. Say the one true thing you do better than anyone else, and then do it. The rest is bones.