Anxiety as fuel, client side, co-conspiracies
Hey – Rob here.
Playing with the newsletter format. Because all work and no play etc, but also because predictability is nice but also boring. Before we get started, don't forget to sign up to our free panel on scary good comms strategy.
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Anxiety as fuel
I can't find the clip of it anymore for some reason, but one of the great scenes of the American Crime Story show about Gianni Versace (for me anyway) is where he talks about how, when he's anxious, he creates.
It's quite interesting isn't it. Because anxiety is essentially reframed here as something that is annoying (yes it is), but also productive (when channelled well). I'm reflecting on this because today feels like one of those anxiously productive energy ones, so I'm just gonna go with it.
What triggered the anxiety? Maybe a bit too much client work on. A couple of annoying situations on a project. A meeting I was worried was gonna go bad, was reassured actually went well, except the feedback suggested it didn't go as well as we thought we did. So I catastrophised.
When catastrophising, it's important to honour the emotion behind it because if you don't it will come back 10x stronger. It's like a hockey stick emotion for a startup you thought was gonna go bust years ago, but actually became a unicorn and you could have retired by now. But after honouring it, you can give it a new home and direction – you channel it.
I channel anxiety and emotion by writing and seeing where those words go. It's not 'optimised' for the social algorithm, sorry. But hopefully it's optimised for a very specific part of the algorithm of your mind that doesn't just want to learn and evolve and hyper-grow in "proud and humble" ways, but the part that just wants to be seen and acknowledged.
If you've felt these feelings, and you're constantly juggling between whether you're more on the 'oh no this is gonna be a bad day' side of the fence, or the 'oh wait actually this is a helluva good fuel' day, I see you. And I salute you. It happens to all of us. You're better than you think. 🫡
Client side: evil or necessary evil?
You know in the Dark Knight Rises film where the weird yuppie corporate dude asks Bane "what are you", he answers, and the yuppie dude goes "you're pure evil", and Bane says "I'm necessary evil"? Yeah, that, but let's apply that to the realm of that thing we love to bemoan called 'the client'.
I find it boring to say clients are the bane of creativity, because it's a naive view of how business runs and how stakeholder alignment is important. We just don't see it, but there are battles our clients face that go well beyond the purity of our intentions. Compromise and negotiation are important levers, more than just 'the insight' or 'the idea' on a slide.
Anyway, it's for this reason I loved to attend Hemal Gill's workshop on how to nail the first 100 days of client side. Not saying this because I'd go client side per se (tho who knows), but I like to understand the realities of the audience I am selling to first and foremost. Sure, our job is to understand 'real people' and what interests them, but it really helps to understand the people in front of us and what they need to sell an idea.
You can unlock Hemal's micro workshop, and all past recordings, by joining the Salmon Crew today. I'll send you a link to all the goods straight after. Plus you get to hang out with Hemal on our private group chat, where (I recently checked with some LLM help) she's among the top 3x contributors by volume – and, in my view, definitely also by value.
Join the Salmon Crew and tell your most hated social media algorithm to fuck off.
Collaboration vs co-conspiracy
We all love to talk about collaboration, but sometimes when we say collaboration we really mean "death of original thinking by committee", and that isn't very nice if you give more than two shits about your work.
Instead, I prefer to start thinking more about how we're all in a little conspiracy together. Two recent examples of this: one, I saw this quite telling graph that there is now more AI generated content on the internet than human content, and my first instinct was to send it to our private group not with a "oh no we're fucked", but with something... different.
If we can't challenge the short-term inevitability of some of the big tech macro movements and how they're fundamentally imposing cultural shifts from the top down, that doesn't mean we can simply abide like little zombies. The Empire exists? Be the Rebel Alliance instead. It's a little bit harder and grittier, but makes for a much better life story. Lead with story.
Another example was from a recent briefing I delivered to a team of creative directors (who incidentally were behind some of my favourite campaign work done for the British Army), but the context was:
We had received the client briefing 48h before
We needed to answer pretty swiftly with some work
We had some strategic territories but not fully stress tested
And what became quite clear is that, by framing this briefing as a bit of a discursive session where I and my CSO got to some strategic territories, and were definitely not precious about them, things flowed quite well. It became clear that there definitely some elements in them that felt important to create standout work, so we kicked off on the right terms.
What felt interesting was what happened after, where we simply got into a very organic conversation that blended the strategy, the work, the delivery, the sell-in, how we ensure our clients feel part of the journey, and the whole thing just felt like we were conspiring to deliver something great.
No egos. Just pure conversation. But it wasn't a feeling of "let's collaborate so everyone feels part of it and no one feels insulted at the end". It was deeper. More intentional. We were co-conspirators and everyone was organically helping plan the rebellion in the most effective way possible.
The difference between collaboration and co-conspiracy is that the first one feels like something you do to avoid losing ("make everyone feel heard"), but the second one is all about how we can win better together ("it's us vs this big gnarly problem, let's get to work cracking it").
Also had a bit of a vibe of how the team on the Criminal Minds show simply start kicking around a case while flying to meet the local police chief. This is the type of problem solving culture that suits me well, where strategy, creative, design, client services and operations are not separate departments, but layers that work in tandem to cut through the bullshit.
A bunch of health papers cos why not
One of my schticks right now, that I use to basically show I'm a bit of a proud dork but also a half-decent strategist, is when I say I read effectiveness papers for fun. It's not strictly true, as they're for work, but it's partly true in that I get a kick out of finding interesting and effective new ways to solve problems, and clear ways that demonstrate that the problem was indeed solved beyond saying "social sentiment was great".
So, here's a little experimental section. I'm gonna share with you a bunch of effectiveness papers I read around healthcare and adjacent categories, because of a project I've been working on. These papers are all in my private swipe file, which you can access in its entirety when you upgrade to the Salmon Crew, but I'm giving you a preview of them for free. You will need to ask for access, but I will give you access. Deal? Alrighty, deal.
Why am I doing this? Because I think more strategists should make it a habit to study a bit what's worked effectively before, instead of simply burning their mental matter trying to chase the latest trends just so they can feel current. By all means, be current, but also be useful and focused on the endgame. The endgame isn't to be really smart, it's to be effective.
So, here are 10 papers that may be useful to you if you're working on healthcare stuff, or just if you want to study the anatomy (hey) of a good paper. In no particular order (I lie, it's in alphabetical order), do enjoy:
Keep swimming,
Rob
Ps. I'm fully booked until the end of January, but if you have any plans to get some indie strategy thru radical collaboration energy into your work life from Q1 2026 onwards, we should be talking: rob@salmonlabs.co.
