Merry Christmas to everyone who follows, reads, argues, laughs, lurks, or quietly nods along.
Hope these days give you a little warmth, a little rest, and at least one honest moment that isn’t staged, filtered, or forced.
Thanks for being here. Really.
Something has quietly shifted in how authority is granted.
Not so long ago, leaders were judged on what they could build. Better services, steadier institutions, a sense that someone was carrying the weight of complexity on our behalf. Even when they failed, the expectation was effort. Responsibility still mattered.
Today, power is increasingly given to whoever promises to make things stop.
Stop the politicians.
Stop the bureaucracy.
Stop the system.
Stop the noise.
This is not a collapse of reason. It is a response to exhaustion.
When systems feel responsive, people argue about outcomes. When systems feel distant and immovable, people argue about exits. Improvement starts to feel abstract and unreachable. Removal feels immediate, visible, real.
That is why disruption now outperforms competence. Why negation travels faster than plans. Why “anti” messages beat detailed proposals. It is not that people no longer care about results. It is that they no longer believe results can be achieved through patience or participation.
Exhaustion rewires consent.
In low-trust environments, refusal reads as strength. Distance reads as honesty. The leader who promises to tear something down sounds more credible than the one who promises to stay and repair it. Staying feels like complicity. Leaving feels like integrity.
Think about the last time a leader resigned, a platform collapsed, or an institution was publicly humiliated. Before you wondered what would replace it, notice what you felt first.
For many, the first emotion was not fear. It was relief.
This logic no longer belongs to politics alone. Companies are praised more for decisive cuts than for long, uncertain repair. Platforms reward outrage and exits over stewardship. Institutions designed for continuity now perform disruption simply to prove they are alive.
Authority no longer has to prove it can carry complexity. It only has to prove it can drop it.
That is the dangerous inversion. When removal becomes the primary proof of power, destruction no longer needs a replacement plan. It only needs applause. At that point, consent and surrender begin to blur.
People are not asking for chaos. They are asking for relief. But relief is not progress, and silence is not resolution. A system that rewards those who make things disappear will eventually elevate people whose only skill is making things disappear.
Not because they are villains, but because the system taught them that this is what winning looks like.
Power does not always arrive by force. Sometimes it is lifted into place because it promises to carry nothing forward.
That is why this moment feels volatile and strangely celebratory at the same time. We are not being conquered. We are cheering because something heavy has been put down.
The real story in McKinsey’s State of Marketing 2026 is not the charts. It is the confession. Europe’s marketing engines were built for a world that no longer exists.
Budgets rise yet impact stalls.
Data grows yet decision quality lags.
AI expands yet teams operate with twentieth century structures.
The winners share one pattern. They stop treating marketing as a function and start running it as an adaptive system.
• Cross functional squads instead of siloed departments
• Always on experimentation instead of quarterly bursts
• First party data as an asset not a compliance chore
• Creative bravery tied directly to commercial impact
This shift is not cosmetic. It is existential. The report shows that firms who redesign around this model create disproportionate growth even in flat markets. Europe’s marketers face a simple question. Keep optimising the old machine or build the one that fits reality.
If your organisation feels stuck, this is the moment to redesign not repackage. The companies that act now will define the next decade of European marketing.
If you want communication that earns belief, not just attention, start a conversation with me.
Grab it here
Why collapsing trust is about to reshape power, economics and the future of knowledge
We always assumed the internet would make us smarter. Instead, it made us doubt everything. The breaking point wasn’t when people fell for fake news; it was when they stopped believing even the fake news they once trusted. The very floor beneath our information ecosystem has cracked.
When a system loses credibility, it doesn’t collapse slowly. It collapses overnight.
The internet is entering that moment.
For years, platforms optimized for attention over accuracy. Noise outperformed knowledge. Outrage outperformed expertise. Every incentive pointed downward. The result is the world we live in now: abundant information, vanishing certainty.
People no longer ask, “Is this true?” They ask, “Who wants me to think this?”
The shift is subtle but historic. When the public loses faith in the public’s own knowledge, the entire digital model wobbles. We’re seeing the early tremors of an epistemic recession: the rapid decline of the internet as a source of objective truth.
AI accelerates the crisis. Its power is extraordinary; its weakness is lethal.
AI doesn’t understand. It predicts. It assembles patterns of words that often look right but occasionally miss by just enough to erode trust completely.
One technologist put it bluntly: “When I already know something and check it with AI, it’s maybe 85% accurate. That 15% is a cliff, and that cliff is growing. Because AI trains on human writing, it inherits our confusion. It scales our errors. When the collective mind is foggy, AI becomes a fog machine.
The irony is brutal: the more impressive AI becomes, the less we trust what we read.
Paradoxically, this collapse of digital certainty strengthens something older and more elemental: human expertise.
When filters fail, people start searching for faces, not feeds. They want names, not usernames. They want individuals whose competence is visible and whose reputation is earned, not algorithmic.
In a world where any answer can be fabricated, the rare people who truly know things become valuable again.
The economic shift is already visible:
• the era of influencers is aging • the era of experts is returning • authority becomes local, not algorithmic • knowledge becomes embodied, not aggregated
We’re moving from the era of “content creators” to the era of “credibility creators.”
The next few years won’t bring a post-truth world. They’ll bring a splintered one.
Instead of a single, global information sphere, we’ll live inside micro-networks of trust. Communities built around people, not platforms. Truth becomes relational. Believability becomes a currency.
The future looks less like Silicon Valley and more like ancient Athens: reputational, communal, human.
The lesson is uncomfortable but clarifying.
The internet is no longer the source of trust. People are.
The institutions that survive will be the ones that rebuild credibility at the human level, not the algorithmic one. The leaders who thrive will be the ones who understand that in a collapsing information economy, clarity is a form of power.
The prediction is simple: The future belongs to those who can be believed.
