I’ve been asking community members to share a short reflection, by completing the statement: “2025 was the year that …”
» See what some of our members had to say about the last 12 months.
If you’d like to share your reflection, drop me a DM, or hit reply to this email. For every reflection posted, I’m making a donation to NABS, the advertising and marketing industry charity.
Last year, NABS received a record 5,200 calls from people across the industry. That’s proof that looking after our collective mental wellness has never been more important. You can donate too here.
This week sees the merger of Omnicom and IPG - and with it, over 4000 job cuts, within a larger context of some 20,000+ headcount reduction in the group over the coming year.
Whilst no job is secure (and have a read of Rob Estreitinho’s reflection on 2025 below for more on that), for many, the seemingly endless rounds of redundancies and restructuring could feel like the beginning of the end. When there’s only a small handful of networks to go work for, what’s the difference between Tide and Persil? Probably zilch.
But, as Zoe Scaman’s article from this week rightly points out: “The work is disseminating – into in-house teams hungry for real talent, into collectives forming around shared values instead of shared overhead, into direct relationships with brands who are tired of the holding company tax, into new shapes we haven’t even named yet. The demand for strategic thinking and creative excellence and brand building hasn’t evaporated. It’s just finding new vessels.”
This shift isn’t new, it’s been happening for a long time. As people who run our own businesses, we know this, and have known it for some time. Where PE backed organisations look to optimise and consolidate - the real action is fracturing, splitting, spreading, across an ecosystem of nodes. And it’s the interconnectednes of those nodes which make for interesting times.
However, I’m well aware, this doesn’t make things any easier.
Looking for work gets harder, rather than going to one big building with lots of jobs, it’s now a task of hunting around lots of small buildings (or kitchen tables, coffee shops and coworking spaces).
And I know this life isn’t for everyone - in fact, whilst there have been plenty of commentaries on what the mergers mean for creativity and the industry at large, there are fewer headlines on the human impact of decisions that lead to so many people losing their sense of security and identity, just weeks before Christmas. Inhuman.
But I hope, again, this is where some of the interconnectedness can help. The messy spider web of nodes and connections. We’re the nodes. We’re the connections. And when someone falls out of the frying pan and in to the fire, hopefully we can use that web to soften the landing, offer support, make people feel welcomed into this other way of working. Whether they’re here for a moment or a long time.
We’ve welcomed a good number of folk who find themselves here unplanned. Let’s show them around, and how working independently doesn’t have to mean working alone.
And if you’ve recently joined our community because of redundancy or outside of your own control - you might find our resource helpful.
🫶 mk
ps. I’ll be pausing the newsletter over xmas, December 19 will be our last 2025 issue, and normal service will resume Jan 9 2026. This gives my head a rest. And boy, does my head need a rest.
When you’re a full-time employee, you largely feel that someone’s in control of things.
There are projects to work on. Familiar faces here and there in the business. A salary always kicks in at the end of the month, alongside a contribution to your pension, health insurance and some snazzy cycle to work schemes, if you’re lucky.
Someone’s in control.
So you feel in control.
And so you can get on with it.
When you go independent, control gets pulled from under you.
All those projects? Yeah someone had to develop the pipeline and convert them into contracts. That salary? Yeah someone had to ensure invoices got paid and everything god reconciled properly. And things like pensions or insurance or fancy perks are now your job too. In short, sure you go independent so you can focus more on ‘the work’.
But in some sense, you also get pulled into 10x directions that are about nothing but ‘the work’.
And yet. As with all tough years (and there have been a few of those), there are lessons to be learned.
A big lesson for me? That control is not the right brief anymore.
It’s a misled expectation. We control very little. But what we can do is learn how to influence events and our reactions to those events. You can’t control where your next gig will come from, but you can influence it.
How? By learning how to get noticed, have the right volume and quality of chats, being comfortable with asking and closing. Nothing about this is about control, because you can’t force anyone to do anything. But you can learn how to influence people and events so the odds are a little bit more in your favour.
A possible pushback: where’s the safety net in all this?
Well, my provocation to you (and myself) is this: is there a real safety net elsewhere anyway?
Because, unlike pre 2019, it feels like every full time job is basically a FTC, and so any ideas of safety nets are at best opportunities with an expiry date, and no one ever really tells you what the date is until the date actually comes.
So for me the lesson in 2025 was clear: assume the expiry date will come, get ready for it, learn to enjoy the process.
Learning to influence things is a hell of a first step to become more resilient as an indie.
We all need a bit of that.
» Rob Estreitinho is founder of Salmon Labs, and you can join his excellent strategy community The Salmon Crew, over at https://www.salmonlabs.co/crew
huddle: Don’t forget, we’ve got a demo of Prxy AI next week for Outside Perspective subscribers. Josh will be taking us through the platform. » Details here
» on the issue with research slop
» Perla Bloom on why we should build worlds, not campaigns
» ‘s Future of Trust report dropped a couple of weeks back.
» Meta-analysis ahoy. Ben Malbon’s NotebookLM powered analysis of Amy&Co’s trends folder, along with his process, and Matt Klein of ’s brilliant annual take on the 250+/2Gb of reports dropping this year.
» ‘s Social Signals deck feels like a delightful antithesis too the rest of the pile.
» The Remote Labour Index suggests doing more than one thing in a row is still too hard for AI. Phew.
» Celebrating imperfection (thanks Michelle)
» on Stranger Things (and did you know Season 5 cost around $480m to produce?).
» Loving the Spotify Wrapped ad.
» Young people and entrepreneurship
Things we’ve found and opportunities from our friends.
FEATURED: The team at alan. are looking for a brand strategy person, with experience in b2b positioning. It’s a perm role. This you?
https://outsideperspective.co/gigs/20251204-brand-alan-879e17.html
[SG] Freelance Social Strategist with beauty exp at Hogarth
https://bit.ly/4pggdQW
[US] [PERM] Social Strategists at Mojo Supermarket
https://bit.ly/3XvWfWo
[UK] fractional CMO for fintech at yonder
https://bit.ly/48NIRTG
[RO/NO/DK] strategy or research folk with exp in teens/gen z at Livity
https://bit.ly/4pcVLAq
[US] [PERM] strategy director 6-8yrs exp at Leo Chicago
https://bit.ly/4ixCmaR
[UK] freelance social media strategist with climate/nature campaign + brand experience at New Society
https://bit.ly/48Lr6o7
[US] junior-to-mid-level researcher/strategist role 20hrs/week at Hackemer
https://bit.ly/4rrBV6l
[UK] [PERM] Integrated Strategist via Red Sofa
https://bit.ly/49Kntji
[UK/London] [PERM] Senior Directors for one of London’s fastest-growing strategy studios via Nicholson Glover
https://bit.ly/4pMk5JD
[UK] Freelance Social Strategist with strong experience in retail, hospitality, or food & beverage via Profiles
https://bit.ly/4pHFSlv
[UK] Brand Strategists with a strong understanding of UX frameworks via Major Players
https://bit.ly/3K5rMvf
[NL] Senior Strategy Director for international Brand & Design Consultancy start-up in Amsterdam via Spark
https://bit.ly/3KddLM1
[UK/London] Freelance Brand Strategist via Factory
https://bit.ly/3K6ojfY
You can keep updated on real-time posts as we share them via:
» Web
» Telegram
» Whatsapp
+ and of course, our slack channel if you’re a community member.
That’s all for this week.
mk✌️
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