APG Sideways
About our guest: Mike Power
Hi, I’m Mike Power.
I’m a strategist, consultant, and occasional human-potential work-shopper based in Toronto & Costa Rica. I’ve spent 15+ years helping brands, agencies and teams make sense of the messy middle — where research, culture, business ambition and creative instinct all collide.
Most of my work lives in that space between clarity and possibility: sharpening positioning, building creative platforms, making complex briefs useful, and helping teams find the human tension that makes work matter. Recently, that’s included strategy work in every single category – currently with Diamond in Toronto, with a broad range of fractional and freelance engagements at Zula Alpha Kilo, Sid Lee, John Street, DDB…
I am a nice guy who still believes advertising is a fun place to work.
Brilliant Weird Best
Planners are curious folks so we asked Mike to tell us the most brilliant, weirdest and best things he’s come across recently.
BRILLIANT: Vaseline Verified
I love when a brand stops trying to invent culture and instead pays attention to the culture already forming around it.
Vaseline Verified takes all the strange, useful, homespun ways people already use Vaseline and turns them into something the brand can validate, celebrate and build from. The brilliance is that it does not treat user behaviour as a cute social listening input. It treats it as product truth, community proof and an innovation engine.
For me, that is where strategy gets exciting: when the brand has the humility to say, “Maybe the people out there are already showing us what this thing really means.”
WEIRD: Sakeru Gummy’s Long Long Man
This is the kind of advertising weirdness I have a deep love for.
Long Long Man is part soap opera, part product demo, part fever dream. It takes a simple product distinction — regular gummy versus longer gummy — and builds an entire cinematic universe of longing, betrayal, seduction, melodrama and snack-based chaos around it.
I love work like this because it reminds you that attention is not earned by being tidy. Sometimes the shortest route to product meaning is through complete narrative madness, as long as the madness has internal logic.
It is ridiculous. It is committed. It is oddly beautiful. It makes most rational ad decks take a leave of absence.
BEST: Perfect Days
This movie stayed with me.
On the surface, Perfect Days is a quiet film about a man cleaning public toilets in Tokyo and living by a simple daily rhythm. But underneath that, it is about presence, ritual, dignity, surrender and the almost impossible discipline of actually being where you are.
I spend much of my professional life helping brands and teams chase transformation. I spend a lot of my personal life learning that transformation often starts with paying better attention to the thing directly in front of you.
Perfect Days is a beautiful reminder that meaning does not always arrive as a thunderbolt. Sometimes it is found in repetition, care, sunlight through leaves, and doing the small thing well.
Top Guilty Pleasures
Not all of our consumption habits can be academic. That's why we asked Mike to give us the sources to his creativity.
At a ripe old age, I learned to surf. I am not that good, but every dog has its day.
The algorithm has me figured out and lays out these scrolling holes I fall into. The techniques, the tricks, the beginner mistakes, the boards, the etiquette, the YouTube explainers, the deeply humbling truth that the ocean does not care how strategic you are.
I like it because it feels like a useful metaphor for almost everything I’m interested in right now: flow, timing, surrender, balance, fear, commitment, and the difference between forcing something and learning how to meet it.
Also, it sounds cooler than golf swing rabbit holes, which I have also been known to fall into.
The British one is better.
I’m not entirely sure what I love about it, beyond the strange relief of knowing I am not that young anymore. And I already have the partner of my dreams. I watch it and feel both anthropologically fascinated and personally grateful.
I remain amazed that people dress like that. I do not know where you even buy clothes like that. Although, of course, marketing has found its way back in — now they’re supplied through a partnership with eBay.
So yes, it is ridiculous. But it is also a strangely perfect little cultural aquarium: desire, performance, insecurity, language, status, branding, swimwear, and people trying to say something emotionally meaningful, interjected with a whole bunch of ‘like’s.
This month on Slack
Over on our Slack, strategists are supporting, debating, and shitposting. Click on a link to see the full convo.
Everything We Think We Know About Human Evolution Is Probably Backward.
Jon shared this Substack piece as required reading for anyone who talks about culture professionally, and the argument is genuinely disorienting. The piece makes the case that Harari's wildly popular account of how humans evolved, intelligence first, then language, then cooperation, then culture, gets the order exactly backwards. The more current scientific view, associated with Joseph Henrich, is that culture came first, and everything else, including our intelligence, followed from it. For people in the business of shaping culture, that's worth sitting with.
Publicis Made a Film About Bad Pitch Behaviour. The Channel Wasn't Sure It Was Self-Aware Enough.
PK Lawton shared Publicis' parody film, dropped before Cannes calling out agency pitch excess, specifically over-promising on AI and making unsustainable commercial offers to win business. The problem is that Publicis is a holding company that attends Cannes, enters awards, and pitches clients the same way everyone else does, which made the film read less as an industry intervention and more as a reputational play dressed up as accountability.
The Long-Form Brand Film Isn't Dead. Uncommon Just Won't Let It Be.
Spencer shared this La Colombe x US Soccer film from Uncommon as proof that the format still has a pulse when the right creative team is behind it. Making a national team story simultaneously a Philly story and a coffee story shouldn't work, and yet it does. Worth watching as a reminder that the problem with most long-form brand content isn't the length, it's the lack of a real point of view.