APG Sideways
About our guest: Ben Porter
Hi! I’m Ben Porter - I’m a strategist at Rethink, coming up on my 5th year in advertising. Prior to strategy, I got my feet wet in accounts working on McDonald’s at Cossette. I decided on a career in advertising when a creative team came into my grade 5 class and showed us the OOH they made for big birds at the ROM, so if that was you, shout out to you.
Before advertising I spent three years bartending on and off to support my addiction for travel. Morocco remains my favourite travel experience.
Brilliant Weird Best
Planners are curious folks so we asked Ben to tell us the most brilliant, weirdest and best things he’s come across recently.
BRILLIANT: Just Evolve: World Down Syndrome Day
I’m a big fan of advocacy creative that trades the cutesy and feel good for making you feel like an asshole and an idiot. Advertising is about changing behaviour and this is a brilliant example of how spurring self-reflection can accomplish that.
WEIRD: Cerave: Kevin Durant is the new face of legs
The comically long legs are one part of the weird, the other part is executing an athlete endorsement without a single line of dialogue. Tapping into what NBA fans have been joking about for years, Kevin Durant’s notoriously weathered legs.
BEST: Johnnie Walker: The Man Who Walked Around the World
I doubt a 6 minute brand film ticks a lot of media results boxes but this is my favourite ad of all time. The single take, the performance, the set design, the script, the bagpipes - it doesn’t even feel like an ad but more like a Vox explained episode. Squeezing an entire brand’s history into a single digestible piece of film.
Top Guilty Pleasures
Not all of our consumption habits can be academic. That's why we asked Ben to give us the sources to his creativity.
I’m a bit embarrassed that it took me until season 4 to realize this is just Mad Men for the modern times, but I think this is the best show on TV right now. It's a bit heavy on the shock factor of the sex and drugs but it serves its purpose when you question why you find yourself rooting for these terrible people.
I’m a bit of a history nerd so getting to play-out a storyline from the middle ages has gotten me through this snowy winter. They put a lot of effort into the historical accuracy which is something you don’t see too often in the world of video games.
This month on Slack
Over on our Slack, strategists are supporting, debating, and shitposting. Click on a link to see the full convo.
Stop Hiring for Well-Rounded. Hire for Obsessed.
Contributor: Michelle Lee
Michelle flagged this as an interesting read, and it's hard to disagree. A Stick + Twist piece argues that the future doesn't belong to generalists or specialists but to what they call "spiky" people: those with two or three areas of genuine obsession sitting alongside broad competence everywhere else. The generalist argument, that AI handles depth so humans should focus on breadth, misses the point. If you can't tell the difference between good and great output, you can't supervise the machine producing it. The more interesting question isn't what kind of worker survives AI. It's what kind of team you build when the value is no longer in the middle of the distribution.
Gen Z Is Saving More Than Anyone Expected. That's Not Necessarily Good News.
Contributor: Cameron Fleming
Cameron dropped this Atlantic piece as a corrective to the usual Gen Z money narrative. The generation with a reputation for living in their parents' basement turns out to be saving earlier and more aggressively than any generation before them. The average Zoomer started saving at 18; the average Boomer didn't start until 34. But the piece earns its interest in the twist: this isn't a success story. It's a portrait of a generation so uncertain about the future that saving feels less like a choice and more like a crouch. Hypervigilance and financial nihilism, the article argues, are just two responses to the same anxiety. Some people hoard every penny. Others log onto Polymarket. Both are strategies for a world that feels like it's about to deliver a blow that may never actually come.
Doodle Wants to Reinvent How Work Thinks About Time.
Contributor: PK Lawton
PK shared this one as a project he's been working on, and it's a genuinely interesting brand pivot. Doodle, best known as the "when can everyone meet" poll tool, is repositioning itself as a Time Orchestration platform for enterprise. The manifesto they launched on Substack makes the case that the calendar app has been asking the wrong question: not what goes in the slot, but what deserves your attention and when. It's a smart reframe for an agency world where coordination has quietly become a second job. The thread also turned into a useful sidebar on brand Substack strategy, with Jon noting that the biggest growth lever isn't posting frequency but getting quoted by a bigger publication. Old school, but apparently it still works.