I have spent more than two decades in advertising and communications, much of it helping brands say what they needed to say in a way that would make people feel something strongly enough to act on it.

Most of the time, that meant getting them to buy something. That was the job. You learn how to shape a message, find the pressure point, and simplify something down to what actually matters, removing everything else so it can be understood and felt. It is a serious craft that demands discipline and rewards clarity, and at its best it can be intelligent, emotional and genuinely powerful. I feel fortunate to have spent my career inside that world.

There is work being made today that I genuinely admire. Work that makes you laugh, makes you think, sometimes makes you feel something you weren’t expecting. That kind of creativity counts for more than we might realise, and it should continue. But over time, something else started to pull at me.

I grew up in Cabramatta, in Sydney’s south-west, at a time when the suburb was being remade in real time. Vietnamese refugees were settling there in large numbers after the war, reshaping the streets, the shops, the language, the food.

My parents worked long hours in factories and on assembly lines, or digging trenches and laying pipe with the water board, doing whatever was needed to give my brother and me opportunities they never had. Most people around us were doing the same. What we did have was a strong sense of community, and when things weren’t clear, especially for people navigating a new language and a new system, you felt how much that lack of understanding mattered.

You don’t think about it much at the time, but it stays with you in ways you only recognise later. That instinct found its way into the work, first with organisations like the Salvation Army and the Fred Hollows Foundation, and later through projects like The Future is Man-Made for WWF and Earth Hour, followed by work with UNICEF, Toyota’s emergency communications network, Westpac’s Rescue Rashie, and the Donation Dollar for the Royal Australian Mint.

But what sat underneath all of it was the same idea, helping people understand something that wasn’t immediately clear, and feel close enough to it to care.

The work itself didn’t change in form. It still required the same discipline and craft. But the effect was different, reaching beyond the immediate brief. And that difference, once you see it, becomes difficult to ignore.

Westpac’s rescue rashie was designed to save lives.

There was no single moment where everything changed. It was a gradual recognition that many of the problems shaping how people live don’t belong to marketing departments. They sit within policy, systems, regulation — the decisions that affect industries, jobs, communities and culture.

What also became clear was that the skills our industry has spent decades refining are not only relevant in those spaces. They are often missing from them entirely. That realisation is what led to Rethink Everything.

The name reflects the instinct behind it, to step back, question what’s been accepted, and work through complexity until it can be properly understood and acted on. It wasn’t a rejection of advertising. It was a decision to apply the same skills somewhere they were genuinely needed.

The change was immediate, moving from working primarily with marketing teams to working alongside CEOs, heads of corporate affairs, policy advisers, economists, former politicians, diplomats, and Traditional Owners and Custodians.

The problems were different too, domestic gas pricing and its impact on Australian manufacturing, labour reform and the evolving structure of work, broken subsidy systems, and the protection and recognition of cultural and environmental landscapes. These are public problems. That is where the work now sits.

It is still persuasion. But it operates at a different level, not influencing preference, but shaping understanding in a way that holds and leads to action.

This country is facing real pressure right now. The cost of living. Housing. Energy transition. AI redefining the nature of work. Universities under strain. An ageing population and a healthcare system that will struggle to keep pace. Environmental pressures that haven’t gone away, even as attention turns elsewhere.

These are not distant issues. They are present, structural, and poorly explained.

That is exactly where the capability of this industry could matter more than it currently does. We have trained generations of people to understand behaviour, attention, emotion and influence at a high level. That is a powerful capability. The question is whether we’re prepared to apply it to problems that carry real consequence, not just commercial ones.

The boundaries around what this industry does are largely self-imposed. There is more to be done than most of us would like to admit, and it is needed now, not at some point in the future.

If anything, creativity feels more important now than at any other point in my career, especially in where it’s applied. For me, it has simply been about using creativity where it carries real consequence.

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