A year ago, I was madly, head-over-heels in love. I was also in a job that I loved, dabbling in areas of PR that I never had a chance to explore before in my career.

When my agency was desperate to recruit, I recommended my boyfriend at the time. I didn’t think twice about the consequences of working with a romantic partner; my judgment was clouded by both his talent for the job and our smooth-sailing relationship.

However, once he started in his role, it turned out I was managing him, which dramatically shifted the dynamic between us. He grew resentful of being assigned tasks by me and overly critical of any feedback I had to give, whether it was positive or constructive. It became obvious that our relationship outside of work was affecting the culture within the agency, and we eventually broke up.

To my horror, he started to actively sabotage me by putting me in awkward situations at work, such as speaking over me on client calls, ignoring my directions on accounts, and eventually, spreading false claims about me that I was using artificial intelligence (AI) to draft all written content, which was untrue. The constant discrediting, undermining my authority, and defamation led to my being forced to quit. Should I forgive him? — Anonymous

Click here to submit your anonymous story.

There are people who, for as long as they can remember, have wanted to be founders. Others simply had an idea, and entrepreneurship was the path presented to them. Now, let me tell you the story of an entrepreneur, then aged 16 or 17, who wanted nothing more than to leave the “sundown town” in which he grew up. His two best friends, of similar ages, were about to start a clothing brand, and he only offered his services as a way out of town. “I was like, nah, fam, don’t cut me out. Well, sure you guys need a social media guy, right?” Josh Akapo, now Head of Marketing at Rise Climbing, told me about his route into entrepreneurship.

The co-founders had their first major success after launching the ARCHSAMURAI t-shirt in January 2016. “Our collaboration with Lovebox came later that year. I was just scrolling on Twitter when I stumbled upon a flyer looking for young people aged 16-24 in Tower Hamlets to do a festival merchandise campaign. We lived in Kent at the time, but we managed to blag our way in by saying we were from Tower Hamlets. It worked! We were very young and very ballsy.” Josh said in an interview with the learning platform, hundo. In time, the clothing company transitioned into ‘a creative house made up of young creators and thinkers’, working with some of the most renowned companies: Prime Video, KFC, BBC Sounds, and the NHS. archtype officially closed for business in 2025.

It was almost ten years of firefighting, every day, from the moment he woke up to the minute he closed his eyes at night, he said to me, almost confessional. For almost ten years, without a real holiday, he wrestled with the fast-paced cruelty of the industry, his ADHD, unpaid business pitches, and being responsible for the livelihoods of a dozen people. It all took a toll, and Josh paid for it with his mental health. “I mean, [I] greatly recommend it [rest]. [I] don’t recommend being forced off work due to a mental health crisis. But if you get to take some time, I recommend it because, especially in professional services and creative industries in general, we are so overworked. So overworked.” Although this advice now comes in hindsight, he rested from the work he had done and from posting on social media, including LinkedIn, where I first became aware of him.

LinkedIn posts often follow a familiar pattern—someone is either thrilled or excited to announce something, much to the disdain of the common civilian. Well, it feels like Josh is the penance for all that merrymaking; his posts rarely thrill or excite; they appear on your feed with the message of fire and brimstone. “I don’t know why I put myself through this,” he confessed. “It’s not necessarily about me, because usually I’m not in the situations I’m talking about. For example, I just made a post last week, where I was like, you know what, people are being underpaid. So someone should probably say where the pay grade should be, since no one’s saying how much people should actually be paid. Lo and behold, almost every worker in the creative industries felt like they resonated just because someone was saying the quiet part out loud.” Another of his recent posts read:

“i jUst wAnT tO seE iF aNy fr3eLAncERz hAvE jAnuArY avAiLabiLiTy 🤓” i think everyone does, because we all got ghosted / made redundant / budgets slashed / paid late for the entire duration of 2025 😁🤞🏿🙏🏿 here’s to better treatment and better fortunes for all us freelancers out there in 2026 ✨”

Josh is no longer fully freelance. He found Rise Climbing while searching for a hobby, in a bid, I assume, to grant some respite from the madness of his former day job. “Little did I know that that independent business would form part of my mental health plan to this day,” he said. “It’s one of the best communities I’ve ever been in.” He spoke about Rise like a man newly in love. He describes it as “a place that you want to wake up and do your best for”. He has also thrown himself back into music, his first ever love, under the name ‘Jalé’. “Some might say the only [love],” he joked. His latest single, Water & Air, has the tonal cadence of a 2010 Ne-Yo track, underlaid by production more in tune with the ‘alternative’ genre. Jalé is musical heritage. “My granddad later ended up bringing one of the first West African churches ever to the West in the form of CAC [The Christ Apostolic Church]. So, all the choirs and music that came out of that church…hey, I’m just using what I was supposed to in terms of the keys playing and the singing and all of the songwriting and the musicianship”.

Although he threatens to, it’s hard to believe that Josh could simply release music and be unbothered by the creative industry; you can tell he’s waiting—like a father does his prodigal son—for the industry to find its way back. “I feel like we have forgotten our usefulness and are instead just chasing the bag. And sometimes chasing the bag is not useful. If we’re going to remain relevant, if AI is not going to come and take our whole bag, you know, like people keep saying, I think being useful means remembering who we’re doing this for and it’s people. We’ve got a sense of people again. That is my hope. That is my ambition. That is all, literally, for as long as I’m in this part of the creative industries, that is all I am going to be doing”.

So it shall be. When I chatted with the man in question, it was a Friday afternoon in May. We were both thankful for the rare sunshine—a nod to the increasing prospects of summer. Josh seems to be revelling in his work, and only wants to talk about ‘people’, not “this whole KPIs, ROI, AI, BS, that doesn’t really make sense”. Of course, he’s back to posting on LinkedIn like he never left. The critic is dead, long live the critic!

Dear reader,

There are a handful of people who come across as unafraid to say the quiet parts out loud—whether calling brands out for misrepresenting themselves, mistreating freelancers, or posting job ads without the salary band. Josh Akapo, Head of Marketing at Rise Climbing, is one of them. I’m excited to reveal the cover for this month’s magazine – look, they’re ‘washing’ again!

In this age of AI, I asked Josh what he thinks about it. His response? “I don’t think of AI”. It was an interesting conversation. We spoke about his interesting career, from co-founding and running archetype (for about 10 years) with his friends, taking some time off work, and coming back to lead marketing at Rise. The article will be live next week!

We also have interesting takes from this month’s contributors, Greg Double, Creative Director at Burson, and Holly Ingram, Senior Account Manager at The Hoffman Agency.

Hope you enjoy this month’s issue.

Picture a scene from a horror movie. Now close your eyes, and imagine ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams playing over the top. The scene becomes less scary – funny, even.

Throughout the years, ads have experimented with leveraging the effects music has on our brains, and more importantly, our purse strings.

Founding father of advertising, David Ogilvy, famously said, “if you have nothing to say, sing it”, yet in the same breath claims, “advertisers who believe in the selling power of jingles have never had to sell anything”.

It’s safe to say the industry is still divided, but music, memory, and behaviour certainly aren’t. Let’s dive in.

Original songs in adverts

Without the sound, are you able to identify this advert? Can you remember the song? The brand? The story?

If you guessed Milky Way, you are correct. This ad began circulating in 1989 and was broadcast all the way up to the early 2000s. For many, it ignites nostalgia - and this is no accident. Music lights up nearly all parts of our brains; to get technical, specifically the amygdala and hippocampus, which are the parts responsible for emotion and memory. If catchy enough, the music in the ads plants ‘earworms’ in our minds that trigger a positive association when we hear the song.

If you didn’t guess Milky Way, what did you guess? Or have you never seen it? Your uncertainty itself is evidence of how weak immediate brand recall can be when it’s not tightly linked to branding. Much like a baby duck who thinks the first thing it sees is its mother, our brains work in a similar way. Memory is rooted in how we felt at the time, so if the brand name/image isn’t woven tightly into that, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to remember it – at least straight away.

Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday!

For many Brits, Jess Glynne and Jet2 are synonymous, thanks to over a decade of her song ‘Hold My Hand’ being used relentlessly in advertising and on the planes themselves. Although some are frustrated by the songs’ overuse, there’s no doubt that the brand association is there.

However, in Summer 2025, a new earworm came to town. The classic ‘Hold My Hand’ song was overlayed with a voiceover done by Zoë Lister. For those familiar with the internet, you’ll no doubt recognise the opening lines of the audio: ‘Nothing beats a Jet2holiday!’

Did you read that in the original voice-over style?

For those who are perhaps unfamiliar, the UK social media space picked up the audio initially last summer and used it to layover videos and images of their tragic holiday mishaps – waterslide fails, drunk moments, missed flights. Soon, the trend became international - much like Jet2 flights themselves – and Jet2 experienced a £5.3 million revenue increase following the campaign. Wowza!

But why was it so popular? Well, while a full trend deep-dive is beyond the scope of this article, there is some insight from a Guardian interview with social media strategist Adam Gordon that can help us understand why the viral success of the campaign does not come as a shock.

“…the hold my hand line was always married to an on-screen POV shot of someone holding someone’s hand – a classic Instagram holiday shot – so the seeds were sown early, and deliberately.”

In a nutshell, the visuals are responsible for the success, and the audio earworm was just a tool to help it get there. Do you think the same rings true for the Milky Way ad?

Jolly jingles

To find out, we need to strip it right back.

The first-ever jingle was released 100 years ago by Wheaties in 1926. It started as an experiment, where a vocal quartet were paid $15 per performance (about $200 in today’s money) to sing the jingle live intermittently between their sets, but the success of the campaign quickly changed advertising forever.

Since then, many brands have used jingles as an attempt to force their way into the memory stores of consumers. There are too many to list, but here are some of my favourites. See if you can fill in the blanks.

• Autoglass repair, Autoglass _____

• Go com______! Go ____pare!

• Compare the market! Simples!

If you had a smile on your face while guessing those, then the earworm has done its job!

Conclusion

I think we are using jingles less because of the short-lived nature of trending soundbites on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Nobody wants an expiry date! Jet2’s viral success proves that audio can stick in our minds and translate to brand recognition, but today’s earworms burn bright and fade fast.

A thought to leave you with: the future of music in ads may no longer be about creating nostalgia that lasts a lifetime, but more about capturing attention for just long enough to stay relevant.

Originating in Etruria, Ancient Italy, but modernised and popularised by Black Americans and hip-hop culture, grillz have long been a way to tweak smiles and turn you into the ‘cool kid’. In 2025, Heinz saw the fight between its consumers and their sachets as its duty to quell. Customers shouldn’t need an apron to open a sauce packet, right? So, as part of a new campaign, Heinz Brazil created Heinz Grillz, tapping into a consumer truth that these packets are not always easy to open! The activation drew on the drip of hip-hop culture and fashion to create something so inherently Black American, but it appealed to global audiences in a specific way. This was mirrored in the tagline “You drippin’ without losing the sauce”.

The execution felt like a familiar effort in cultural curiosity, similar to how Nando’s and Wingstop have with their various campaigns and ambassador choices. I first caught wind of this in early 2026, and it made me smile because it felt like Heinz was paying attention to something special.

Heinz was showing off a flair typical of its marketing ideas, like the Sauce Packet Jacket, the limited-edition Ed Sheeran-style tattooed bottles, or having DJ Mustard create his own limited edition, ‘Mustard’. There’s a similar texture in this to the 2010s’ movement of putting food on everything. From phone cases to jewellery, to even food-inspired tattoos and brand logo tattoos. Food is life, I guess. Everyone is fighting over Gen-Z attention, and pairing food with culture always seems to do it.

Heinz might have achieved a presence that can put them almost anywhere. Brands are moving towards becoming lifestyle entities that can show up in music, fashion and social media and dominate their niche simultaneously. Heinz already has a foothold to climb into different worlds and spaces. With the universality of ketchup on their side, it makes sense that Heinz could tap into African American history, culture and fashion.

Grillz are jewellery, and Heinz was trying to speak the language of something trendy, like how brands typically comment under TikTok videos. I wouldn’t be surprised if Heinz UK leaned into interacting with Gen-Z in even more similar ways, meeting them where they’re at, and tying their mission to even more delicious contemporary ideas. I think there are plenty of ways to make this happen. Today, it seems to be fashion. Tomorrow, it could be something else. Perhaps they’ll make a TikTok sound inspired by the poopy sound that comes out of their almost-empty bottles. Who knows, but I am here for it.

Whenever I see two or more co-founders, I often wonder how they decided who would become ‘CEO’. For many companies, it often comes down to personalities; typically, something like this: Steve Jobs, the visionary, and Steve Wozniak, the brilliant engineer, plugging away. For other companies like Facebook, the story is maybe more complicated. When I spoke with Hayel Wartemberg (MD) and Ndubuisi Uchea (CEO), co-founders of Word on the Curb, a few weeks ago, I just had to ask.

“He’s smarter than me, it’s easy, he’s smarter than me”, Hayel said instantly. We all burst out laughing, but he was being serious. “He’s good, he’s a brilliant face of the business. He deals with stuff that I honestly couldn’t, wouldn’t even dream of dealing with, like the financials, accounting and forecasting, and those are CEO elements…what he might do is say that I’m being too humble, but that is God’s honest truth. He is a brilliant CEO, and it just makes far more sense in terms of our skills as well”. Ndubuisi—or Ndu, as he’s casually called—chipped in after, walking around a filming set, and dialling in from his phone. “When you first meet him [Hayel], you feel his intelligence, but it’s intelligence in a way that is translatable. And I wouldn’t limit it to him as a managing director, because he is a phenomenal talker. It was very easy for him to take the reins of someone who was imparting or meant to impart wisdom on the team.”

The company Word on the Curb was founded in 2015, but the content creation platform existed on YouTube before then. In 2013 and 2014, they released a series of spoken word videos featuring Jaja Soze, Theresa Lola, Samuel King, Hollie McNish, and more. In 2017, their popular blind-dating show, Back2Back, which has produced some of their most popular work, launched.

Some of their early videos were explicitly political. In 2014, then Prime Minister David Cameron named Hayel and Ndu ‘Points of Light’ for their work promoting freedom of speech. In 2015, Hayel spoke to The Guardian about their new film, ‘Don’t Close Your Eyes’—a ‘focus on their generation’s apathy to the realities of global warming’. During our conversation, he described his politics simply as wanting people to be given a fair chance to live the best life possible. This mindset has invariably affected how the company operates; its work sometimes appears to redress specific social imbalances. “Everything we do is innately political”, he said to me. Word on the Curb now describes itself as an ‘audience engagement agency connecting you with young, diverse audiences through consumer insights and creative strategy’. Beneath the marketing lingo, the company’s core doesn’t seem to have changed since inception; you still get the feeling that it’s always been about understanding how people relate to one another.

Hayel described how they’ve stayed relevant and achieved back-to-back wins over the years: a Media For All [MEFA] Awards win, a UKBCN Awards shortlist, and a listing on Campaign UK’s 10 Trailblazers list in 2025 alone. The secret sauce is doing the hard work—spending money and time to create content that reflects the lived experiences of the groups they’re trying to reach. “But what you do get back is engagement. You get people who feel as though you are there for them, you are representing them, you are telling their stories, you are providing meaning and value and things that feel as though they sit within their world,” he said. “And I think that’s the problem that a lot of brands, agencies and organisations have, which is that they expect a relationship with people that is unilateral and not bilateral. They expect that you can dangle a carrot in front of somebody, and they’ll just give. But the most culturally relevant brands, agencies and organisations in the world have done so by being present in people’s lives over a long period of time.”

Earlier in the conversation, Hayel also praised Ndu’s clairvoyance. “He’s been able to predict where the market is headed in our particular space ahead of the curve many times over and make suggestions as to where we need to be playing in the next twelve to eighteen months or two to three years. And invariably, those things have always ended up being the case.” I wanted to know what Ndu could see in his crystal ball about the next eighteen months. “The industry just looks like more of an understanding of how to use AI within it. You’ll have more AI-generated films, AI-generated comms, AI-generated marketing, AI-all of that. I think it would be embedded. But I’m always a believer that wherever one thing goes, look at the opposite. The way AI is dominating the space, the opposite will also dominate, which is ‘human’. And I feel like anybody who has a good grasp on leveraging human thinking, human truths and human storytelling will just win. And to me, that’s us.”

He then said something that I frankly didn’t see coming, maybe because it was a throwaway joke. “So hopefully in eighteen months, I’ll say to you, Mofe, how much do you need to keep doing this [the magazine]? Give us seventy-five per cent, and here’s some money because we’ve just sold our business, because people have understood the importance of human insights. Hopefully, that answers your questions.” Yes, it did, and I had more—but not before I offered to take the money with open arms. I was curious about his comment on exiting. I wanted to know if that was the objective: to sell. “No, it wasn’t. We never built this to sell. We built it out of passion, we built it out of our own interests and seeing a gap in content creation at the time, and we’ve managed to make a big name for ourselves within that industry. So when you get to that point, it becomes obvious to think about how to make it bigger. I think we’d be doing ourselves, our community and the work we do, a little bit of a disservice if we don’t pay attention to what strategic partnerships, acquisition or whatever, looks like with bigger agencies with more spending power to grow and scale and do what we do in multi-markets and with a lot more impact ultimately”.

In the UK, Word on the Curb is one of the few recognisable names in ‘youth engagement’ and even fewer share its specific business model, which has proved successful thus far. It combines insights and strategy with a creative and distribution arm—a common mix—but also owns its audience, and this could be the main selling point come any exit negotiations. If, within the next eighteen months, the communications industry believes in ‘human’ again and Word on the Curb has new owners, then Hayel would’ve been right about his co-founder, and I will be there, still with open arms, reminding Ndu of his ‘promise’. Anyway, until then.

Dear reader,

Most passion projects start with a common story: an idea pops into your head, and you can’t help but scratch the itch. When I started Whataboutisms (and this magazine), the only objective was to bring an idea to life. That’s how it goes—well, at least for me. A few months ago, I had an itch again. I wanted to interview two people who also know a thing or two about building passion projects. The cover for this issue is Hayel Wartemberg and Ndubuisi (Ndu) Uchea, co-founders of popular UK youth engagement agency Word on the Curb.

Hayel and Ndu have created one of the most influential youth platforms in the UK—you might have seen their online blind dating show, Back2Back. There’s something about their projects that always seems to be about connecting people, no matter where they’re from. It was great to speak to them about the company’s origins and where it might go next. The full article will be published next week.

In this issue, we will also share articles from John-Paul Kurunmi, newly promoted Account Executive at Hope & Glory, who has previously written for this magazine, and Bronte Littlewood, an award-winning Junior Creative at The PHA Group.

The sun’s out, a new issue of the magazine is out, what’s not to love?

“Too corporate for the cool kids. Too cool for the corporate ones.”

I read that on LinkedIn a month ago and stopped scrolling - which, given my fried attention span and the sea of “what my dog taught me about leadership” posts on my feed, means something.

A creative strategist, someone who’d built campaigns for Fortune 500 companies and DJ’d the same weekend, was writing about the odd no man’s land of his career - permanently in the middle, fluent in both languages, fully claimed by neither. It wasn’t necessarily surprising, but it certainly was the most accurately I’d ever seen my own experience described by someone else.

I’ve spent over a decade doing PR and brand strategy across music, fashion, and global corporates. They are worlds that live in the same worlds, but don’t speak the same language, where a lot of your energy goes into translation.

For me, that’s never been just professional. I’m mixed race; I grew up in a melting pot of cultures, and code-switching - that quick, semi-conscious audit of which version of yourself to be as you walk through a door - started as a kid. Growing up in South London in the 90s, reading a space by energy alone wasn’t a workplace soft skill, it was just how you stayed safe, so you get pretty good at it pretty quickly.

The professional version carries its own friction. In creative spaces, I’ve felt too structured, too commercially aware, too shaped by years of C-level pushback to fully let go. In corporate spaces, it flips - too instinctive, too culturally specific, watching references that feel completely obvious to me land with a wry, diplomatic nod. If you know the correct response to Giggs’ Talking the Hardest, you’ll know what I mean. If you don’t, that’s sort of the point.

That subtle uncertainty of whether you’ve read the room right follows you everywhere, and after a while, honestly, it gets old.

Here’s the part the LinkedIn post didn’t quite get to. I wasn’t code-switching because I didn’t know who I was, I was doing it because the rooms I was in weren’t ready for who I was. When you suggest a collab with the most exciting up-and-coming fashion brand, then end up with branded product mailers and a press release for the 10th time, you learn where to spend your creative energy.

Over time, something gradually shifted. It was part seniority, part becoming a parent, twice - sleep deprivation burns off that performative layer very quickly.

But something external changed too, something I’ve only recently put my finger on. The industry started demanding “authenticity” so loudly, in every brief, every pitch, every panel talk, that at some point, the coolest thing you could do was show up undiluted. When everyone’s demanding it that urgently, you start to think, fuck it, let’s do it.

And when you do, something clicks. The thing you’d spent years being hyper-conscious of, never quite belonging in any one room, carrying references that didn’t always land, stops feeling like a liability and starts feeling like your edge.

The post frames this as “bulldozing a new lane into existence,” and I’m here for that energy, but for me, it’s been less about smashing things and more the quiet freedom to stop auditing myself at the door. The lane was already there, I’d just been told, in a hundred small ways, to use a different one.

Most cool agencies need structure, most corporations need cultural relevance, and if you’ve spent long enough living between both, your currency is being fluent in each.

The strategist asked what it means to be a professional creative in 2026. I think hundreds of people read that post and stopped scrolling for the same reason I did. I’m finally in a place where I can reference The Wire, Skepta and campaign KPIs in the same conversation and not overthink it. The industry didn’t give me permission to do that, it just finally caught up.

What role do comms professionals at tech companies play in crafting and spreading particular discourses? That was the question that spurred my recent research at the Oxford Internet Institute.

My answer – born out of interviews with a dozen senior comms leaders at huge Silicon Valley companies – is a process I call “story work”. It starts with comms execs taking inputs from multiple internal and external sources, then translating and performing them into persuasive outputs that change how people view the world.

I now see this process almost everywhere in the tech industry. When a thought leader’s once-fringe idea gets mainstreamed by a new startup (witness Peter Thiel’s recent influence). Or a billionaire CEO’s new corporate manifesto drives industry conversation (Dario Amodei and Travis Kalanick providing just the latest examples). Story work is a core task of comms professionals, even if much of their labour is invisible to the world outside.

A new mental model for discourse creation

After 20 years working in tech comms, I knew that the tech sector was besotted with the power of stories. You can see that manifest in every product launch, investor deck, and vision statement. But I wanted to understand exactly where these discourses and the ideas behind them came from. That drove my return to academia.

As my supervisor emphasised, I was “doing science, not journalism”. A few anecdotes wouldn’t make for a convincing thesis. I was expected to create a theoretical framework with explanatory and even predictive power. Fortunately, my interviews with Silicon Valley comms leaders provided rare and unvarnished insights from inside the world’s biggest tech firms.

What I heard has given me a new mental model for how the tech industry’s discourses get created. Operating at the intersection of their organisation and the outside world, comms professionals play a key role in turning often obscure industry ideas into compelling stories for mass consumption.

Phase 1: inputs

Story work begins with inputs, which comms professionals absorb from four main sources. First, there are “tech thinkers” – the thought leaders, TED Talk-ers and Silicon Valley intellectuals who popularise cutting-edge concepts. There are also internal research teams, often made up of computer scientists, psychologists and even philosophers, who provide their companies with proprietary insights into how technology and business are changing.

Then there are the product and engineering teams – the Jony Ives of the world, who design and build the software or hardware these firms sell and whose beliefs determine how those products work. Lastly, we can’t forget company CEOs, who are often heavily involved in shaping corporate discourse and can act as “chief storyteller” for the business (especially if they’re a founder).

Phase 2: acts of translation

Comms professionals then turn those inputs into a story compelling enough to engage outsiders, such as customers and policymakers.

Comms leaders consistently described this as an act of translation, interpreting technical language and corporate jargon so it makes sense to their audience. Like any good interpreter, they have to edit judiciously, choose the appropriate words, and even redefine things a little as they go. As thoughtful executives, they don’t simply take what they’re given – they regularly reflect on whether their story is sufficiently differentiated and consider ways it might need to adapt as the world changes.

Only then is their work ready to be “performed” by the company or its leaders, whether in a keynote presentation, industry event or media interview. This is the most visible part of comms professionals’ work to the outside world. But most of their labour has already happened, during those preparatory stages inside their organisation’s walls.

Phase 3: outputs

The final stage of the story work process is in their outputs. It’s here that technology companies present us with an image of an increasingly tech-enabled future. They tell us that soon everything will run on software, almost every physical task will be digitised, and every organisation will become, in effect, a tech company.

A lot of this vision is born from the fact that tech companies use themselves as both a laboratory and their own best case study. They regularly build tools to solve internal problems before realising they can sell them to their customers. And they bring prospects and media into their facilities to show off how they work. The result is to embed “the logic of tech” as the standard everyone else should copy.

Embracing theory

As an industry, comms is notoriously resistant to embracing theory. But by listening to the experience of comms leaders from major firms, I hoped to create a framework we can all recognise. One that acknowledges both the factors we’re bound by and the profound influence our role still has – in shaping the stories of our collective future.

Sometime toward the end of 2025, Americans discovered Black Scottish people on TikTok in the same way Christopher Columbus discovered America. The Americans had found a video made by a Sterling K. Brown-looking Black-Scottish man, and could not believe their ears. “Baby, we did not know about y’all. Let me tell you something, I am learning so much right now”, one user said. Soon, my feed morphed into the inevitable lambasting of the American education system. If you looked away from the pitifulness, it made for hilarious viewing. I think about this now, as I write, recalling the first time I heard Mercy Abel speak—she was...Scottish? In my defence, I saw her at London networking events so frequently that I simply assumed she was based here. While speaking with Mercy on a Teams call in March, I learned that this wasn’t purely a coincidence.

“If you know me, you’re like, oh, great, Mercy’s here again. But if you don’t know me, they’re like, “Who is this girl? Why is she everywhere? Like, I feel like I must know her.” And it was a very strategic step for me, especially, I would say at year two to four of my career, I literally was like, if I don’t speak about myself, who’s going to know me? I live in Scotland”.

“A Glaswegian at heart,” Mercy has lived in Scotland since she was one year old, when her family relocated from Tanzania. So while she frequents other parts of the UK for work, she’s never truly left home. Her first graduate role was amidst the 2020 pandemic chaos, like many ‘COVID graduates’. It was a job she’d secured through the power of connection (Take a drink every time you read ‘connect’ or ‘connection’). She connected with a New York-based British entrepreneur, Hugh Thomas—“a white man, bless his heart”—at a time when the protests for Black lives were a matter of global concern; when Western countries were trying to reconcile the death of George Floyd with their need to do more for Black people. He then connected her with his university mate, Asad Dhunna, founder of The Unmistakables, a diversity and inclusion consultancy, who turned out to be her first boss. Asad would also be her first guest when she launched her Gen-Z careers podcast, ‘audacity of we’ in September 2022.

Mercy has never applied for a role. For her second job at PR agency, John Doe, she was headhunted following the launch and publicity for her podcast. “This isn’t a brag, it’s proof that life rewards you when you put yourself out there & grow a network,” she wrote on LinkedIn. “People have a lot of fear around being visible, right? They have a lot of fear around posting online or showing up in spaces, showing more of their personality. And I understand why. However, it’s like exposure therapy”, she said during our call, gesticulating. “The more you’re exposed to something, the easier it becomes. And the first time that that happens, it’s really scary, and it can shake you to your core. But the more you trust the process and go for it: the art of visibility, the art of, you know, being seen…And I think this is why my networks have grown so much, and the reasons why people might think I live in London, because of all the connections that I have.”

At this point, one could assume that Mercy is a bit of a ‘dive in head first’ type of fearless—that’s hardly the case. I read aloud a LinkedIn comment under one of her posts from Kamiqua Lake, founder of communications agency Coldr and UK Black Comms Network (UK BCN): “You are the definition of feeling the fear and doing it anyway.” Mercy, who has been the Chair of the UK BCN Middle Leaders group since July 2023, was immediately overcome with emotion; she raised her hand to her mouth as if to mask her mild blush and thanked me for pointing this out. “When she says feeling the fear and doing it anyway, it’s very apt. Like that is probably the basis of everything I’ve done. I feel like everything I’ve done has been quite unconventional, and it’s always been in unprecedented times. So it makes me feel good. It makes me feel aligned…I’m entering that chapter of founder life, entrepreneurship, it’s new. But something that I heard that I’ve really, you know, kept to my core and keeping me moving is that ‘it’s not hard, it’s just new’”.

Yes, Mercy, who, up until now, had been a spin instructor, gymnast, internship programme director, communities manager, inclusion consultant, award-winning communications professional, and podcaster, has added yet another feather to her cap: founder. She captioned her jack-of-all-trades-ness in a recent Instagram post as “the feminine urge to do it all.” Announcing her new venture on LinkedIn, she said: “…I have built something…Introducing Who You Know (WYK) - an early careers and intergenerational teams consultancy offering workplace insights, intergenerational teams support, access programmes, network building and recruitment opportunities across the UK.” Her company is aptly named; she believes that “it’s a very who-you-know industry. So why don’t we play in its face and just be like, okay, fine, if it’s a who-you-know industry, let’s not see it as a barrier”. It is often said that naming the problem is the crucial first step in problem-solving. Well, Mercy Abel loves to name the problem. The other initiative she co-founded while she was at John Doe was called UNLOCKED. Why? You guessed it: she wanted to “unlock the door”. “We give you the opportunity to come through. It’s up to the interns to then take the opportunity with both hands and start building that career for themselves. And a lot of them have, and that’s what I’m really proud of”.

Of her legacy so far, she spoke of wanting to give people the opportunity to choose, to back themselves, to further themselves, and to create the life they want. “So whenever people feel like I’ve made such an impact on their life or their career, that they want to relay that feedback back to me, it’s just the reassurance that I need that, yeah, what I’m doing is not only fulfilling, but it’s making an impact. And I just want to do more of that. I want to do more of it!”

Dear reader,

You’ve heard the saying, ‘Jack of all trades, master of none,’ haven’t you? As someone who’s always been interested in learning and doing several things, I prefer the first part of that saying. How wonderful is it to explore so many parts of the world and discover that there’s so much more?

That is why I’m excited to unveil the theme for this month’s cover – ‘Mercy Abel unlocks another character’.

Sometime in early March, Mercy and I sat down to discuss her background, motivations, ambitions, and her new venture, which she officially opens for business this month. In my piece, I say of her: “Mercy, who, up until now, had been a spin instructor, gymnast, internship programme director, communities manager, inclusion consultant, award-winning communications professional, and podcaster, has added yet another feather to her cap: founder.”

Stay tuned for the full piece next week.

Also excited to share other pieces from Pete Marcus, Co-Founder, Delphi, and Axe + Saw’s new Director, Arun Lloyd.

This is for the multi-hyphenates. Remember that you can master anything—everything—you want. But who cares if you’re a master of none? You’re literally a Jack of all trades.

I hope you love reading this issue.

Have you ever noticed your voice shake when you speak? Perhaps you’re in an unfamiliar environment or a new company. Conversely, you know the people and place well, but it is the words themselves that feel unprecedented, unsaid. I’ve had my fair share of shaky-voice incidents, though recognition of these moments tends to arrive just before I open my mouth. I instead discern them by what first takes place in my throat. A certain tightness, a dry compression and contraction, floods that area of the body. Cruelly, my awareness of the corporeal event generates further tension within, as I anxiously await the more visible symptoms to inevitably—and publicly—flag my inner constriction. If still compelled (or feeling obliged) to speak, the right eye twitches, swallows are ill-timed, and, of course, the voice breaks and shakes.

It’s a longstanding affliction of mine, although not unique to me. In school, to be called upon to speak in class meant at least a couple of vocal quivers, even for the most confident of pupils. Then, there were those who utterly despised the act of reading aloud. Eyes down, mumbling and cursing the teacher who subjected them to this humiliation. I fell somewhere in the middle, often wanting to contribute, but not wishing to be seen as wanting that. My demeanour of affected indifference overrode the guttural quakes that occasionally emerged. Though rarely taking the opportunity to speak, I nonetheless welcomed any chance given with open arms, even if my face conveyed a rather different story.

Yet, I was no stranger to pharyngeal limitations. They simply occurred outside the classroom, more often than at my desk. I noticed that, around certain schoolmates, my voice became smaller, croakier. Time and time again, when speaking in front of these people, I felt the need to clear my throat of some sort of congestion or blockage. Despite being vaguely aware of also feeling less comfortable, less myself, in their presence, it was a long time until I made a direct link between this and my increasingly tight throat.

In fact, it was years before I saw any correspondence between my emotions and my body. Yes, I perspired when nervous, cried when sad, felt hot when angry, but these concepts were familiar to me from infancy, cropping up frequently in early curricula and children’s books. Less common was the idea that your feelings can cause entire body parts to tense up, clench and wring, in a process that sometimes feels more subconscious than crying itself. Without the audible change in my voice around certain individuals, I am unsure whether I would have been aware of the persistent strain in my throat.

Indeed, all evidence suggests I would have dismissed such a suggestion as utterly ridiculous. During these years, an older friend of mine told me that she had stayed in a therapeutic centre as a teenager because of anxiety that manifested as a shrinking sensation in her throat. When the stress had gotten so severe as to render her virtually silent, her parents felt it necessary to look beyond the conventional doctor’s visit. There were others on the retreat experiencing similar issues and, after some weeks of holistic rehabilitation, she told me they had been cured. The details of how this was achieved have not remained with me as much as the notion that my friend’s throat had become a sort of vessel for her worries. Perhaps I remember this part so acutely because, at the time, I didn’t buy it one bit. Yet, all I had was her word, which she had never given me reason to doubt. By the time I met her, she had become a singer and guitarist with a number of live gigs under her belt, so accomplished in her second language that she was studying an undergraduate degree in English. Whether it had been before, self-expression was not an obstacle for her any longer.

My cynicism met its match when I began attending speech and drama classes that same year. Here, I learned about the importance of the breath. For the entirety of my first ninety-minute class, I lay in a supine twist on the floor and breathed in and out, in and out, in and out. These breaths were deeper and fuller than those I was used to. They came and went from the pit of my stomach, rather than my chest. As the heat travelled up and down, it warmed my throat, oiling it for use. According to my drama teacher, this ‘diaphragmatic breathing’ was crucial to projecting one’s voice while performing. After all, what’s the point in reciting Hedda Gabler if no one can hear you? We spent the start of every class in this same way and, though it was challenging initially, I was soon able to summon breaths deep from within. The beneficial effect on the volume and richness of my voice was undeniable—squawking became a thing of the past—but there was something in the way I felt, too: calmer, more confident and able to hold a room, the same way my friend did at her gigs.

Now, almost a decade after my final drama exam, I’ve forgotten most of my monologues and wouldn’t be able to tell you very much about the Stanislavski Method, but one thing that has stayed with me is the value of breathing. I’ve since lain in many supine twists, no longer on the floor of a drama classroom, but in yoga studios and my bedroom, as I release and let go of the day’s worries with each inhale and exhale. Simultaneously, the most available and most powerful tool we have in our possession, the breath’s ability to ease tension and anxiety, indicates the deep interconnectedness between our bodies and our feelings. If you’re anything like I was, perhaps this seems like such an obvious statement that it doesn’t require thinking about. But to breathe, really breathe, through tension, is the most foolproof method I’ve found so far to alleviate a twitchy eye, a shaky voice and a tight throat.

In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.

I look like my father, allegedly. To circumvent that, I’ve grown my hair out, whilst he remains bald by choice. You might be able to connect the dots based on our looks and realise, oh, that’s his son, but on paper, we couldn’t be further apart.

For starters, he enjoys football, and I’m more of a basketball fan. He’s a religious Chelsea fan, and I’m a lukewarm Philadelphia 76ers fan; my virtual attendance is dependent on whether I’m bothered to stay up and catch the games. My father, on the other hand, is a dedicated fan, still paying for Sky TV so that he can watch games on Sky Sports, even though the rest of the house uses streaming services. He’s a man of limited words, and I’m a writer, yapper. He studied art at a degree level, and I draw stickmen with three legs…and so on and so forth. So, there’s that.

Beyond his paternal duties to make sure I get home safely every night, my dad and I don’t talk much, and it’s not out of animosity. I remember the time I was curious about how speech formed in his head, and he revealed that he thinks in Yoruba and translates it into English. So, he sometimes struggles to express himself in English, as there might not be an English equivalent for what he’s thinking. But the one thing we do understand about each other is music, which is a gift he’s given not only to me but also to my little sister.

In 2008, I’m scrawny and full of energy, sitting in the bleachers of our local leisure centre, waiting for my swimming lesson. A pack of jawbreakers costs 20p and Fredo chocolate bars are less than whatever extortionate price they are now—a Gen Alpha fever dream. My dad is watching my brothers swim with a slight look of concern on his face. He doesn’t like the pool because he has traumatic memories attached to big bodies of water. That event is also why he is so adamant that all four of us learn how to swim. I’m hard to entertain, and he has parted ways with his phone to keep me quiet. I click the app with two quavers joined together and see three songs listed. Year 3000 by Busted, Right Now (nah nah nah) by Akon and Sweet Dreams by Beyoncé. I don’t have a phone at this time, and all I do is read, but because I’m so annoying and so expensive, I have already wolfed down the new book my mum bought me the week before. Now, there is nothing new for me to read. My dad hands me his earphones. The rest is history.

As I grew, I became more aware of the things he liked to listen to. In his car was a mixture of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, P-Square, Craig David, JLS, and much more. We were never alone in his car. I would grow up to learn that my dad was a frequent party-goer before I was born, and that disco music made him move, even if he was the only one dancing at the function.

January 2026, I’m cooking in the kitchen, reminding myself I have to wash up. This feels masochistic. I have my speaker with me and since my Dad and sister are also in the kitchen, I play songs that we love in common and for the next fifteen minutes, we’re singing together, jumping from Akon to Rihanna to Bruno Mars, and during that moment I realised why my Dad and I were interchangeable as people to some; why they would hear me speak and know I am his son. Maybe it wasn’t intentional, but he had given me music. That was his language, his invitation to be like him. I will never forget that moment.

We have found a way to connect beyond words, and this has helped me appreciate our similarities as well as our differences. No matter what I do to make sure I don’t look like him, there will always be something inside us both that will always be the same because he gave it to me.

There are only a handful of people who decide which stories get published about the public relations industry. Although she thinks of herself in more modest terms, Evie Barrett joined that exclusive list when she was promoted to Deputy News Editor of PRWeek UK in June 2025, only a month before turning twenty-four.

“I’m not sure I personally have as much influence over the industry”, she said in a way that suggests that she had thought about this before. “It’s tricky, especially having never worked in PR, to feel like I’m a fountain of knowledge on these things”. Yet, it seems like she’s always being courted by the industry’s top executives. The first time Evie and I met for coffee, she’d just had lunch with Greg Jones, European CEO of MSQ agency Smarts, at a nearby venue. And when we met again recently at the same joint, she was returning from her meeting with the sports agency, Premier. When she arrived, I was fully set up and had ordered some green tea. She sat opposite me, my laptop and notebook between us.

It’s understandable that Evie would be reserved about her contributions to the industry if she doesn’t think it’s a rare feat. “I think Haymarket [PRWeek’s parent company], in general, is quite good at trusting its young talent with positions of authority. There are various people in their twenties at other Haymarket titles in Deputy Editor roles of sorts,” she told me. Her smile at that moment bore a strong resemblance to coyness. I could not help but think she was genuine; she never seems over-the-top; to celebrate her most consequential promotion yet, she drove back home to visit her family—mother, father, and younger brother—for dinner. “Nothing too dramatic.” She simply got on with the work.

Evie was born and raised in Basingstoke, Hampshire. Although she didn’t have a fancy education, by her own admission, she was still the first in her family to go to university. As a kid, she liked English and Maths—a rare combination—but figured that whatever she did long-term “needed an element of creativity”. Since math wasn’t a viable path to achieve this, she chose words over numbers. She chose journalism, earning a BA from Kingston University (KU) in 2022. Like many journalists who have come before her, she wrote for the school paper, The River Newspaper, and in perfect foreshadowing, served as its News Editor. A simple Google search shows that in 2020, Evie won KU’s Most Promising Journalist award, and in 2022, she was named KU’s News Reporter of the Year.

Later in our conversation, Evie would make a stronger case for creativity and, ironically, sound like a fountain of knowledge. “I’d like to see the PR industry have a bit more faith in itself. Because I think, at the moment, especially for consumer PR, it’s difficult. It’s rare that you see consumer PR agencies that just do that [consumer PR] nowadays,” she says in response to what she hopes the industry can change about itself. “Agencies are adapting by taking on more social media work or more integrated briefs. But I hope that PR can prove its worth at its core by showing that genuine creative ideas that earn attention are still what is best for a brand. PR still has value, in that a good idea, that doesn’t need paid spend behind it, is still the most powerful thing above all”.

On the 12th of May 2022, PRWeek released the first episode of its ‘Beyond the Noise’ podcast. In doing so, it adapted to the needs of the changing media consumer. So while Evie trained to be a writer, she now finds herself as one of the podcast’s hosts. “I think public speaking generally is something that I’ve had to become better at. It’s not something I necessarily thought I’d be signing up to do when I became a journalist. I think a lot of people get into journalism because they like writing, but nowadays you have to host podcasts, speak on panels and conferences, and things like that. So you do have to work on the confidence side of it in terms of speaking.” Strangely, the work she’s proudest of since joining the magazine is her podcast interviews. “The nicest ones are where I’ve interviewed someone who is maybe well known, outside the PR sphere. I can send it to my family, so they can understand what I do”. We both laughed.

As if podcasting wasn’t enough, she had to speak with me, and this time, on the other side of questioning. But I think she prefers to be the one asking the questions. “It’s quite intimidating. I mean, I’ve never envied people I’m interviewing because I know it’s a much easier job to sit and ask questions and wait for an answer than it is to actually think about what response you’re going to give and how you might be quoted”. After I turned off the recording, she just had to ask me a question of her own, “Did you get everything you needed?”

Dear reader,

Let me start with the obvious: this is the first issue of SoWhat, a magazine born from Whataboutisms but also, in its own right, from a different need.

By starting this magazine, I have successfully scratched an itch; I started this magazine because I wanted to read it. I’ve longed for a publication that combines many of the things I love—communications, narrative literature, humour, cartoons—and I hope this turns out to be that. The name choice is deliberate. SoWhat is the five-year-old child asking “why” about everything (or rather “so what?”). It is a communication magazine, but it will reflect the world; we will publish art, fashion, science, politics, books, and everything else under God’s green earth.

Just like Whataboutisms, this publication will publish everyone, from those with the loudest microphones to those who exist on the fringes. Everyone should have an opportunity to voice their opinions on issues they truly care about.

For this first issue, I spoke with PRWeek Deputy Editor Evie Barrett on her fairly quick journey to the position and her aspirations for herself and the industry. We also discuss her upbringing and how that influenced her route to journalism. This was immensely fun; to sit with someone, listen to them, and explore their thoughts together. There are also works by other writers I’m excited about in this issue—mostly personal essays exploring untraditional means of communication. I hope you love reading everything as much as I loved putting this together.

Thank you to Toni Adeoye for his artistic wizardry, Morayo Ibidunni for her organisation, and Greg Double for his overall creative input.