Ad-verse Reads: 'Adland’s Progressive Gaze' by Steve Harrison

A brave, necessary, and ultimately incomplete corrective.

Sir John Hegarty is at an awards ceremony. He’s there to entertain, to bestow wisdom, to remind the room what this industry is supposed to be for. Asked what single quality makes truly successful, memorable advertising, he thinks for a few seconds. Then he says it: irreverence.

He then goes upstairs. He watches pretty much every award go to a social purpose campaign without a scintilla of irreverence amongst them. “I recall racing to the bar as the last gong was handed out,” writes Steve Harrison, who was there, “muttering ‘kill me now’.”

That scene is the best moment in Adland’s Progressive Gaze. It’s funny and sad in equal measure. The gap between “irreverence” and “kill me now” is, in miniature, the entire argument of the book. An industry that knows what it admires. An industry that rewards something else entirely. An industry that has, somewhere along the way, lost the nerve to be itself.

Harrison is right about all of that. The question is, what caused it?

The prosecution

Adland’s Progressive Gaze is a polemic — well-written, frequently sharp, and consciously provocative — from a veteran copywriter who has had quite enough, thank you very much, and has decided to say so at length. If you’ve read the masterful Howard Gossage biography Changing the World Is the Only Fit Work for a Grown Man, you’ll know Harrison diligently researches his targets and, as you’d expect for one of advertising’s most decorated copywriters, is skilled at balancing precision with playfulness in his writing.

His charge sheet, summarised: purpose advertising has colonised the awards circuit; DEI language has imposed groupthink on agencies that exist to produce uncomfortable ideas; and a once-irreverent industry has made itself safe, corporate, and boring — then dressed the ennui up in the browbeating language of social justice.

Harrison’s specific targets are instructive. He dedicates the opening eight pages of the book to Jaguar’s late-2024 “Copy Nothing” campaign — a radical departure from the brand’s heritage that he dismisses as “a vehicle for the creative team’s progressive point of view.” Not only is that Jaguar ad emblematic of peak woke, he argues, but also a watershed: proof that “the brew had gone flat” and that “the marketing and advertising industry — and society in general — had had quite enough of the uninhibited progressive proselytising it had unleashed on the world.”

He takes aim at Bud Light for hiring a trans comedian in its advertising. He invokes Unilever — whose CEO Alan Jope and chief marketer Aline Santos argued that their brands should “stand for something more important than making your hair shiny, your skin soft, your clothes whiter or your food tastier” — and delivers what he clearly considers the definitive rebuttal: “The fact that consumers bought Unilever’s products precisely because they made their hair shiny and their skin soft, seemed to escape Jope and Co.”

I had to reread that sentence. Is that true? More on that later.

Harrison is right to call out the industry’s drift into self-congratulatory purpose-washing. The Hegarty scene captures it perfectly: an industry that mouths the language of creativity while rewarding something that looks nothing like it.

But the most striking data point in the book is buried in its final chapter. The advertising industry’s Employee Net Promoter Score — the standard measure of whether people would recommend their workplace to others — was just 6%. Harrison calls it a “shocking result” that should have set the agenda. He’s right.

I’ll admit that figure passed me by. It shouldn’t have: a 6% eNPS is not just a ‘morale’ issue — it’s an emergency warning.

Harrison is also right to be scathing about the IPA, ISBA, and the Advertising Association’s response. Their probing into the causes of this figure goes no deeper, he writes, than linking morale to “is advertising trusted” and whether it has a “positive impact on society.” They asked a communications question about a working conditions problem. It is a damning observation, and nobody in those organisations should be comfortable reading it.

Harrison’s diagnosis for why the jobs became so miserable: the progressive agenda — making people feel guilty, surveilled, unable to just get on with the work.

But in identifying a real disease, Harrison blames the wrong pathogen. The industry didn’t lose its nerve because progressives took over. It lost its nerve because the people paying for advertising stopped caring whether it was any good.

The real disease

Here is a different diagnosis.

Over the past two decades, client-side organisations underwent widespread digital transformation that fundamentally changed how they procure services. They need ROI demonstrated numerically. They need it fast. They need it cheap. It is very difficult to show the true impact of great creative work on long-term brand value; it is very easy to demonstrate that you got a programmatic buy 15% cheaper.

So creativity stopped being a premium service. Technicians and software-as-a-service became more important than people who claimed to understand culture. The people who claimed to understand culture responded by pivoting to DEI — which at least offered a measurable metric, a census figure, a box to tick.

Which brings us back to Unilever and Harrison’s claim that consumers buy Radox to “make their skin soft”.

Unilever’s products are, to borrow a technical term, boring as fuck. Shampoo. Washing powder. Margarine. Commodities sold in a market where every competitor offers functionally identical goods at similar prices to consumers who increasingly refuse to fit into the demographic boxes that made advertising visible to Harrison’s generation.

But Harrison’s claim devalues the premise of brand building. People don’t buy products for purely rational, transactional reasons. They buy stories. They buy identity. They buy a version of themselves they want to believe in. That is not a progressive invention; it is the founding logic of the industry Harrison spent his career working in.

Diversity and inclusion, whether you think it’s a moral imperative or fashionable nonsense, is part of how people see the world — and therefore part of how brands must speak to it. “Anti-woke” is itself a rather effective brand attribute, as anyone who has watched Elon Musk monetise grievance from a $44bn acquisition will have noticed.

For a company like Unilever, serving young, affluent consumers who don’t fit neatly into the old boxes, not exploring cultural positioning as a viable brand strategy would arguably be the irresponsible choice. The mistake wasn’t reaching for purpose; the error was reaching for it lazily, or as a substitute for a genuine point of view.

The woke ads are a symptom of the same disease as the miserable jobs. But Harrison treats them as the cause.

The record, corrected

The trade press is also in the dock. Campaign magazine is Harrison’s exhibit A for the progressive capture of industry journalism.

I worked at Campaign for several years. I don’t take his criticisms personally (how hypocritical of me would that be?) but on at least one significant instance, he gets it wrong. And I know this because I was there.

The most famous example of what Harrison calls Campaign “surrendering to online mob rule” is the Nigel Farage front cover — a deliberately provocative feature interview, Farage’s hideous rictus grin splashed under the headline “Advertising? I might fancy it myself one day.” The resulting fury from industry leaders, who were appalled that their trade magazine appeared to implicitly endorse a man with a long track record of excreting racist, fearmongering political garbage, was real and considerable.

Campaign; July 2019 issue

Harrison’s retelling of the episode deserves a correction. He writes that editor-in-chief Claire Beale “was forced to meet the progressive gaze — and blinked. Within two days she’d issued a humbling apology. Indeed, I’d hazard it was this brutal experience that persuaded her to quit her role several months later.”

The actual account of what went wrong with the Farage cover was pretty well conveyed at the time by former Campaign editor Dominic Mills in his Mediatel News column: the error wasn’t interviewing Farage or even putting his malevolent visage on the front page. The real mistake was producing an interview that simply wasn’t very good — we didn’t ask the man enough difficult questions. A trade press failure of nerve, yes. But not the kind Harrison thinks.

As for Claire being so scarred by the experience that she quit months later… no. She was made redundant when its publisher Haymarket restructured. This was, to be fair, communicated quite plainly for all to see at the time. It’s a shame Harrison hadn’t included this when he hazarded in print.

It exposes an otherwise laudable book for, at times, clutching too quickly for vivid characterisation over the verified fact. I’d hazard this is exactly the kind of sloppiness Harrison would skewer in a piece of advertising copy.

The meritocracy myth

Harrison’s treatment of class is the book’s most emotionally freighted section, and the one most worth taking seriously — and then pushing back on.

The author is from Blackpool. He mentions this in passing but doesn’t explain it. To the attuned, overly class-sensitive British ear, he doesn’t need to: the mere mention of a Northern seaside town, in a book aimed squarely at London’s media-professional class, is the point. This is an exercise in getting middle-class progressive types to have a long, hard look at themselves.

You can catch the live version of this rhetorical flex in, of all places, the ‘This Isn’t Working’ podcast last year, in which Harrison defiantly proclaims from his kitchen: “I’m 68 years of age… I don’t give a shit.”

‘This Isn’t Working’ | YouTube

Naturally, we are presented with working-class creative heroes — copywriter Paul Burke and art director Dave Dye — as fallen idols of what the industry once was and no longer is. Burke laments that a talent like Alan Parker, “however much they try to deny it,” would today be unfairly marked out as privileged by virtue of his gender and skin colour, and that his “astonishing creative talent might today go undiscovered.” Dye recalls being attracted to advertising because creative departments were meritocratic: “the best idea won. I wouldn’t be beaten by someone from a country estate just because I was from a council estate.”

Take that, posho! But wait.

Meritocracy is far easier to perceive when everyone in the room has grown up in roughly the same cultural soup — watching the same television, reading the same papers, speaking the same slang. Burke and Dye’s meritocracy was real, but it was also bounded; a meritocracy of a specific type of working-class British man. The world has changed — not only because UK adland’s capital city London became more racially diverse, but because the internet has disrupted those cultural references.

Through small, connected screens, we have a permanent window into the whole world and widening array of niche interests. It’s not enough to bluntly ask everyone where they went to school or how many holidays they went on as a child. Diversity isn’t a policy that arrived from outside and disrupted a functioning system. It is the world that already exists, and has existed for long enough that ideologues like Farage have built a career out of resenting it.

It’s not that there are no more Paul Burkes. It’s that there are very few people left, of any background, who can be put in such a neat box. And nor would they expect to be.

Of course grave mistakes are being made in our industry and this book does well to catalogue them. The case of white, male, creatives Chas Bayfield and Dave Jenner — fired from JWT and ruled to have been victims of discrimination — still raises the blood temperature after reading Harrison’s retelling. It wasn’t just that Bayfield and Jenner were victims of a policy to keep women and sack men in a redundancy round; the sheer hostility thrown back at them for raising the issue by creative director Lucas Peon and HR director Emma Hoyle, as revealed by the employment tribunal, is indicative of advertising’s weakness for brutal management regimes.

And there’s the anecdote of a global agency CEO arriving late to a meeting and loudly whining about the monoculture of “middle-aged, white men” staring back at them across the conference table. Harrison is right to find this shocking. It is intellectually wrong, not to mention abusive and illegal under employment law.

But ask yourself what it reveals: this does not look like a bunch of woke ideologues in full control of an agenda, but a litany of incompetent leaders with little of substance to say. Without a DEI agenda, they are simply an overpromoted middle manager with no ideas, no entrepreneurial spirit, and no sense of humour.

That doesn’t seem like progressive capture. It’s a story about the vacuum that created the conditions for it.

The wrong moment

There is also the matter of timing.

This book feels about three years late and some distance away from the actual emergency facing the industry it purports to defend.

We are in the middle of a right-wing authoritarian assault on the world’s largest democracy. The industry’s biggest platforms — the ones that sell the most advertising, that shape the most attention, that generate the most revenue — are extracting acts of tribute and fealty from the companies that depend on them, in exchange for regulatory goodwill. Whether you read that as cheerful complicity or coercion under duress, the result is the same: the structural conditions of the industry are being rewritten in real time, by people with no interest in whether the work is any good. Meanwhile, AI is loudly trying to convince the world that it can now replace the white-collar creative jobs that survived the holding company consolidations of the last decade.

So now, the enemy Harrison describes — progressive HR departments, purpose-obsessed planners, woke awards juries — is real, but increasingly marginalised. It is also, notably, powerless.

The enemy rewriting the actual structural conditions of the industry doesn’t care whether your last campaign won a Cannes Lion for social purpose. It cares about market cap, regulatory compliance, and what the president’s people will tolerate.

That enemy is structural, well-capitalised, and accelerating. And it doesn’t appear in this book.

What he actually believes in

In fairness, the book’s closing pages do gesture at a positive vision. Sort of.

Harrison argues that increasing the number of young women or BAME employees in agencies won’t make the 68-hour weeks any less arduous — and that the jobs they’re being recruited into are precisely the ones AI will eliminate within 18 months anyway.

“Sharing the shit jobs amongst the favoured groups is actually doing no one any favours,” he writes. “Improving those shit jobs is surely the priority.”

He calls for an industry that opens “its doors to people who might make us feel uncomfortable” and then gives everyone “a sense of pride in their work, and crucially the chance to master their craft to a degree that cannot be matched by artificial intelligence.”

And he closes with a borrowed line — a “cri de coeur“ from creative director Nils Leonard: “Honestly, don’t you just want to wake up and matter a little bit more?”

Here is the problem. While powerful in isolation, Harrison’s closing vision and his opening charge make for an incoherent union.

He spends the book arguing that progressive ideology has been actively imposed on adland — a coordinated cultural takeover that has corrupted hiring, warped the work, and driven out the lads wot dun good. But his remedy — craft, openness to discomfort, pride in the work, mattering — requires no ideology to be removed. It just requires leadership with taste and nerve. Which means either the progressive capture was never really the structural problem he claims it is, or his solution doesn’t address it. He can’t have both.

And that Leonard line — “don’t you just want to wake up and matter a little bit more?” — is doing enormous load-bearing work for a sentence borrowed from someone else. It is a feeling Harrison wants adland to recover, not a programme for how to get there. It is also, unmistakably, a statement about purpose, dignity, and the quality of working life.

Those are, of course, exactly the things a well-executed diversity and inclusion agenda is supposed to deliver.

You might even say it could have come from a diversity consultant’s keynote.

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The verdict

Adland’s Progressive Gaze is brave — it says things out loud that a lot of people in this industry think quietly and would never publish. It is necessary — an industry where everyone wears trainers on stage and nobody says anything uncomfortable produces very little useful self-criticism.

Ultimately, Harrison is right that advertising has lost its nerve. He’s just wrong about who took it.

The industry’s real problem isn’t that it has been captured by progressives. It’s that it has been abandoned by serious people — on the client side, in the holding companies, increasingly in the trade press — who might have insisted that the work itself was worth taking seriously. Into that vacuum rushed the only language available that could simulate seriousness: the language of social purpose, of representation, of impact.

Harrison wants irreverence back. So do I. But irreverence requires courage, and courage requires having something to lose. The industry spent 20 years making itself too safe to fail and too bland to matter.

That’s not the progressive gaze. That’s the market.

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Ad-verse Reads is an occasional series reviewing books about advertising, media, and the business of persuasion.

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