How lucky, I was mistaken

«The good thing about not being a river is that you can always turn back.  

In a recent meeting with one of our clients, the founder and current chairman of that company reflected as if to himself with that phrase in the course of a debate that the account team was having with the brand's management team about the path forward for communication over the next two years. He wanted to moderate the debate about the risk involved in one path or another of those proposed. And it was reassuring. Not only because it came from a businessman with five decades of successful management at the helm of his company, but because of the implicit reinforcement it showed to everyone present that if we did make a mistake, it was always possible to do something as healthy as rectify it.

It's true. Many times we forget, agencies and brands alike, that in marketing and communication We are not the ebb and flow of a river, but people within organisations. making decisions that are supposed to be based on data, comparative analysis and experience. This assumes that when we make mistakes, we can make a U-turn at any point and deviate from the marked path to modify the roadmap. This should favour Experimentation, enjoy understanding the effect of something we don't master as much, or that we're introducing for the first time into our mix. Even, learn from those small failures without dramas that destabilise the relationship.  

Around the New Year, the usual predictions for the coming year abound in all media, along with the trends that will dominate this or that discipline. Let it be stated upfront that I have always admired colleagues who are capable of asserting with such vehemence that the course of the river is the one they point to and that, at the end, at the mouth, a delta full of returns awaits. But I also miss a reflection on which of the predictions made the previous year, or the ones before that, came true and how much it cost to break down the dam that the river encountered. 

This is why this writing is just to remind me that in 2023 nothing limits our abilityAge to explore, make mistakes and rectify. In those, instead of a river, you can become an ocean.  

Vanesa Landa, Account Director and Business Development at MIG Prisma