Every Sunday, during my morning cafecito (or yerba mate), I’ll share three powerful ideas transforming culture. Some ideas will be ads or about advertising. Some may be about design or fashion. Others will be about art, illustration, animation, motion, audio, cinema, books, or any other big idea worth sharing and discussing. You get the idea.
IDEA 1: The Power of Suggestion
Sutherland's point is a warning: if you only fund what you can justify on a spreadsheet, you'll never make anything worth talking about.
Sutherland names the quiet asymmetry that kills great work: creatives always have to pitch their ideas to "rational" people for approval — but it never runs the other way. Accountants don't walk into your office pitching a wacky number. So the rational side holds a veto, and the creative side holds only a suggestion. The most interesting ideas die not because they're wrong, but because they sound unreasonable to someone with the power to say no.
That asymmetry is about to get worse. As organizations rush to make everything measurable, optimized, and AI-efficient, the "rational" veto gets a new, data-shaped superpower. The unmeasurable, illogical, emotionally-true idea — the exact kind that moves culture — becomes the easiest thing to cut.
IDEA 2: The Great Renovation
Cut through the utopia-or-doom noise and here's the real picture: 88% of organizations are still at Level 1–2 — using AI as a personal tool for drafting and summarizing. Only 12% have reached Level 3–4, where AI runs actual workflows (just 2% at the top). More telling: leaders live in a different reality than their people. Decision-makers are ~5x more likely than employees to say they've reached advanced AI maturity, and 55% admit they're investing in AI faster than their teams can learn it. The hardest leap isn't starting — it's the jump from Level 2 to Level 3, because that's a category change: new skills, new culture, new systems.
notion.com/ai-transformation-model
Notion's metaphor is the whole insight: this is a renovation, not a rapture. Renovations run over budget, take longer than promised, and occasionally someone hits a sewage line — but they're worth it.
IDEA 3: Liquid Death – We Want Your Pee
AI data centers are burning through millions of gallons of water, and the culture is quietly anxious about it. Instead of ignoring that tension or moralizing about it, Liquid Death and Garage Beer turned it into an absurd musical PSA: drink up, then "send your pee to the AI data center of your choice" to cool the servers — collectible sealable mugs included. It's dumb on the surface and razor-sharp underneath.
This is the anti-marketing playbook at its peak. No product features, no AI flex — just a real cultural nerve (tech's environmental cost) hijacked with a joke nobody can look away from.
Seen work worth sharing?
Send it my way: [email protected]
From Antes de que llegue el Brief (ADQLEB) Podcast
On the latest episode, I sat down with Gabriel René Rodríguez Rovira — Director of Digital & Technology at De La Cruz / Ogilvy. We talked about 20 years building at the intersection of creativity, strategy and tech, the projects that put Puerto Rico's tourism on the digital map, and why the traditional agency model is broken.
Link below if you want to listen while you scroll.
→ adqleb.com/gabrielrene
Brought to you weekly by the team at Idealista Agency
