They take celebrities – people whose lives feel remote, curated and polished – and bring them back down to eye level. Not by attacking them, but by placing them in situations that feel painfully familiar.
They expose how grand titles often hide messy reality. ‘Head of Marketing’ sounds impressive. Many of us know it can just as easily mean team of one, juggling strategy, execution and the printer that’s just jammed again.
They also gently challenge backstories. Not in a hostile way, but with a raised eyebrow. A quiet pause. A reminder that past roles have a tendency to grow more senior, more influential, more decisive the further away we get from them.
What’s clever is that none of this is said explicitly. It’s implied. And that’s why it works.
Good humour doesn’t lecture. It recognises. And the best of these graphics succeed because they tell several small truths at once – about status, titles, memory and storytelling – while letting us laugh at ourselves in the process.
Two buildings in Shrewsbury. Both historic. Both full of character.
One has two black bins, quietly doing their job and almost disappearing into the scene.
The other has a row of bright red bins that completely dominate the view – pulling your eye away from a genuinely beautiful Tudor façade that’s survived for centuries.
Nothing here is wrong.. rubbish needs collecting. And the black and red bins may well serve different purposes, carry different things, or be subject to different rules. This may simply be how it has to be.
And yet visually, the impact is enormous.
Most places, brands and organisations often aren’t undermined by big decisions.
They’re impacted – for better or worse – by practical, operational details that feel unavoidable, but still carry emotional weight.
There isn’t always an easy fix.
But noticing the difference feels like a good place to start.
A Guardian piece was the standout story of the weekend for me. It was written by Sean Luckett – a creative director and senior copywriter in his mid-50s – who recently had the chance to meet his hero, Kenny Dalglish, at a film premiere.
Nothing to see here, you might think. Kenny has been shaking hands and posing for photos like this for decades.
Except Sean was the ‘miracle of Hillsborough’ – the young man who woke from a coma days after the disaster, opening his eyes and saying ‘Kenny Dalglish’ moments after the man himself had spoken a few words of encouragement at his bedside.
And I strongly suspect that meeting again, 36 years on, meant as much to Kenny as it did to Sean.
Dalglish wasn’t just leading a football club in 1989; he was absorbing grief on behalf of a city. And when you’re doing that, you don’t get closure in the normal way. You don’t get to stop, process, or even properly feel. You carry on. You perform steadiness. You become the container.
So the ‘miracle’ isn’t just Sean waking from a coma – it’s that Dalglish was allowed, however briefly, to experience something good that cut through the horror. A proof point that not everything ended in darkness. That matters profoundly to someone at the front, even if they never say so.
Sean says that at the end of the night Kenny made a beeline for him, grabbed his hand and said, “Great to fucking see you again, by the way.”
I recently drove past the Williams F1 team’s Oxfordshire HQ, en route to Wantage to see my Auntie Penny and Uncle Geoff. Nothing dramatic. Familiar stretches of Middle England roads, then a village roundabout with one road leading into the team’s HQ complex. But I felt a genuine surge of excitement passing this way – and realised I’ve been quietly favouring this team for more than forty years.
Why Williams?
Yes, it probably started with Mansell. Those late-80s seasons, the near misses, the Brummie moustache, the sense of effort and injustice rolled into one. Even when ‘our Nige’ decamped to Ferrari and then the US, I stayed put. It helped, of course, that Williams kept winning.
The Damon Hill years felt like a love affair. Would he win? Wouldn’t he? He did – already knowing he wouldn’t be there the following season.
My ardour for Williams dipped when Hill left. But it returned when he retired, and a young Jenson Button was given his chance in 2000. And somehow, through all the lean years that followed, I never really moved on.
I wouldn’t call myself a rabid fan. But I was overjoyed when Williams exceeded expectations with Carlos Sainz’s recent pair of podiums. Was it strange to be on the edge of my seat for a third place and a handful of points? Hardly the glory days of the 80s and 90s, of course. But when you’ve spent years just hoping to scrape into the points, a third place can feel almost as sweet as a championship.
So what is it about this team that’s held me for four decades?
I never warmed to McLaren’s clinical efficiency, or Ferrari’s glorious, myth-laden chaos. Benetton’s banditry left me cold. Renault’s Gallic insouciance never quite landed. Red Bull try a little too hard to be anti-establishment. Mercedes are impressive.. but a bit too industrially Teutonic.
Williams feel different.
They reek of an independent spirit. Of British engineering craftsmanship. Of people who exist to race, not to market themselves to death. Through the lean years, they kept turning up – not reinventing their identity, not shouting for attention, just doing the work.
There’s a quiet dignity in that. Especially in adversity.
And perhaps that’s the real answer. I didn’t choose Williams because they were winning. I stayed with them because they reflected how I like things to be done.
My ‘Uncle’ Geoff Williams spent his career as a mathematician specialising in logistics. In the 1960s and ’70s he worked at Cadbury under Sir Adrian Cadbury. In the 1980s he worked at Jaguar under Sir John Egan.
Of all the bosses he encountered, those two stood out. Very different leaders – but both deeply capable, both connected to their people and both conscious of the responsibility that comes with leading institutions rather than just companies.
Uncle Geoff was there on talent but humbly describes working for them as luck. Luck because he experienced great leadership and stood inside those brands at a moment when they carried particular weight and meaning.
I also love that his career placed him inside two very different organisations that were part of the cultural furniture – applying quiet, behind-the-scenes logistical craft in service of something much bigger.
Careers are often valued by where they take us. Sometimes the real privilege is simply where we’re allowed to stand for a while.
This morning I fell down a LinkedIn rabbit hole after a photographer shared an AI-generated seasonal candy-cane portrait of himself.. basically this one, but with his head.. and gave it short shrift.
The comments in the thread were entertaining. Craft. Authenticity. Data centres. Water usage. The usual lines being quickly drawn.
And yet… it made me smile, so I asked ChatGPT to stick my head on it.. and now can’t stop looking at this image.
No professional photographer could have created it for me. Not because they aren’t talented.. but because I’d never have asked. Never justified it. Never even imagined it. And No, nor would I ever pay for it.
That doesn’t make it better than photography. It makes it different.
Sometimes new tools don’t replace old crafts. Maybe they just create space for things that would never have existed.
But when it matters, I turn to professional photographers. This isn’t that. It’s something else.
Over Christmas, I finally got round to watching the Brad Pitt Formula One movie.
Predictably, it wasn’t the racing that stayed with me. It was the nostalgia.. and more specifically, how the film traces the arc of one driver’s career.
Early on, we’re shown the Pitt and Javier Bardem characters depicted as two young Lotus teammates. At that point, the future must have felt open-ended. Success is assumed, not yet earned.
Fast-forward to today and their paths have diverged. One is still driving. The other now owns a team.
What struck me was the quiet idea that Pitt’s character remains competitive precisely because he has unfinished business. He never succeeded the first time around. Champions who return are often trying to relive something they’ve already ‘done’. That rarely ends well. The hunger is dulled by closure.
This character is different. He isn’t protecting a legacy or defending a title. He’s finishing a chapter that was left open when a horror crash – inspired by real Lotus driver Martin Donnelly – ended Sonny Hayes’ F1 story before he’d even won a race.
And that’s why (spoiler alert) the ending works so well. When he finally wins one, he can walk away. Not because he’s had enough, but because he’s complete.
This comeback arc is less about redemption and more about resolution. A rarer, more satisfying kind of ending.
In the real world, some people are driven by achievement. Others by unfinished sentences. And often, it’s the latter.. later in life.. who surprise us most.
Perry’s of Eccleshall is a proper Staffordshire butcher not far from me, and until very recently I’d never actually stepped inside. But every time I drove past, I slowed down just to look at the window.
Because the window does a lot of work.
It quietly signals pride in the craft, an instinctive understanding of its customers, and the confidence that only comes from doing something well for a long time. Chalkboards, clear signage, good light.. and products displayed in a way that makes you stop, look, and smile.
What’s clever is that for years I became a tiny part of their marketing without ever buying a thing. I mentioned them to people. I pointed the shop out as I drove past.
And then yesterday, just before Christmas, I finally went in.. and came out with one of their large pork pies.
When people like me start doing your talking for you, you’ve probably got something right.
And Christmas seems a very good moment to notice businesses that understand that.
My LinkedIn feed has been full of MiniMBA results posts recently. Lots of A grades. Lots of justified pride. It’s also reminded me of my own MiniMBA result from about five years ago.. an unspectacular Grade C. Not a near miss and not something to boast about. I messed it up.
Oddly, it’s not a bad memory. I really enjoyed the course and threw myself into it. It was a sharp refresher on marketing fundamentals and a welcome antidote to some of the woollier thinking that creeps into our profession. The exam, however, didn’t go my way.
When Mark Ritson released the results, he made a point of saying there was very little correlation between exam performance and being a good marketer. He went further, noting that some of the best marketers he knows were, in his words, ‘shithouse at exams.’ It was a genius thing to say.
Because the people who got A grades would enjoy the moment, update their profiles, and not even register that he’d said it. But those of us who did badly remembered that line forever.
Seeing all those results posts now makes me smile. I’m genuinely pleased for the high scorers. But I’m also quietly grateful for my unglamorous Grade C.. and for the reminder that great exam results are not always a good proxy for judgment, curiosity, and effectiveness in the real world.
In the end, my Grade C faded.. but Ritson’s line didn’t. That’s good storytelling.
Andrew Greenhalgh 