First Footers 2026: The Year of Attention Democracy

First footing is a Scottish Hogmanay (or New Year) tradition. The first person to cross your threshold after midnight is your 'first footer', and who they are and the gifts they bring set the tone for the coming year (you want someone bringing coal, money, whisky or food!). With that in mind LBB is inviting the advertising and marketing world's first footers to set the tone for the industry this year with op-eds that look to tomorrow – rallying cries for issues the industry needs to tackle, future-casting insights for the trends and themes we'll likely come across and reflections on how they plan to navigate the shoogly, shifting path ahead. Here, we hear from Neville Shah, CCO at Kinnect.


Relax. Advertising doesn’t need a panic button. It just needs better ideas.

Advertising is starting to feel a bit like trying to dance on a moving floor. The music keeps changing, the surface keeps shifting, and every now and then someone yells “AI!” like it’s a surprise party and not a tool we’ve been slowly wiring into the system. But the funny thing is, through all this chaos the only thing that saves you when the floor moves is rhythm. And in advertising, rhythm is the idea.

We’ve spent years obsessing over platforms, formats, algorithms, media mixes, dashboards and performance charts that look like ECGs. Somewhere between those spikes, we convinced ourselves panic was a strategy and ideas were optional. It felt like if we spent enough money, attention would fall in line. Except attention has become extremely honest. It doesn’t respect budgets and it can’t be bribed. It respects relevance. It respects humour. It respects intelligence. It respects something worth talking about.

2026 isn’t the year of attention deficiency. It is the year of attention democracy. The audience is roaming, scrolling, skipping, bingeing, blocking, and occasionally falling in love with something that feels like it was designed specifically for them. They’re choosing better. And when they love it, they don’t just consume it; they evangelise it. That’s the shift. The audience will become the media strategy.

They aren’t going to be reduced to a target group, they will be your distribution system, your credibility, your critics, your defenders, your ambassadors. If you treat them well, they take your idea further than your media plan ever will.

The question has shifted from “how do we make people watch us?” to “do we deserve to be watched?”

If your idea isn’t interesting, no platform can save it. Whatever it is; a film, a stunt, a tiny social ‘thingie’, if it’s good, it will eventually end up in conversation. And conversation is equity. It’s relevance. It’s participation over passive targeted consumption.

Consolidation: “A Hero in Disguise”

The other conversation today is about consolidation. The big scary word that will be the end of creativity and usher in corporate sameness. Except I don’t think consolidation is the villain of this story. I actually think it might be a hero in disguise.

Clients today don’t want a bag of vendors. One agency for the idea, one for media, another for social-activation-innovation-tech-onground-thing-a-ma-jig, and then one to fix what the others broke. They want a partner to take them from intent to impact. One brain. One narrative. One team that can take a brand from ambition to execution without fracturing the idea in the process.

Consolidation, done right, doesn’t shrink creativity. It protects it.

What AI Will Actually Replace

Although, one thing creativity doesn’t need protection from is AI. Let’s put it plainly: AI is not coming for creativity. It is coming for inefficiency. AI won’t replace creative people. It’ll replace the time they waste on the wrong things so they can spend more energy on the right ones.

Will AI shape production? Yes.
Will AI streamline timelines? Absolutely.
Will AI magically make everything cheap, instant and perfect? No, let’s relax.

Good AI still costs time, money, talent and judgement. Sometimes you just need a camera, not a philosophical debate with software. Because shooting still makes more sense than rendering perfection in a server farm. And that’s fine. AI is a tool, not salvation. It’s here to make our lives easier, our turnarounds faster, and our iterations smarter. It is brilliant for adaptation, experimentation, simulation, and feasibility.

But if your story is boring, AI will simply help you produce boring faster. And in higher resolution. Think boring in 4K.

Which brings us back to the thing that has always mattered and still matters most: ideas. Not ideas as deliverables, but ideas as cultural participants. Ideas that live beyond slides and outlast the campaign period.

And perhaps the most exciting part of 2026 is that we don’t get to hide anymore. There is nowhere to bury mediocre thinking. The audience will tell you instantly. The internet will tell you creatively. Culture will tell you honestly. And any GPT will outdo mediocrity. But when we get it right, people talk about it. And it travels faster, louder and more joyfully than ever before.

So maybe the year ahead isn’t as complicated as we pretend. Maybe it’s simply asking us to do the thing we joined this business for in the first place. Think better. Be braver. Be sharper about who we’re talking to. Be more empathetic about how people live, laugh, scroll, complain and celebrate. Build ideas that people choose, not endure.

Because consolidation, tech, AI, tools, structures; that’s all just infrastructure. The idea is still the engine. And if the floor keeps moving, I’d rather dance (metaphorically only) to the rhythm of an idea than cling to a platform.