First Footers 2026: Make Time for Quieter, Slower, More Truthful Brand-Building

​​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. Tom Rainsford, marketing director at Beavertown, gives his perspective below.

With the New Year upon us, we enter a new phase for productivity. We act, we improve, we start anew, we cut, we reduce, we stop. Often all of this feels in contrast to the environment and energy levels we find ourselves with at the start of January.

Within agricultural societies, life was measured in seasons, not productivity. Winter meant surrendering speed and progress. Life slowed naturally, not by choice, but by necessity. Physical rest and retreat from colder temperatures flowed with the natural cycle of the season.

As we stumble and splutter into 2026, with the victories and losses of the previous year lingering like a relative who’s stayed beyond Boxing Day, winter, like us, has lost its moral permission to pause. We override our natural limits, denying our bodies’ circadian rhythms. Instead, we push on to meet our internal contractual obligation to achieve more, sooner.

As Anna Katharina Schaffner puts it in her exceptional book ‘Exhausted’: “We live in an age that has a fetish with productivity, speed, and busyness. We have learned that our worth to each other and ourselves is measured by how much we do and how busy we are. We rest purely so that we can get up again and start being busy again.”

With this in mind, here are three considerations for brands, marketing and advertising folk for the New Year.

Enjoy the Silence

If the meteoric rise of air fryers tells us anything, it’s that we’ve run out of patience for even the most basic need. Food. In a world dominated by speed, slowness feels like the ultimate rebellion.

The role of slowing down, and finding peace and quiet, is shaping how we spend our time.

‘Quietcations’, or ‘Hushpitality’, are predicted to be a travel trend in 2026. Like fitness tourism, where you might fly to Tokyo to take on the physical challenge of a marathon, and experience the city, quiet travel is equally experience-led, but at a slower, softer, more considered pace.

This quiet rebellion has been, ironically, drifting into our lives for some time. It shows up in a ‘Quiet Night Out’ at London’s Union Chapel, in ‘Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing’, in the millions that have viewed night-walk videos that reveal a gentler, almost secret version of our loudest cities. This longing to slow things down gives us space to notice what matters, instead of endlessly doing what we’re told we must (no matter the cost).

Brands often (and I am guilty of this) see being quiet as a negative. Brands can treat loudness as a shortcut to standing out in busy, noisy markets. But if everyone in the room is shouting, wouldn’t you just leave?

Do we have the opportunity to rethink? Maybe less focus on “buy now” and more on “here’s why this matters.” Content that connects, rather than is simply consumed. Products designed to last years, not seasons.

Maybe too idealistic, but consumers buy into values, beliefs, and identity, not loudness, urgency, or your need to meet a set of personal objectives. 

And it’s urgency, and the desire for control, that’s creating a negative ripple effect.

The West has become a culture of emergency, where everything is urgent, and if you’re not in control, something bad is going to happen to you. That desire for control and speed creates two things: stress and anxiety, not productivity and results.

Over half of UK adults admit they’ve pretended they were okay rather than speak about how they truly feel. More than half say they are stressed at work, and nearly eight in ten experience that stress frequently. The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) reminds us that, on average, 18 people in the UK lose their lives to suicide each day. These are sobering numbers and they ask to be taken seriously.

The question of “what can I do to help myself?” has slowly settled in. No one is coming to rescue us. And so, taking gentle but deliberate care in how we treat ourselves has become essential.

So, let’s take a moment at the start of this year to enjoy the silence.

Who Wants to Live Forever?

Quite a lot of us, it turns out.

Mushrooms. Magnesium. Green powders. Adaptogens. Collagen. Electrolytes. Breathwork. Cold plunges. Red light. Ashwagandha. Zinc. Infrared saunas. Sleep trackers. Somatic tracking. Shilajit. Hip stretches to release stagnant energy from past life experiences. Just me? Fine. Let me get to the point.

Rich health guy, Bryan Johnson is on a quest for immortality, aiming to reach 2039 without ageing at all. He aims to hold his biology in place while the rest of the world keeps moving. An extreme goal perhaps, but a revealing one. Age is becoming more fluid. Youth, increasingly, is less about the number of candles on a cake and more about how we choose to live our days.

For several generations now, the excess of rock ’n’ roll has given way to something inward facing: self-awareness, balance, mental health literacy, wellness and fitness. Younger generations invest more in their health than those before them, spending more than any other age group. 

And beneath it all is a deeper hunger, to make the most of our time here. It transcends age. We want purpose beyond a salary, a way to protect our future health, and deeper connections within our communities.

Loneliness carries a health impact comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Connection and community, then, is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s essential and more people are beginning to understand that.

Gallup highlights that the key drivers of wellness are: ‘Career' (or, purpose) you like what you do everyday, ‘Financial’ you manage your money well (note, this isn’t have a lot of money), ‘Physical’ you have energy to get stuff done, ‘Social’ meaningful friendships and ‘Community’ you like where you live. 

Brands acting as a catalyst to socially enable communities around shared values and beliefs, rather than rigid demographics, have real opportunity. Being comfortable in what your brand truly is and does, rather than chasing borrowed youth or social memes, feels like a longer, stronger path. One that creates spaces where a 19-year-old and a 60-year-old feel equally welcome, and equally valid.

So-called “fourth spaces” are beginning to emerge. Places designed for shared experience and human connection, often free from digital interruption and happen regardless of who, what, and why.

Maybe your brand feels distant from wellness. Even so, the human desire for connection, sociability, and community still rings true and offers brands the opportunity to be genuinely additive to how people spend their lives.

Authentic Soul 

In a world where millions on TikTok have watched a “historical” AI video, filmed at Pompeii the very day the volcano pops its top, the lines between reality and illusion blur more and more each day.

Forbes recently declared, “Authenticity is the new currency in business.” And in a world where AI can be both your travel agent and your therapist, authenticity suddenly matters more than ever.

Global campaigns churn out messages approved by committee. Brands tumble over one another to collaborate with the same influencers and everything that moves contains protein. Meanwhile, a discerning, sceptical audience has little room to truly connect, to show open support for a brand the way they once might. Instead, their loyalty flows elsewhere: to the influencer, the cause, the ‘K-Pop Demon Hunter’. Brands slip further down the spiral.

As we stand, eyes glued to our phones, watching the quiet murder of authenticity, there is a choice to be made. Within this moment lies an opportunity, for us humans to be…well, human. If the AI robopocalypse is near, let us play our last advantage and what we do best, emotion.

AI can mimic, calculate, and predict. But it cannot (currently) feel. Unless “That’s a great question, Tom” tugs at your heart strings. 

How do we best connect emotionally with each other. Through (oh god…I’m going to say it) storytelling.

Storytelling, the classic brand cliché, once the king of the marketing kingdom, who was stalked in dark hallways by preppy-Dorian Gray-look-at-my-dashboard ‘performance marketing’, may be poised for a resurgence. In a world increasingly devoid of feeling, other than rage and anger (the Oxford University Press word of 2025 was rage-bait), the ability to tell stories that genuinely move us could become our most valuable currency.

As John Yorke writes in ‘Into the Woods’, “All tales are, at some level, a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it, and to make ourselves whole. That is the pattern. That is how and why stories connect.”

So, maybe we tell brand stories that really connect. “Ah…but can it be done in six seconds on socials”…sure, not the whole story but you can set a tone, a scene, a character, establish a key theme. It’s less about how and more about ambition and courage to do it. 

At the heart of these stories, for them to truly connect, they need to be true. Not business ‘truth’ and its truth-twisting reality but actual swear-on-your-mum’s-life truth. 

Truth builds trust. Trust is the house we all inhabit and it is on fire. In politics, in news, in the business, in each other, trust has fallen to an all-time low. And this absence is exploited, weaponised, and monetised. 

For a brand’s story to be real, it must first be true. 

So let’s spend 2026 telling the truth.​