The shoot looked less like an agency offsite and more like a low-budget action film. Beautifully printed excuses — the kind agency people mutter into their coffee cups every morning — were lined up, then destroyed by INNOCEAN USA staffers with flamethrowers, machetes and bows and arrows.
It was, by design, ridiculous. It was also a thesis.
Jason Sperling, Chief Creative Officer at INNOCEAN USA, and Jen Ostrich, behavioral leadership coach, co-authored a late-March Ad Age op-ed arguing that the bottleneck to better creative work isn’t talent, budgets or bad clients. It’s the limiting beliefs that calcify into standard operating procedure — and then get rebranded as common sense.
Jason Sperling, Chief Creative Officer, INNOCEAN USA Jen Ostrich, Behavioral Leadership Coach
The exorcism was the point
Watch this section: 01:12
Sperling didn’t want a deck. He wanted catharsis with a camera on it.
“Excuses are easy,” he says. “Brilliance and tenacity and vision aren’t.” So INNOCEAN turned the bullet points into props and the props into ash. The visuals are a sight gag with teeth — a way of saying, out loud, that this is the stuff that’s been quietly killing the work.
The numbers Sperling cites in the op-ed give the bit some spine: roughly 40% higher rates of project failure inside excuse-heavy cultures, and a 50% drop in collaboration. The flamethrowers were the headline. The data is the reason.
Excuse is the symptom. Belief is the disease.
Watch this section: 03:21
Sperling brought Ostrich in because he didn’t want this to end at the visual. She thinks about excuses the way a physician thinks about a cough.
“The behavior or the excuse, in this case, is like the symptom,” Ostrich explains. “The root cause is really something that lives in our subconscious.” She calls these the hidden layers — the operating system underneath the operating system, running quietly while everyone insists they’re being reasonable.
People don’t choose excuses, in other words. The belief chooses for them, and they read the result off the script.
The three buckets every excuse lives in
Watch this section: 04:32
Sperling has heard a lot of them. The agency excuses he hears most cluster into three buckets, and once you see them, you can’t unsee them.
The first is ownership. Not my job. Not my problem. I can’t do anything with this brief. These are the lines people use when they don’t want to be set up to fail, or get sucked into something that might reflect badly on them.
The second is effort beyond the assigned role. Someone else will take care of it. I wouldn’t work too hard, it’s a small project. A pre-built rationalization for not going the distance.
The third — and Sperling flags this one as especially loaded inside large holding company structures — is the feeling of being invisible. There’s nothing I can do to change things. When people feel faceless, they stop trying to change the face.
“The Doug ate my brief,” as Kyle O’Brien put it on the show, only half-joking. “I never got briefed,” Sperling shot back. Every shop has its hits.
What it costs when the language wins
Ostrich is clear-eyed about the price tag. Culture, she says, is largely defined by language — and when these phrases become commonplace, they start to define the culture itself.
“That’s a real slippery slope, and a dangerous one,” she says. Advertising is a team sport. Let each person’s limiting belief drive the output, and the math gets ugly fast.
It’s not the loud failures that worry her. It’s the slow erosion — the meetings where the work gets quietly worse because nobody fought for it.
The Enneagram, and turning the lights on
Ostrich spent 14 years as an account person across eight agencies before pivoting into coaching in her early 30s. She came back to the business with a tool: the Enneagram, an assessment usually filed under psychology and spirituality, increasingly making its way into the workplace.
What she likes about it is the systems view. “There’s a way to look at an entire team or an entire ecosystem through the lens of the Enneagram,” she says. It surfaces what’s driving each person — autonomy, attention, certainty — and lets a team acknowledge that the engines aren’t identical.
Self-awareness, the boring superpower, becomes a competitive advantage. You stop arguing about the symptom and start working on the wiring.
Indie doesn’t mean immune
Watch this section: 11:27
The temptation, especially in this community, is to believe that smaller equals braver by default. Sperling is having none of it.
“I worked at a 12-person agency once earlier in my career,” he says, “and that place was the most political environment I’ve ever been in.” Fewer layers, more knife fights. He copped to adopting excuse culture mentalities there himself — why am I investing this much if someone else is going to take credit?
Ostrich agrees that size isn’t the variable. The variable is leadership self-awareness. Where she’s had the most impact, she says, has been with independent agencies — not because they’re smaller, but because the decision-maker can say yes without a committee, and the buy-in actually disseminates.
INNOCEAN’s pillars, in plain English
INNOCEAN’s response, Sperling says, has been to bake the opposite of excuse culture into the agency’s pillars. Care the most. Be the person on the project who cares the most. And the one he comes back to: Have you tried?
It’s the question you ask before you turn away from something that seems impossible. A built-in friction against the easy no.
Sperling wrote a book on creative leadership built on similar bones — including a principle he calls “opposition attracts,” which is about building environments where it’s okay to refute leaders and have a point of view. The opposite, in other words, of there’s nothing I can do.
What CMOs should actually look for
Watch this section: 17:54
The quick-fire round produced the line of the conversation. Sperling’s advice to CMOs evaluating agency culture: don’t trust the pitch.
“It’s not easy to see a culture during a pitch,” he says. “Everyone comes in on their best behavior.” His prescription is a culture audit — one-on-one interviews with people who aren’t the leaders putting their best face forward. Glassdoor is, he allows, “a sort of like, you know, a hate machine,” but the right question — do the employees feel empowered and heard? — will affect the work either way.
He also turns the lens around. Excuse cultures often start with the client. The agencies that survive that, in his telling, are the ones with enough relationship to ask the uncomfortable question — what’s actually underneath this no? — without ending up on the chopping block.
And the most shocking excuse you could ever give a client? Sperling, after a long pause: “Sorry, you’ve given us too much money for a project.”
Ostrich, laughing: “Take some back.”
Good stuff for marketers
If you’re a CMO and you’ve ever wondered why the work from a perfectly talented agency keeps coming back a little dimmer than the pitch, the culture audit Sperling describes is the cheapest research you’ll ever run. Talk to the people who aren’t presenting. Ask whether they feel empowered and heard, and listen for the language. We can’t. That’s not how it works here. Last time we tried that, leadership killed it. Those phrases are the symptom Ostrich is talking about — and they’ll show up in your work long before they show up in your QBR. Then turn the lens around: notice whether your own team is feeding the same excuses back. Brave work needs a brave room on both sides of the brief.
Good stuff for indies
If you’re an independent agency, the seductive trap is assuming your size has already solved this for you. It hasn’t. Sperling’s 12-person nightmare is the cautionary tale — fewer layers can mean more friction, not less, if the leadership at the top hasn’t done the work on themselves. The competitive advantage is real, though: you can actually act on it. You can audit the language your team uses in stand-ups, kill “we can’t” as a starter phrase, and write “have you tried?” on the wall like INNOCEAN did. You can also use this honestly in business development. A CMO who’s burned out on holding company politics is the easiest sell in the world for a shop that can prove its room is psychologically safer than the one they’re leaving.
INNOCEAN USA
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Jason Sperling LinkedIn
Jen Ostrich LinkedIn
Read the Ad Age op-ed: On Turning Limitations Into Possibilities — Dismantling Excuse Culture
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