Goodvertising founder Thomas Kolster on creativity’s commitment problem

Thomas Kolster is a speaker, impact entrepreneur, sustainable marketing advisor and author of books including Goodvertising and The Hero Trap. Here, he offers some unconventional advice for creatives to follow if they want their work to truly make a difference.

Love and impactful creativity have more in common than you think.

Sure, you fall in love at first sight, but somehow the relationship falls apart as that initial fascination turns into shopping lists and guys forgetting to put up the toilet seat.

I see a lot of this pattern in creativity, too. Everything is exciting at the beginning, but over time, the level of effort and care starts to dwindle, which is why most creatives are terrible at impact. We’ve been brought up on delivering ideas, ideas, ideas. Jotted down on napkins or Post-its, almost to prove their disposable nature. OK, I sound old. Today you just prompt AI and get 100 before breakfast. What we haven’t been trained to do is ensure those ideas connect to meaningful change.

There are signs of hope. Over the years, I have watched the Impact category significantly change from being dominated by campaigns in traditional media to breaking free and becoming whatever impact needs: a product, a paragraph changed in an insurance policy or a collection of law proposals. We need more of this, so to help encourage that mindset, below you’ll find some lessons in love which double as advice for impactful creativity.

1. Stay for breakfast

Unfortunately, a lot of creatives don’t have the stamina. They’re short-distance runners and don’t have what it takes to run a marathon. It’s the same with the traditional agency model, which is built around quick turnarounds, not one project running year after year. Creatives often don’t even stay at agencies for multiple years, and clients keep changing jobs too. Everyone moves on before the impact has had time to happen.

Like love, impact demands hard work. That’s why there’s a big difference between being a creative and being an entrepreneur. Ideas are easy. Damn, you get them in the shower. Being an entrepreneur is the endlessly harder job of making an idea actually happen.

Take the Åland Index. It began as a clever idea: what if you could calculate the climate impact of what people buy, using their payment data? The hard part was turning that idea into Doconomy: building the technology, convincing banks and payment companies, raising money, hiring people, getting rejected, adapting, selling and scaling until an idea became a company with global reach. Creativity is having the idea in the shower. Entrepreneurship is still working on it five years later. Impact mostly happens in the second part.

2. Make the first move

That brings me to the second point. You need courage. Almost blind belief that you can make it happen. Like a teen finding the stamina to ask the next person out despite a recent no. And creativity is far from only the domain of agencies. Clients are killing it recently: Apple, Google and others. Plus, all these challenger brands are raising the bar, and that should make big business uncomfortable.

Big business has the budgets, the R&D departments, the talent and the distribution. What it lacks is the courage to put something genuinely different into the market. It’s a culture problem. Great marketing was never about playing it safe. Look at Unilever’s acquisition of refillable deodorant brand Wild. A company the size of Unilever is more than capable of creating a refillable deodorant. It probably had something similar sitting in an innovation drawer somewhere. But Unilever didn’t dare to do it, and it took a challenger brand to prove that consumers actually wanted one. Now Unilever is taking refillable deodorant further into the mainstream through Dove.

It exposes an uncomfortable truth about big companies: they acquire the courage they lacked to launch something themselves. Maybe, with AI pushing brands towards the average, there’s an opportunity for agencies to find their way back to being their clients’ Chief Challenger. This is where a creative or an agency can truly add value: pushing for what’s great, not just good.

3. Opposites attract

Marketing is from Mars. Sustainability is from Venus. Marketing loves simplicity: good or bad, right or wrong, buy this and make a difference. Sustainability is messy, interconnected and full of trade-offs. Electric cars still need mining. Organic farming can use more land. Recycling can encourage more consumption. The magic is finding the bridge between the two.

French supermarket company Intermarché didn’t ask people to care more about food waste. It made ugly fruit desirable – turning a sustainability problem into a marketing opportunity. That’s where impactful creativity gets interesting. Find the place where the two make each other stronger.

4. Don’t fake it

And finally, a couple of relationship rules.

Your case study video is not an idea. Too often I see an agency entering a case study video, but when digging further into the case study, I discover they didn’t actually make the innovation featured in it. They just made the video. Shame on you. Don’t take credit for other folks’ work.

Impact, impact, impact. It’s not enough to tell me you’re the world’s best lover. Where’s the proof? Views don’t translate into impact. What changed? What’s the outcome? Is it measurable?

I am super excited to see where we, as an industry, can take impactful creativity. The best ideas rarely come from indifference. They come from a love of something, or hatred of something that needs to change. Impact starts when you give a damn.

Download the D&AD Trend Report 2026 to discover six trends shaping the creative industry, including Institutional Conviction, which analyses how corporations are taking real risks on problem-solving work with no guaranteed return.