I didn’t pick friction at a desk. I found it standing on this stage at SOS25, in the middle of sessions, and I just knew. Twelve months later I stood back up there and tried to explain what I thought it meant.

Everything in our industry had gone soft. One-click checkout, autoplay, auto-reply, auto-caption. Frictionless payments, frictionless onboarding, frictionless content… frictionless thinking. Ask the machine, paste the answer.

The effort is where the good lived. The reply. The phone call. The awkward hello. The draft you rewrote eleven times. The strategy that took three weeks instead of three prompts.

Friction isn’t the thing standing between you and the work. Friction is the work.

That was the theory. Then I spent two days at Optus Stadium watching speakers who hadn’t compared notes prove it from angles I did not see coming.

Here’s what actually happened.

Clare opened by naming the thing

Clare Pickens walked out two weeks after surgery, in heels, and called this moment the great friction removal experiment. Then she spent forty minutes taking it apart.

We used to tell clients to pick two: good, fast or cheap. Now everyone expects all three. “I’m here to tell you that that’s absolute rubbish.”

She had the receipts. Companies quietly rehiring because the token budget cost more than the talent. A Christmas ad that took over a hundred people to make and about as long as a traditional campaign. And a Marketing Week experiment that showed the same work to three groups with three different origin stories: made by AI, made by AI and an agency, made by an agency and a Japanese origami artist. Identical work. The high effort story won on trust, creativity, innovation and appeal.

Then she gave us friction maxing, and it took over the conference. By the afternoon, Sophie Winter was opening her own session saying she thought it would stick. It has.

If you take one thing back to your team, take Clare’s: in Formula 1, it isn’t the fastest driver who wins. It’s the one who slows down the least.

Everybody found their own version of it

This is the part I keep thinking about.

Christina Garnett called out trust cosplay. The solid background, the white text, the statement that says something wasn’t aligned with our values and never quite says sorry. She wouldn’t let anyone blame the bots either. “We were dead first.” We became the bots, she said, and then we trained the bots to be just like us. Her homework question is now stuck to my monitor: when was the last time we posted something that wasn’t downstream of a KPI?

If you were there on the Tuesday morning, you know why that one got me. In 2020, Christina tweeted an invitation for marketers with fewer than a thousand followers to say hi. That tweet is how I met her, and how I met most of the international speakers who have stood on our stage since. One small, awkward act of friction, five years before it was a theme.

Tess Palmyre drew the distinction I’ve wanted someone to make for years. When you’re asking people to participate, especially people with nothing left in the tank, your job is to remove friction. Do your homework first. Pay them properly. Go to where they are. But inside your own team, friction is the point, because “a frictionless team can easily become a team where nobody challenges anything at all.”

Tim Duggan gave us an hour on conflict and pointed out that we spend more time teaching people Microsoft Excel than teaching them how to disagree. Four terrains (the swamp, the summit, the minefield, the arena), a scoring exercise most people did quietly on their phones, and the most portable takeaway of the two days: “how” is the most powerful word in conflict, because it drags the other person into solving the problem with you.

Jes Scholz reminded a hall full of social media people that there’s a second algorithm they keep forgetting about, and its name is Google.

Marc Fennell sat down with Jenna Clarke for the Riverside Chat and said the quiet part out loud. A machine that can’t say no sounds great until you realise how much you learn from being told you’re wrong. “We grow through friction.” His worry is the vanilla-isation of creativity, and that it won’t go unnoticed: “I think the audience can tell.”

Rob Campbell closed day one with a Chinese proverb: “A crooked tree gets to live its life, and a straight one gets turned into boards.” His ask was simple. “Please be crooked trees.”

On day two, Saira Manns swapped the career ladder for a map, because a ladder is something someone else built.

Nobody compared notes. That’s what got me.

The sessions that quietly changed people’s plans

Some of the most useful stuff wasn’t the keynotes.

Jamie Kho and James Jeffs walked us through what happens when a 125-year-old bank closes every branch. Support didn’t disappear, it moved to social. One answer helps hundreds of people, and customers can watch the help happen. The trust becomes visible.

Ariel Bastian scared a good portion of the audience straight on privacy. Three million dollars in revenue isn’t big business anymore, and if your parent company clears it, you’re covered. WA’s new PRIS Act started on 1 July, the first privacy law the WA public sector has ever had. If you do work for a state or local government agency, check your contract: there may well be a clause handing that compliance to you.

Larah Kennedy and Kelly McParlane gave the most honest Reddit session I’ve seen. Upvote and walk away. Declare your edits. Take the downvotes on the chin. And don’t be a d*ck.

Dave Stewart made trademark law funny, which should not be possible, using Katy Perry versus Katie Perry. A business name, a domain or a company name won’t protect your brand. Only a registered trademark will.

Lizzie Young brought Mark Ritson’s numbers from Cannes: campaigns with audio in the mix averaged a 22% uplift. His other advice was to get a jingle, with a word in front of it I won’t print here.

Pamela Obeid made the case that creator marketing isn’t a campaign tactic anymore. It’s infrastructure.

Will Bal asked Google and ChatGPT to recommend suppliers, on screen, and showed us what decides the answer: proof points and consensus. Almost none of us are tracking it.

Jess Zafarris closed day two by making a hall full of marketers care about etymology, and became the first person in nine years to drop the C-word on our stage. Her last word to us was to wield our words for good. Then she took us to the puppies.

The bits that don’t show up in a session recap

The Lube Lounge was new this year. It started in March when Will at Look Brilliant was riffing on F1, pit crews and motor oil, and I said two words. It became a neon tunnel somewhere between Lisa Frank and that first Mac you owned, with jars of Vaseline. Apply liberally. It’s physics.

The Confession Booth by Sked Social asked you to confess your worst marketing sin, in secrecy. Nothing illegal, please. Dave told me so.

The Barkout Session with Dogs Refuge Home landed on 26 August: International Dog Day, Henry’s birthday and mine. The fifth most important day in the world. Thank you to everyone who put a gold coin in for a pat, and to everyone who didn’t steal from a homeless dog.

The Human Search Engine had no speaker, no slides and no recording. Just tables of people answering each other’s questions. A fortnight out I still hadn’t fully figured out how to explain it.

Rub Shoulders ran twice on day one and once on day two, at tables with people stuck on exactly what you’re stuck on. Every year your feedback tells us the conversations between sessions are the thing. So this year we programmed them.

Thank you

Nine years. Same venue. Same incredible AV team. Same woman who still doesn’t sleep in August or learn her opening remarks.

Thank you to Barry Winmar for the Welcome to Country, and to Robbie for being my buddy in this, again.

To every speaker who said yes and came to the far side of the world to do it. To our partners, who back an independent conference and give me the ground to stand on while I reach for something stupid every year.

To the eight people who pick up the phone, talk me off the ledges, tell me when an idea is terrible and then help me execute the good ones. This looks effortless because they make it look that way.

And to everyone who came for the first time with no colleagues, badge on, phone out, pretending to read something important: I saw you, and I hope you found the helpers.

Next year

SOS27 is 24 & 25 August 2027 at Optus Stadium.

Year ten.

If you want to be first to know when tickets open, you know where to find us.

Thanks for a good one. Go and do something with it.