SUNDAY SCARIES: The Outsourcing of Accountability
This week we're examining the ever-elusive idea of ACCOUNTABILITY.
1. The Imaginary Extremist Problem
Tom Morton (founder of Narratory Capital, former global CSO of R/GA, and someone I'm lucky enough to call a friend) surfaced something on LinkedIn recently that most leaders pretend not to see: the panic isn't coming from the public, it's coming from the distorted version of the public living in their heads. The Polarization Research Lab shows fewer than four percent of Americans support political violence, yet people operate as if half the country is reenacting The Purge in their garages. Executives take those warped perceptions and build strategy around them, treating shadows like census data.
Our Takeaway: The real risk isn't worry about misinformation, it's building longterm strategy around shadows.
(Sources: Polarization Research Lab; Tom Morton: LinkedIn; Ad Age)
2. The Expert Report Nobody Read
There's also the fancy version, where accountability hides behind big logos and expensive decks. Deloitte handed the Canadian government a CA$1.6M healthcare report loaded with citations to academic papers no one could find. Why? Because they never existed. Not mis-typed. Not mis-sourced. Fabricated. Deloitte handed over work for a million dollars based on an AI helper treated like a haunted Xerox machine.
And because the universe loves symmetry, Mata v. Avianca (2023) gave us lawyers submitting a federal filing full of entirely imaginary case law because ChatGPT said it with confidence. A federal judge sanctioned the lawyers this past week and delivered a perfect line: AI is not a “get-out-of-accountability card.”
Our Takeaway: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up. Or in this case, the blissful certainty that the letterhead means nobody would bother to read the homework.
(Sources: CBC; Mata v. Avianca ruling; Financial Times)
3. The Consumer Isn't Soft, The Selection Is
Retail landed at +0.2% instead of +0.4%, and the excuses started flowing like a hedge fund earnings call. “The consumer is tightening.” “Macro headwinds.” “Discretionary pressure.” It's always the consumer's fault, like they all got together and decided to go on a feelings-based spending strike.
But the consumer isn't fragile. They're awake. They're choosing carefully. They're saying yes to the brands that make sense, and no to the ones that feel like homework. “Soft demand” is what you blame when you don't want to say the offering is fuzzy, generic, or missing its point.
Our Takeaway: When brands can't articulate their value, the consumers and economy become the fall guy — a scapegoat large enough to hide an entire quarter behind.
(Sources: U.S. Retail Sales Report; Bloomberg income-tier spend analysis; WSJ)
4. The Audience of One
There's a quieter version of accountability drift happening inside companies, and it's weirdly relatable. Work created for millions slowly contorts itself to please one executive who “has a feeling” or one investor who “prefers blue” or the founder who definitely hasn't spoken to a customer since the Bush administration.
And Poppi is the sharpest contrast sitting right there in the middle of the culture. A brand built on a founder talking directly to consumers with unfiltered conviction — now entering a corporate system where the gravitational pull is always toward pleasing internal stakeholders instead of the people actually buying the drink.
You see it in the holding-company holiday ads built to reassure internal teams they “still do heart,” and pitch decks rewritten to manage up and up and up until the entire idea becomes a peace offering instead of a position.
Our Takeaway: Nothing can "put the consumer first" if the real audience is the person sitting at the head of the table with veto power and a fear of the Gen Z stare.
(Sources: Ritson / Marketing Week; Ad Age Holiday Roundup 2025; Because of Marketing)
This Week's Red Thread: The Outsourcing of Accountability
I believe that even the worst mistakes can teach us something if we treat them as ours. But when was the last time you heard someone say, “I really f*cked up”? Nobody ever seems to own the moment anymore. Everyone's too busy handing blame to things that can't file a rebuttal: the imaginary extremist haunting a dashboard, Deloitte assuming no one would ever read page twelve of its report, the “soft consumer,” the investor who needs emotional bubble wrap, the algorithm that apparently signs off on everything now.
Last week Campbell's gave us the perfect case study in idiocy: a senior executive caught on tape calling the company's food “for poor people,” using racist constructs about his colleagues, and the corporate response was basically, “We fired him, but he doesn't speak for us,” as if a senior executive in the upper ranks of a corporation just floated in through an air duct.
It's the inverse of the line usually attributed to JFK: success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
In 2025, the orphanage is full. Everyone wants credit. Nobody wants lineage.
Corporate environments reward the accumulation of responsibility without accountability. People love to be in charge unless something goes wrong and then they become human teflon. The modern instinct is to sprint for the nearest exit, to blame the context or the culture or the tool or anything that lets us pretend we're still invincible.
And the lasting damage is in the vanishing act, when everyone disappears before the lights come up.
— NB