At SXSW Sydney, Manifest Group founder and CEO Alex Myers didn’t deliver a talk so much as a manifesto.
The session, Boring Cant’s: The ‘Rules of Comms We All Need to Break, was part industry-roast and part inspiring creativity-revival CTA.
Standing before a crowd of marketers, creatives and brand leaders, at one of the first sessions at SXSW Sydney, Myers set out to dismantle what he called the industry’s growing “can’t culture.”
Alex Myers
“You literally cannot deliver progress or be a progressive brand without breaking rules,” he said.
For Myers, the line between safe and stale has disappeared, and he’s not afraid to point a finger at what’s gone wrong.
“There’s a real danger at the moment that the industry is slowly sanitising itself,” he warned. “In the creative industries, everything you create should destroy something. Otherwise it’s not new.”
The age of “Can’t”
Myers opened with a provocation. In every organisation, there are “the ones that can and the ones that say you can’t.”
He argued that “we put the burden of proof on opportunity… prove to me why that’s going to work. We don’t actually ever need to prove why that’s risky.”
His advice is just to flip the script.
One of the standout examples came from Manifest’s work with Eager, a fruit juice brand that Myers described as “fresh from reality.”
“There’s an industry of fruit juice around the world that is pretty much identical,” he said. “Everyone has the same f***ing oranges, but they all try to tell people to care about what’s in the carton as if you’re going to care which oranges are in there.”
Instead, Manifest reimagined “fresh” as cultural relevance, not orchard imagery.
During UK university Fresher’s Week, the first week at university, their cranberry juice campaign declared: “When life gives you a UTI, drink cranberries.” And the tagline read, “Because burning pee isn’t a vibe.”
The Eager campaign for UK Fresher’s Week
The OOH campaign featured a huge cranberry juice carton, stuck to the billboard which students quickly stole.
“So we put ‘Missing’ posters all over London that turned this into a social interaction,” Myers said. “We didn’t have a budget for social, but it was the right thing to do.”
Breaking algorithms and stigmas
Perhaps the most powerful example cof Myers’ approach came from Tommee Tippee’s “The Boob Life” campaign.
“The first product they ever launched for mums was a breast pump,” Myers explained. “Everything supported this sanitised idea that breastfeeding and pumping was easy, polite… there was nothing that was real about it.”
Instead, Manifest showed real mothers and real experiences.
“We created a campaign with real mums and their children showing real, authentic breastfeeding experiences in a world that said you can’t do this,” he said.
When Meta and LinkedIn removed the ads, mothers began reposting them faster than the platforms could delete them.
“When it was getting brought down, they were sharing it faster,” Myers said. “We turned it into an active revolt against this stigma.”
Within a week, the platforms changed their algorithms to allow breastfeeding imagery.
“All of the mums that we surveyed before the campaign and surveyed afterwards had improved their confidence in breastfeeding publicly,” Myers said, noting marketing campaigns often use the word ‘lactating’ but real mums never do. “That’s a real shift we can have.”
Myers says Manifest, which has offices all over the world, tries to run their business in the same way that they think of marketing campaigns and creative – by challenging rules that have become lore in so many workplaces.
Running a business by breaking rules
“We were the first creative agency in the world to give everyone unlimited paid vacation,” he said. “Everyone said, ‘You can’t do that. Everyone’s just going to be on holiday all the time.’ Turns out they won’t.”
He also introduced what he calls the “F*** Off Fund.”
“If you leave Manifest in the first three months, we’ll pay $2,000 to leave the company. If you stay, you have to choose the person in the team that made you feel most welcome, and they get the money.”
The six rules of rule-breaking
In closing, Myers distilled his philosophy into six rules every agency, creative and marketer should live by:
Campaign for something and not about something.
Data should inspire you and not restrict you.
Measure cultural impact, not just reach.
Forget your lane.
It’s not broke, then break it!
Navigate by fun.